Virtual Mentors

I wrote about Finding Your Tribe where working with your competition will get you to be better than working by yourself in any situation.

Finding mentors in your life will greatly improve your development.

There’s always the case of: what if I can’t find a mentor? The person I want to have as a mentor is just too busy or inaccessible?

From James Altucher’s Skip the Line, another way to get a mentor is to have virtual mentors, which are books.

Books are by people and books are thoughts codified. Just like code is for an algorithm. By reading a book by a person you admire, you are getting mentored by them, just like they were telling you the same advice, except you are reading it.

Not only are you reading it, you can read it over again, take notes from the book, etc.

By using virtual mentors, you can have more (virtual) mentors than actual mentors.

Real Person as Mentor

One area a mentor as a real person would be better than a virtual mentor would be if you missed certain foundations in your knowledge/experience before having that mentor.

Ideally, having a tribe can support you in this aspect - especially if the mentor you want is a virtual mentor (with a great body of work.)