How To Get The Best Mentors, Including The Ones Who Are Out Of Reach
Mentors are an essential component of a professional career. Yet most people don't benefit from it because they misunderstand how to receive advice from the best ones.
There is no problem you could have that someone has not already had and written about it in a book.
— Will Smith
I’ve been collecting quotes for years. From books, from movies, from songs, from conversations.
Every time I come across something that feels like an interesting piece of wisdom, I note it down, and store it in a huge file full of quotes.
The first times I did this, I didn’t have any objective in mind. Just an internal voice whispering to me: you don’t want to forget that. I would note it down, wondering what I would ever do with all those quotes. I didn’t find any answer. The intuition remained strong, so I continued. I continued for years, to the point that it became a habit, something I would do without thinking.
The Multiple Purposes Of Random Quotes
The first time I used a quote from the list was for a blog post. I mimicked what many book authors do — I took a quote that alluded to the topic I was talking about, and added it as a prelude to an article. Easy. Part of me felt smart, part of me was ashamed by how cliché that was. I continued doing that, mostly because it finally gave a sense to this list. It had a purpose, at last.
The second usage that I tried was for a lecture I was giving in a university. I was aiming for surprise at various moments of the presentation. Using unexpected rap quotes to make a point about design proved to draw the attention I was hoping for.
But those two examples were nothing compared to the actual raison d’être of this list. I discovered it by accident. My list of quotes being pretty long, I was finding it hard to skim through looking for a specific quote. So I decided to go through the whole list, and erase the ones that didn’t seem that important.
While doing so, I realized that I had forgotten the existence of many of them. More interestingly, a few specific quotes resonated in me in a deeper way. At the time, I was experiencing work-related challenges that I had never dealt with before, and those quotes were giving me new angles to look at them. It felt like those flashback moments in movies, where a father-figure’s statement haunts back the hero who is facing a dilemma.
That’s when it struck me. I knew what this list of quotes was.
Changing The Expectation Of What A Mentor Should Be
All those years, I had been building my board of mentors. The fact that I never met those mentors — and that they didn’t know me at all — didn’t matter. I had selected the best mentors I could find, extracted every single piece of wisdom I came across with, and stored them in a safe place where I could come back to for advice.
Quotes replacing mentors. Sounds like a weird idea, right? My first reaction was to reject the idea. Probably because it made me sad to think that this long list of words could replace in-person self-centered conversations with great people.
Yet, the idea has some legs. Here’s are counterpoints to the most common doubts.
But don’t mentors bring value by telling you things you’re not aware of? The idea of quotes-as-mentors doesn’t work if you rely on your personal memory. You can’t surprise yourself by retrieving an old memory, because a recency bias will prevent you from finding the best memories that would surprise you. Having stored those quotes in an external memory means that you can scan them, and therefore fall on one that can be entirely unexpected.
But shouldn’t mentors give you advice catered for your specific situation? When you’re facing an issue, a good mentor will not solve it for you. He’ll give with you a mental framework that fits your situation and that will allow you to make a decision. Your mentor didn’t invent this framework for you, he’s just sharing with you something that has helped him in the past.
But isn’t a major bias to only rely on quotes you selected in the past? The truth is that mentors you listen to, and the pieces of wisdom that impact you, are hand-picked too. Every single smart person that surrounds you doesn’t become your mentor. You select the ones that correspond to a personality you can get along with, and that seem to offer the kind of wisdom that resonates with you. The big advantage of the list of quotes is that I can pick mentors who don’t know me, who wouldn’t have time for me, and even who are dead.
A Tool For Organizing Those Nuggets Of Wisdom
Having accumulated quotes for decades, I now have a list that I cannot skim easily anymore. Sometimes, I want to filter the quotes by only displaying the ones touching on a particular theme I’m interested in, but I can’t, because a simple search function doesn’t really address my need.
In general, I’m very skeptical of supposedly magical tools that unlock leaps in personal productivity. That’s why, for these quotes, I relied for years on nothing more than a dumb text file. Very recently, I decided to give a try to a tool called Roam Research. The interface is poor, the company is young, but the ability to tag quotes by themes seems to be what I’m looking for.
If you have found a tool that addresses that problem, please let me know!
Thank you to Anne-Laure Le Cunff for writing the article that helped me choose the right tool by using a brilliant architect/gardener/librarian metaphor. Thank you to Stéphane Schultz for recommending me to read Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s articles. And thank you to the 235 mentors who have been at my side these past years — you don’t know me, but I owe you one.
Every two weeks, I write an article to explain how the mind works, usually through a comparison that everyone can relate to.
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