Mentorship is pivotal to the success of a person in a new venture. It allows mentees to have a more seamless experience in studying and understanding their new industry or line of work. Mentorship is necessary to sidestep energy-draining and time-consuming snags. It helps you focus as you take on the complexities in your new line of work.
Photo credit: Thirdman
Many successful people cut their teeth in their craft by receiving mentorship not necessarily by an expert (expertise takes donkey years in certain endeavors, and a mentee could have little food guzzlers at home). But a person with years of experience; with repeated successes, and of course, a string of failures and deep insights, so much as to show mentees how to navigate or even better, circumvent pitfalls would suffice.
Educating younglings, underlings and newbies need not be considered a drain of time and effort or a forlorn undertaking, or an exercise in futility–on occasion. Rather, it can be an opportunity to inspire the next generation of change-makers (even if one ends up becoming a Hitler), business leaders, and climate-change hopefuls.
Folk new to an industry sometimes find it difficult to find their footing or get a headstart in a new line of work, career, or profession. Everyone—unless you’re from outer space, experiences this drawback. It’s the reason why it’s advisable for neophytes to seek the counsel and tutelage of experts and industry silverbacks.
Mentorship allows entry-level or aspiring actors to avoid gnarly mistakes, upheavals, and boulders that spring up along their path to becoming masters of their craft. Granted, mistakes are cool and empirical errors are even cooler, but things are coolest when you fail forward and if possible, fast. Withal, mentorship allows neophytes to sidestep silly pitfalls that otherwise would be damaging to one’s morale.
Foster, sorry… mentor the people!!
Mentorship is a critical aspect of individual and organizational growth. It allows the “new guy” (the guy in this context is a lady or….a guy) not to feel embarrassed, abashed, and utterly sunken when he or she rams one of your organization’s mission-critical vehicles into a metaphoric and immovable wall.
When you mentor a person, (heck!, I’m a mentor to my African Grey, so animals too deserve mentorship), you nurture sprouting seeds of creativity; you contribute your quota to an innovation stack. Because chances are your mentee would absorb your knowledge and insights and take the status quo a notch higher to a point of increased capability and efficiency.
Mentees benefit from the grand gift of avoiding inevitable errors in judgment and faulty actions led by quirky decision-making because they were none the wiser. Mentees who approach you for your guidance and sapience have probably lost count of their cascading failures. Better put, they are now well-practiced in the sublime art of repeated blunders and are super ready to flip the coin, to experience from here on out, bursts of success.
NB: Please, Mr. or Madam executive, don’t shove mentees aside when they huddle to your paneled-wood door to seek your ‘imperial’ acquaintance.
In this age of the millennials, and with startup businesses emanating from every corner of the globe, mentorship received – whether in-person or through a computer screen—is needed more than ever before.
As entrepreneurs venture into the unknown and establish businesses that take a shot at addressing problems that sucker-punch us at will, you (the mentor) can weigh in on their troubles. And help plumb difficulties they encounter as their success is everyone’s leverage in the long run.
Textbooks vs mentors
In the course of building his social network, what is now known as Meta, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, received a fair bit of mentorship from Sean Parker—the founder of the now-defunct, pioneering media streaming platform— Napster. SpaceX founder, Elon Musk, had a rather quaint means of receiving mentorship.
Although he devoted considerable time to studying space and rocket engines through textbooks, he asked his engineers lots of questions about vague concepts concerning the mechanics of a rocket engine and would listen with rapt and laser-focused attention. Insights garnered from his ceaseless interrogations consolidated his personal knowledge base and grasp of the technicalities of the space industry.
However, not everyone is imbued with the unique mind of Elon Musk (you, the reader, are incontrovertibly unique as well), or get an opportunity at some point in the timeline of history to create a Facebook or Twitter or….what’s that goofy app again? Oh yea!, TikTok. Or have something so compelling to attract the top dogs to provide their coveted money-torship (that’s definitely not a typo)….and errr, perhaps an opportunity to pilfer ideas from innocent mentees, sadly. And if you’re in that sour line of business (idea larceny), on behalf of all the mentees roaming the earth, I say stop! It hurts very much. In my opinion, I’d say organizations prioritize mentorship and make it available to those who seek it.
You don’t want to suffer a jester masquerading as the next Claude Shannon or H.G Wells. You can imagine an apprentice whose mind, body, and even shadow are fixated on a remote subject or…piece of work (like when a ’69 Mustang in mint condition rolls by and his faculties roll along with it).
That said, mentorship allows you to partake, perhaps availing you a front-row seat to a new generation of innovation and reinvention of the status quo.
In conclusion,
To inspire a better world and push the boundaries of what limits us, we have to allow and encourage mentorship as we are basically all teachers; people who run into us directly or indirectly learn something new without us realizing it. To mentees, take courage and knock on that door. You might be doing this industry big shot a favor.
Related: 3 people you must first connect with before changing careers
