~Been a small while, family. We haven't los tour energy or slowed down, e've just been adjusting to new paces. All part of growth, so its a sign of good things. Hope everybody had a great 4th of July. I kno I did...kind of LOL. Anyway, on to the business at hand~
Its important to be mentored by a person w/ more experience than you. This is tru in life in all aspects, spiritually, professionally & personally. Its only important tho if you're actually serious about life.
The reason its important is because, as I've told many people before, it absolutely SUCKS how every year we get a little bit older, yet on our birthday nobody gives us an instruction manual on what the hell we're supposed to do for the next 365-&-a-quarter days. Depending on who you are, where you are & where your trying to go in life, your path may be more complicated. A good mentor can school you on life in general & in the area you've chosen to receive guidance in. They may or may not have had 1 (you are NEVER too old or too young to be mentored, not possible), but they can tell you how big a difference 1 can have. There are a LOT of people I kno that could benefit or could have benefited from a mentor. They've made choices & decisions & missed out on platinum opportunities that they didn't have to simply because they had no experience to guide them.
Let's use reason. Hard work pays off & short cuts very often cut US off. But if you could achieve your goals & get to where you're trying to be without taking as long, paying as many dues & with much less screw ups, wouldn't you go for it? Why touch the stove to see if its hot when you could just ask the person who's used or is using it?
In order to find a good & a suitable mentor, you have to do a few things.
•First off, you must be prepared to look outside of your surroundings. Odds are if you already knew somebody that has had success in the area(s) your looking to, you would have been on the phone or at their door by now. Ask your friends or loved ones if they kno anybody. If not, look in your community, Google your area & see who pops up, get looking.
•Second, develop a friendship with this person. That doesn't mean you have to be buddy-buddy with them, but attempt to AT LEAST have a business-type relationship. Trust has to exist like in any other relationship because you will be making important changes, decisions & taking on challenges & opportunities based on this person's advice & input.
•Third, seek somebody older than you. They DON'T have to be elderly like Dumbledore in Harry Potter or Gandalf in Lord of The Rings, but you want somebody with EXPERIENCE. & more often than not, that comes with age. There are people that are young with lots of experience. Every older person was young once. But you're looking for a sure thing, so unless you kno that person is a prodigy in the area you're looking into, go older.
•Fourth, make sure they take you seriously. 1 of the downsides of looking to a relative or friend can be that they don't see you as you want to become or can't take you seriously because they still see you the way they always knew you. This goes back to an EARLIER blog where I briefly shared how powerful a first impression is. Look for someone who you can have a clean, fresh slate with, if you can.
•Fifth, don't trip about the difficulty. A mentor isn't going to magically unlock doors for you. You're still going to have to bust your ass to get to where you want to be. However, a mentor will help you bust it the SMART way & show you in which DIRECTION you should be busting it.
•Last up, you don't have to have just 1 mentor. You can have a few. They can be for different areas in your life or all for the same thing. Different perspectives add more color to the painting. You can see common themes & increase the odds of great opportunities that can result from a mentor putting you on.
Now for those that have the resources & the experience necessary but are just sleeping on it, let me school YOU on something. Its a lot easier for women to mentor each other than it is for men because, face it, we got issues. We struggle enough with communicating with the women in our lives, let alone other men. We let our pride & insecurity make fools of us just because we don't want to come off as inferior to another male. & this is why it takes us years & decades to accomplish what could only take months & years. Sharing information with each other is NOT going to shortchange you. You will not get your riches taken if you tell somebody else how you got them. Your riches are just that: YOURS. If anything, you'll add more wealth just by sharing yours. Chris Rock said during a recent interview with Oprah that "wealth isn't about having money, its about having opportunities." Networking, mentoring, doing favors for others, all of that creates opportunities. There have been stories about people who inherited FORTUNES just because they gave of their time or good advice to others. Somebody spent some time with a little, old lady or helped clean up around a handicapped guy's home, or treated somebody's relative like family. Can you imagine how you might have benefited (besides financially) if you had the ability to mentor Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Barack Obama or LeBron James before they reached their success? You never kno who is just a few grains of wisdom away from being a success story. You have a chance of writing history as a mentor because you can say I helped Gates become a software tycoon, I advised Obama on how to run a campaign, I showed LeBron how to improve his game.
No man is an island, we're all we got. Crabs in a bucket can't even LOOK for a way out because they're too busy keeping the others down. But if they would focus on helping 1 get out, they could all escape from Red Lobster. Never be afraid to ask for help or say "I don't kno", because that's how you get to the next level. Be TERRIFIED of not seeking it, because you will stay at the bottom all your life. -Donny
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