Peer MentorshipWhile I think mentorship is important, I’d say that there are a surplus of “unqualified” willing to mentor people and a shortage of “overly…
While I think mentorship is important, I’d say that there are a surplus of “unqualified” willing to mentor people and a shortage of “overly qualified,” yet not easily available, people. I think plenty of people are willing to give out advice. The internet is full of it! And though you can learn something from anyone — a lot of that advice comes in recipe form, while the reality is that it is not prescriptive.
Bad advice is really bad. If you are not looking sharply enough, you may waste tons of time following advice that stems from hindsight bias, ego, or most likely the case, someone trying to sell you something.
Therefore, I have found (remember, just my own opinion) that finding the right advice at the right time can be super important. In this case, I am referring to very tactical and actionable advice. I find that “general,” more fluffy advice, rarely, if ever, works for me. So I try to focus on getting questions answered rather than vague statements hashed out. I tend to do the latter on my own.
Anyways…in getting tactical and strategic advice — where do you look?
Google?
Twitter?
Cold emails?
I find that formal, “industry” mentors can be very good for giving out best practices — but for some of the harder questions, I find the absolute best resource to be my peers. People my age.
There is something profoundly helpful about working through situations with people who are very similar to you. Or better yet, people who can empathize with you (but still disagree with you).
Peer mentorship, as it is called, has made a massive impact on my life. It is honestly a very informal thing — but I have created a network of people close to my age that I rely on for advice on what to build, what to work on, how to spend my time on things, actionable tips, etc.
(Informally) creating a system like this has been super valuable for me.
My peers are constantly challenging my perspective and pushing me to have more conviction around what I do.
I learn more in these types of circles than anywhere else. And most of it is done remotely (meaning I have not even met all of these people in person).
Is this the future?
Originally published at gonen.blog.
By jordangonen on September 26, 2017.
Exported from Medium on February 17, 2018.