Sean Eby

On Mentors

If you really do care about finding meaning and being successful in life, you must absolutely have mentors. I know of no successful person without at least 1 trusted adviser or mentor or teacher. I don't mean remembering a great teacher from grade school or university (though they can become life mentors in some cases), I mean relying on people who are successful themselves and are those you also trust.

It's not that you are not intelligent in your own right to be successful and do great things but mentors and teachers create a network and a balance that requires fairly little investment in exchange for great returns. A great mentor and teacher will challenge your views (even your aspirations) and you must find deep in yourself a way to understand what it is you're doing in life. For many, this is a most challenging task. After all, a mentor or teacher should care about you and will challenge you, much like a caring and loving parent. This doesn't mean that success is only rooted in "complex" things but certainly, doing rewarding things (especially financially) do require some talent and skill. A great mentor and teacher, especially one from the business world, will be able to help you understand the details.

What if you don't have a mentor now but want one? Well, you can't really go to Wal-Mart and buy one on the cheap so you're left to network on your own. Find people you share a similar worldview with. Who knows? Maybe they blog? If you email them and speak intelligently about the issues, perhaps you'll find someone who is responsive and willing to talk to you, if not help you outright. You'll never know until you do, though, so you'll need to try. The worst thing you can do is just sit there and fear rejection because frankly, rejection will happen, all the time, no matter awesome you are.

One of the keys to success involves finding a great mentor. If you don't have one (or two or three) and want to be successful, you need to find one, right now.