Mentors + Self-Education = Success

Understanding Mentorship, Believe in Yourself First, Self-Education, Artificially Intelligent Mentors, The Failures of Formal Education

This week’s 5 Big Ideas are inspired by the following questions from my savvy sister:

I.

Understanding Mentorship

Mentorship is not what it’s made out to be. It’s not an initiative set up by your Student Affairs or HR department. It’s not a match resulting from two people swiping right on an app. It’s an unorchestrated, mutually beneficial human relationship. It’s akin to a friendship. 

To better understand how we find mentors, it might be helpful to consider how we make friends. Do we reach out to strangers on LinkedIn, proposing, “Hey, I stumbled upon your profile and see we share common interests; want to invest hours of your time into a one-sided friendship with me?” Of course not. Yet, that’s basically what you’re doing when you approach someone with, “Hey, do you want to be my mentor?”

Ironically, when seeking a mentor, you’ll want to avoid explicitly using the word “mentor.” These days, it’s taken on a inauthentic undertone, reminiscent of the bogus Student Affairs/HR programs in which you’re assigned a temporary mentor (or mentee), receive a participation certificate, and add a new bullet point to your resume—Was a [mentor/mentee] for [University/Company]’s leadership program—only to never talk to that mentor/mentee ever again once the program concludes. This isn’t a mentorship; it’s a transaction. 

But mentorships weren’t always portrayed the way they are now. The word “mentor” originates from a character of the same name in Homer’s The Odyssey. In the tale, Mentor is a trusted friend of Odysseus (the king of Ithaca), and a caretaker to his son, Telemachus. The goddess of wisdom, Athena, would frequently disguise herself as Mentor and advise the young Telemachus on how to take responsibility and evolve into a valiant leader. That’s how the concept of a “mentor” came about—after Mentor, the faithful confidant of Odysseus, and advisor to his son, Telemachus. And, in a way, mentors aren’t much different from Mentor. Real mentors are trusted friends who sometimes seem to possess Athena’s sagacity. But it’s not really Athena whispering wisdom through your mentor; it’s Experience.

II.

Believe in Yourself First

We need to stop telling them, ‘Get a mentor and you will excel.’ 

Instead we need to tell them, ‘Excel and you will get a mentor.’

Sheryl Sandberg

Mentors are experienced craftsmen who want to help you succeed because they recognize fragments of themselves in you. They see grit, talent, and potential. Like angel investors, they take a chance on you by investing their most precious asset—time. Their endowment in you is a calculated one. While they could speculate on many newcomers, they chose you because they believe you hold the highest potential. As your mentor, your success is their time well spent. 

When you’re starting out on a new venture and are not yet 100% committed, you’re unlikely to attract a mentor to help you lay your foundation. You must demonstrate to your potential mentors—and, more importantly, to yourself—that you have what it takes to succeed on your own. You must lay your groundwork. Doing so proves that you’re a worthy investment. Just as you wouldn’t waste your time on someone who is lazy, uncommitted, or aimless, don’t expect someone else, a stranger nonetheless, to spend their time on you if you exhibit those traits. A mentor won’t help you circumnavigate hard work; they’ll propose even more hard work. 

III.   

Self-Education

Since you’ll be laying your own foundation, it’s essential to know how to learn. The beginning any worthwhile endeavor will inevitably be unfamiliar and complex, no matter how much of a “natural” you appear to be. Unless you’ve spent years studying exactly what you need to do, chances are you’ll have no clue where to begin. This is where self-education comes into play. 

Before you find a mentor, you must gain insight into your intentions. What field are you entering? What are the measures of success in that domain? Who are the leading experts? What are they known for? What are their stories? What were their struggles? How did they rise to victory? Understanding these things will not only demonstrate your knowledge to a potential mentor but also inspire ideas for laying your foundation.

For example, when I committed to writing, I had to figure out what I was up against. With no formal education in literature or journalism, I had a lot of reading ahead of me. I read numerous memoirs about the craft of writing—Stephen King’s On Writing, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, to name a few—and I learned that none of these successful writers had a mentor when they first started out. They faced self-doubt, resistance, and insecurity. But they were committed, self-directed learners who honed their skills through relentless practice and overcoming frequent rejection. Through self-education, I realized my feelings of uncertainty were not only common but, perhaps, obligatory. 

Reading a book is like entering a portal to another’s mind, whether they’re dead or alive. Stephen King likens reading to telepathy, while Virginia Woolf describes it as a mirror for the soul. Although books do not provide direct feedback like mentors do, they expose us to diverse perspectives. Through self-directed learning, we expose ourselves to new vantage points and gain the confidence to move forward. 

IV.   

Artificially Intelligent Mentors

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. 

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

I utilize chatbots daily, often having four of them open in separate browser tabs simultaneously: ChatGPT 3.5, Google’s Gemini, Perplexity.AI, and Microsoft’s Copilot. Chatbots are remarkable, bewildering tools; testaments of our digital age. 

I employ multiple chatbots with my queries because I know they are frequently inaccurate and biased. I witness this daily. I feed the same query into each bot, and they all spit out different answers. Sometimes, the responses are marginally different, while other times, they are vastly different. And yet, every chatbot is programmed with unapologetic confidence— as if they were channeling wisdom directly from Athena herself. But it ain’t Athena who’s feeding these LLMs their data sets; it’s humans. Imperfect, parti pris, naïve, suspect humans. People who might one day try to police original thought. 

There are many advantages to using AI for guidance, but there are also disadvantages. Anonymous Reddit User suggests that Savvy Sister should rely on chatbots that compute responses based on cherry-picked data instead of mentors, who offer guidance rooted in real-life experience. I vehemently disagree. 

Despite my appreciation for and frequent use of available technology, I worry about people like Anonymous Reddit User; people who believe that chatbots have superseded human mentors. ARU is likely among those who are prone to over-reliance on chatbots, using them as shortcuts to avoid hard work. For example, I’m increasingly encountering articles on Substack that appear to be written entirely by AI. The articles read like a chatbot output: ciphered and mechanical, boring and mindless. 

Unlike mentors, chatbots are not invested in your success. They don’t care if you put in the hard work or not. They can’t offer advice based on experience because they have no experience. They’re just tools. Tools that can be used; tools that can be abused. 

V.   

The Failures of Formal Education

If faced with the decision between pursuing formal education or a combination of mentorship + self-education, I implore you to consider the latter. While there are many damning things I could say about the failures of formal education (three university degrees and $30K in debt later), allow me to portal some sage advice from two dead guys. 

The following telepathic message comes to us from the late author and school teacher, John Taylor Gatto:

I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic—it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.

John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down

While this mirroring of the soul comes from the late Sir Ken Robinson, PhD:

Public schools were not only created in the interests of industrialism—they were created in the image of industrialism. In many ways, they reflect the factory culture they were designed to support. This is especially true in high schools, where school systems base education on the principles of the assembly line and the efficient division of labor. Schools divide the curriculum into specialist segments: some teachers install math in the students, and others install history. They arrange the day into standard units of time, marked out by the ringing of bells, much like a factory announcing the beginning of the workday and the end of breaks. Students are educated in batches, according to age, as if the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. They are given standardized tests at set points and compared with each other before being sent out onto the market. I realize this isn’t an exact analogy and that it ignores many of the subtleties of the system, but it is close enough.

Ken Robinson, The Element

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 Lastly, a BIG thank you is due to Janet for your generous support – I’m beyond words!