Rough Draft 7 Street Smart Ways to Get a Mentor

By Larry Chiang

Getting a mentor is at the heart of succeeding after college. Wrangling a mentor is a major career boosting event. Approaching mentorship is a side passion that has gotten me access at levels higher than I deserve. My wish is to boil down my curation of best mentorship and expose some counterintuitive dynamics into this listicle into “7 Street Smart Ways to Get a Mentor”. I welcome comments and feedback as my ability to place thoughts into written format is a challenge because mentorship is such an emotionally charged topic. 

Some common questions I will attempt to solve

How do I get on the calendar of a person who has a super packed schedule

How do you initially meet your mentor?

What role does my non-existent social media presence play in reaching out to someone very influential?

-1- Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

We still use paper letters, paper notes, phones, emails, fax and business cards. Your potential mentor will have a preferred way to speaking with you. Let me stress that all the modes of transportation help get you to your next mentor and your next-next mentor. What I’d like to stress is that your mentor might have the preference to use old fashion smoke signals and we as mentees are going to have to hook up a facsimile machine. 

For example, I met my mentor via snail mail. I wrote out a handwritten letter and put it in a #10 envelope. 

For example, another mentor Ted Rhingold liked you to like his Twitter likes. And like the tweets that you would like to network with him about. So instead of setting a premeeting agenda via email, you signal an ability to search within a social media feed. You also signal your

– goals for a potential mentor

– signal your effort to search past writings your mentor has already said 

– signal future direction. Q

This answers How do you initially meet your mentor? and also leads to my next point…

-2- Signaling, Execution. 

Your potential mentor wants to meet rising stars. Your mentor will fit time in their schedule when you signal execution. Here is the process

– I read what you previously wrote. 

– I took this very specific and very small action based on a change you stimulated me to take and make. 

– This is my documentation via smoke signals, a medium post or Facebook Instagram story. 

– This is me emailing you the documentation. 

– Now, request time over the telephone for a coffee. 

This answers the question of, “How do I get on the calendar of a person who has a super packed schedule”

-3- Be the mentee to a cohort mentor. 

So your cohorts are a great source of peer mentorship. But because of pride, hubris or/and shyness, we do not thank our lowly cohort mentors publicly. 

There are four types of mentors:

– superstar mentor

– cohort mentor

– junior mentor

– default mentor. 

People overly stress a superstar mentor which I define as a brand named, industry leader. But a cohort mentor (think peer learning) is a great “hack” to prime the mentor pump. Briefly, a junior mentor is when your mentor learns from you where you’re the junior. Default mentor is a person who is near you that mentors you by default: Think family, an assigned work associate or someone in close proximity that by default fills your head with their opinion(s). 

You should guess at who your potential mentor’s mentor. They have risen to superstar mentor levels because of a mentor. Very often they thank and re-thank their mentor. This is an mmppi. 

	Larry Chiang (@LarryChiang)
10/26/17, 9:50 AM *How to close (the “deal”) for a mentor, over a real world coffee* #ch5 twitter.com/highalpha/stat…

counterintuitive, street smart way: Ask for a telephone conversation. In the phone conversation, have a specific agenda that you email. 

	Larry Chiang (@LarryChiang)
9/27/17, 9:25 AM Trust. Be Public about how you thank a mentor. #ch5 twitter.com/asse9/status/9… pic.twitter.com/qQdqnu2V3n

Think about thanking your mentor like it’s a Venmo payment to your cohorts. You’re letting the world know you pay your friends. “Pay” your mentor by thanking your mentor. 

	Keith Rabois (@rabois)
7/7/17, 1:26 PM @paulg @garrytan The challenge is that they are so counter-intuitive that if you just avoided the mistakes you might have an 80% prospect for success.

This leads me to point #3

	Larry Chiang (@LarryChiang)
1/30/17, 4:06 PM Me & Mark share the same mentor! DJ in Geoffrey Moore, Eric Ries, S Blank & @tjkosnik = “Cross the Chasm, FromTheRight” #ctcFTR #ch5; #ch6 twitter.com/markgee/status…

-4- A great mentee brings deal flow to their mentor. 

-5-