How To Find And Use A Mentor Through Books
If you try to learn everything solely through your own experiences, you may waste valuable time that could be spent learning and practicing. Instead, you should initially follow a mentor who has already gained the experience and is willing to share it. Using the lessons from others’ experiences for your own benefit is the most productive form of learning, as it transforms their knowledge and experience into your own. Additionally, this approach can help you understand your mentor’s mindset and attitudes.
Phase 1: Imitate the Mentor
The most efficient way to achieve a specific goal is to imitate someone who has already succeeded in reaching it. Therefore, you should find a person who has already achieved the goals you are aiming for. This can be someone from your personal network or someone you don’t know personally. You can choose a living person or someone from the past as your role model. If direct contact with this person is not possible, you should read their (auto)biography or another book by or about them. Take notes on what made this person successful, their strengths, and the qualities you admire in them. Then, imitate their behavior and mindset, doing exactly what made them successful while omitting the strategies they tried that did not work. This way, you also learn from the mistakes of others and avoid making them yourself.
To implement this, you should create an action plan, detailing the habits and beliefs you want to adopt from your mentor. Observe how this person structures their day and handles specific tasks. Next, create checklists to replicate and further develop these processes.
Because books cannot offer direct contact with your mentor, you should visualize the material and engage with it through as many senses as possible. Imagine sitting next to your mentor and interacting directly with them. Analyze what you read, ask questions about it, and consider how your mentor would answer. This intensive research and visualization help you create a vivid mental image of your mentor. Then, in various situations you encounter, ask yourself what your mentor would do.
While reading, note down the key words and concepts to research in other sources later. Describe these concepts using a few sentences and diagrams. Using techniques like the Feynman technique, you might write an essay on each concept, compiling them in your knowledge base. This approach helps you build a broad and thorough knowledge base that you can retain in your long-term memory through spaced repetition.
Phase 2: Surpass the Mentor
After a period of imitating your mentor, you will begin to understand what works for you and what you need to adjust. Then, adapt your mentor’s behavior and mindset to your own strengths and needs. Once you have learned everything possible from your mentor, look for a new one or start developing your own unique approach. This is necessary to step out of your mentor’s shadow. Your ultimate goal should be to surpass your mentor. By doing so, you combine and advance the knowledge of one or multiple mentors, further enhancing it with your ideas and experiences.
Example
An example of this type of learning is Thomas Alva Edison, who chose Michael Faraday as his mentor and read his book Experimental Researches in Electricity. This book provided Edison with all the knowledge Faraday had gained through years of research in electricity. Edison absorbed this knowledge, conducted the experiments described in the book, and expanded upon it through other books and his own experiments. This enabled Edison to become one of the most successful inventors in the field of electricity and electrical engineering.
