How do you find a Mentor?

A Mentor is someone who has already achieved a type of success you desire and is willing to help you achieve it.

A mentor offers their advice and insights for free. If you are paying for it then that person qualifies as a consultant. A mentor just wants to see you succeed because to some level they see themselves in you.

You need to have desire to improve to master a discipline and to be what’s called Ventura Bowl. In other words you should show great potential which in return will attract a great mentor.

I will be starting from zero in this video, so here’s how to do it.

1. Self Awareness
   Look deep in yourself and find out which are your core values, who are you, what do you want from life, what are your passions, what makes you happy, who are the people you look upto and why. Whats so appealing about them. Write all these down
2. Analyse and pick an industry based on the answers you gave and the people you have chosen as inspirational.
   Determine what would be an actual occupation or job that fits your description. Be honest with yourself and find the job that would not feel like job if you were to do it for the rest of your life. And once you found it, that is your new goal in life.
3. Start Reading Now
   You need to understand the industry by the top five best books covering your topic. At least two of these should be biographies on how someone made it bug in that industry. Learn from them.
4. Create your Minimal Viable Product or MVP.
   A MVP is the least complex version of your product or service that people are still willing to pay for.
5. Get better at your business
   After you have your product. You need to start improving and optimising your entire business. Learn as much as possible, test different ideas and strategies until you have got a good understanding of what it takes and how you can run your type of business.
6. Only now you can think of getting a mentor
   Only after you have a business that’s running smoothly should you go after a mentor. This is incredibly important. The majority of people expect to get a mentor right from the start when they are even playing around with ideas. People willing to mentor others are super busy themselves and the last thing any of them want to do is to babysit you while you are still figuring things out. It’s important that you show you can take care of yourself. You have a track record of putting in the work and that you are not going to take too much time.
   One thing people always look for when taking someone as mentee is - their ability to be coachable, to see that they are open to learnings from their experiences and not think that they themselves know better only to be proven wrong by reality.
7. Identify a potential mentor.
   The ideal candidate would be someone from your geography - city, state or even country. That’s walked the road you plan on taking at another time or in another but similar niche. That means this person has already created and sold a company in your industry and is now done with it or they are running a similar business model at way higher stakes but in another niche.
   This might sound confusing for some of you but there is actually a really good reason behind it.
   Now the reason why it’s recommended for the person to be in your geography is because at some point in the future you will want to take them out for lunch or coffee to. Ask yourself if you would feel successful if you were in their shoes. If yes, you found yourself someone good.
8. Analyse them and their business
   Once you have found this individual, it’s time to start learning about their business and about themselves.
   Read as much as possible with the goal to identify a weakness or a very time-consuming part in the business they are running. This will be your way in.
9. The Gift
   This is probably the most important part of the process. After you have educated yourself and identified something this person is struggling with or taking too much time to manage. It’s time to reach out.
   You will do so by offering to take that burden off their hands for free. Super important you do it for free.
10. The question
    This potential mentor of yours will be intrigued about your proposal and will question why want to do this. This is when you come out with the truth. You tell them about yourself, about the small business you have created and that you are looking for someone to offer occasional advice. You would be willing to do the work no matter what but if there’s any advice to give you, you would be willing and open to accepting it.
11. They are probably going to say YES
    Influential people receive tons of messages but very few people are willing to do quality work for free. That’s how you know someone is serious and worth investing in.
12. Prove to your mentor that you are coachable.
    You mentor will recommend you books, ideas, events, things to implement. You should do all of them. Get them done so they know you are serious. The last thing a mentor wants to offer is advice that never gets put in action. That’s when they will drop you.