Importance of mentors and How you can mentors for yourself
A mentorship is a relationship between two people where the individual with more experience, knowledge, and connections is able to pass along what they have learned to a more junior individual within a certain field. Mentors are the professionals who help you to define and achieve your goals by providing you seasoned advice and guidance for your growth. most of us are not able to see ourselves from the perspective of others, this leads to have a false belief of mastery in our field this the point where we need someone who can help us to channelize our energy, set right systems, mental models, goals to help us develop mastery.
We have many examples from our past that how a mentor-mentee led to great events that changed the course of history, created breakthroughs and pushed humankind forward, established great empires, wrote great epics and magnum opuses.
So, you need a mentor who can help you to define your career goals help you in your personal growth etc. Well that's a hard task you even need to do that very carefully, because what can make you can break you too!
"Your mentors in life are important so choose them wisely"
-Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad
There are plethora of advice all over the internet on how to find a mentor, well that's good and sound but, what you need to know is that there are some common myths around mentorship.
Myths around mentorship; some of the most beloved myth around mentors is that are the biggest people in your field, so when you think of a mentor in business you think of Paul Allen or Howard Schultz; for designing you we set our eyes on Don Norman or Jony Ive but let me tell you that you don't need them to be your mentor, we all need to find a mentor we can relate to from whom we can get some practical advice about our career, believe me they can be your friend, teachers, colleagues. They are the people who know about you and your style and can really help to find unfilled gaps and missed opportunities caused due to your lack of ignorance. Secondly, people think a mentor thinks the same way you do, and has same thoughts around the working of world, but that's necessarily not true you can have a mentor with a contrasting world view of what you have they can challenge you to work harder and even call to change your perspective.
Thirdly, this one I feel the most is that your mentor should be a human but what if you admire a person who died long ago, what I mean to say is you can even have books as your mentor. Since you also need more sort of guidance you should read a lot until you find one mentor.
You only need one mentor is also a myth about mentorship and that's definitely not true every mentor is specialised in one or two fields so this limits your learning capability, in fact you can have more than one mentors specialising in different fields such and capital building, leadership and marketing our in research etc.
Now, I hope that the above article is able to help you a little bit, and if it does comment below and tell me how you feel about it and do share your opinions even if they and contrasting to me.
