How to Become a Mentor
If you’ve ever been obsessed with ideas or advice and feel like you can’t find a mentor, here’s how to become your own mentor: Look at everyone else doing the same. Some are successful and some are unsuccessful. Find everything that they could have been better. And then don’t tell them. Tell yourself. Do it in a positive way: Think about every cool idea you have to offer these people, anything you have to offer them, if they allow you to contribute. Thinking blue sky, updating their current routine, all the ways they could grow, evolve, mature and truly shine .
Do it negatively: Pay attention to every stupid mistake, every mistake, every false assumption, every time it’s ego, novelty, or idle chatter that distracts them from their work. Make a written list. Keep adding things until you have sublists, consequences, a few examples of every flaw or every opportunity. Don’t get obsessed, but pay attention and write things down. You don’t need to memorize a list, you can write down both successes and good ideas, it’s great, you should always do this. But you need to keep track of all these missed opportunities. You, of course, are not writing this list for them, but for yourself. Have you ever seen a project launch with a manifest? This happens a lot in the media. Some new site is launched and says a lot about what it will do and what not. Lifehacker did this with our parent section Offspring. When you make this list, you are building your own manifest. Don’t post it, but consult it. This is a list of advice you have given yourself and is not a substitute for advice and wisdom from outside. But it’s a great way to understand what you value, what ideas inspire you, what you think a person like you should do. Sometimes you realize, as you apply your list to your own work, that an idea also takes a long time, or that a certain flaw is a necessary evil, or that you can’t do everything perfectly. This is fine; you are not dad, you can be wrong. It’s good that you didn’t try to give advice to other people and make a fool of yourself, but learned the lesson on your own. If you really want to discuss your ideas and criticisms with others, do so after you’ve already established a relationship and after you’ve tried a similar job yourself. Ask them why they made a different choice, and make it clear that you trust their opinion, whether you make the same choice or not. (If you don’t trust their judgment, don’t waste your time and their time talking to them. They don’t want criticism from someone who doesn’t even respect their work.) Their answers will teach you, and hopefully help you improve your list tips. And if you are so humble in communicating your thoughts – treating the conversation as a favor they are doing to you – then you may end up doing them a favor too.