Mentors before mistakes

My old self: "If I just put in enough hours and figure things out through trial and error, I'll get there eventually."

My new self: I don't believe that anymore. Talking with Josh Schachnow this week reminded me why. While he was still interning early in his career, a friend's father, who'd spent thirty five years practicing immigration law and was retiring, offered to mentor him if he started his own immigration law firm. Josh had never done immigration law, never even taken the course in law school, and said yes anyway. That one relationship put him years ahead of where trial and error alone would ever have gotten him. He didn't have to make the beginner's mistakes himself. Someone who'd already made them told him which ones to skip, which filings go wrong, which clients burn a new lawyer, which programs were actually worth building a practice around.

I've experienced the same at every step of my own career, going from academia to industry, then from a corporate job to a startup, and through many stages of that startup. I've had the benefit of getting advice from some very experienced mentors who helped me navigate all of it. That's exactly why I still open twenty minutes on my calendar every day for AMAs. Getting advice from someone a few steps ahead of you does not prevent a mistake but makes it easier for you to learn from that mistake and retain the learning.

You have to be very clear about what kind of help you need and then the only thing that is left is to show up and ask. Look at what they've actually built, not what they say they've built, and find someone who did it recently. Someone who was early stage five years ago will tell you something more useful than someone who was early stage twenty years ago, because the market they navigated actually looks like yours.

Most people underestimate how willing others are to help. It doesn't even need to be a dedicated mentor. I call it having a few fractional mentors: a handful of people who've done things you want to do, that you go back to once in a while with a specific question. You get so much value out of it.

In a recent survey we ran, one of the most common answers to what's missing between where people are now and where they want to be in six months was exactly this: a mentor and an action plan. It's not a niche problem.