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It is said that the right mentor can help you get further, faster.
As Isaac Newton said, “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”.
The right mentor can help us to see the forest from the trees, make better decisions and avoid treacherous pitfalls.
But there are two key challenges when it comes to the mentor-protege relationship serving, rather than sabotaging an entrepreneur.
This post will focus on the latter.
When we achieve success in any domain, it’s easy to fall victim to the ‘narrative fallacy’ and draw a straight line from start to end. But success is far from linear.
It’s easy to, as Behance founder Scott Belsky argues, misattribute our success only to the moments we’d rather remember as opposed to the things we’d rather forget.
We place little emphasis on all of the inevitable missteps and failures that essentially helped us to course correct or created serendipitous opportunities and connections that otherwise would have remained undiscovered.
Not only are mentors susceptible to the narrative fallacy, but the conditions that underpinned their success — market appetite for their product, competition, the economic and political landscape, the role of technology and so on — were unique to their business, not yours.
Finally, they are susceptible to bias, based on what worked for them. Steve Jobs might have pushed proteges to spare no expense on design and aesthetics, whereas Jeff Bezos might push for frugality so that you can carve out margins with lower-priced items because in both of these cases, that’s what has worked for them.
This is why we must not take anything a mentor says as gospel, and only apply or experiment with insights that have been stress tested against your unique circumstances.
Steve Glaveski is on a mission to unlock your potential to do your best work and live your best life. He is the founder of innovation accelerator, Collective Campus, author of several books, including Employee to Entrepreneur and Time Rich, and productivity contributor for Harvard Business Review. He’s a chronic autodidact and is into everything from 80s metal and high-intensity workouts to attempting to surf and hold a warrior three pose.