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Comment by afarrell | Hacker News Reader

> Find a great mentor

This is harder than the sentence makes it seem. Subproblems involved in finding a mentor include:

1) Knowing yourself well enough to know who would make a good mentor for you.

2) Finding and asking someone in a way that is not functionally equivalent to asking someone "Hey, could you commit to spend an unbounded amount of time helping a stranger?"

3) Asking well-framed questions that set your mentor up for success in helping you.

Does anyone have recommendations or advice on how to better frame the "find a mentor" problem or how to accomplish it?

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I think the sage advice is to find someone who's doing what you do, but is ahead of you on the roadmap (but not too far ahead, perhaps). How do you do that?

Be experienced enough to know enough people in your field. Find a contact channel and ask someone you respect. If that fails, ask someone you've already known and respected for a long time. If you can't or won't do that, then you should go it alone. You don't need mentors to succeed.

I find that I know enough people after working for more than a decade that my mentors have become the people I already ask for advice, so making it official was a minor step.

To address your specific requests:

1. Knowing yourself well enough means knowing your blind spots. Anything you dismiss without question is a blind spot. Have mentors who cover them. I have robust conversations with all my mentors, and they always give me pause for thought.

2. Asking for time means you need to focus on what you're asking of them. Mentors are there to advise, not make the decisions for you, or finance your endeavour (unless they already do). Ask politely and they'll say yes.

3. Well-framed questions help, but I find that I won't know the questions to ask until I've experienced something unexpected. Also, sometimes I find some of the best conversations come out of asking open-ended questions. I think there's a time for both.

As to my situation: I've asked mentorship from people younger and older. I've asked friends and acquaintances; some I know well, some I don't. However, they are all willing to be honest. It's necessary that we disagree on some things.

My blind spots are things such as raising money vs. bootstrapping (bootstrapping all the way!); revenue from products and services vs. revenue through finance or advertising (I believe revenue should come from creating material value, not increasing it through financial vehicles); cryptocurrency as a business model (I find few projects are genuinely useful). If the opposite of my belief happens to be useful, then it helps to have someone who understands it.

> (I find few projects are genuinely useful).

basically my thought since I found out most of these crypto projects are trying to solve problems that are already done centralized. (like logistics)

Seeing stuff like this is why I only believe Crypto is going to be used as a Currency and not for apps.

> Ask politely and they'll say yes.

Or you can take Warren Buffett's approach and keep on bugging your mentor, even be ready to work for free so that you get to work with your mentor.

Working for free devalues the entire profession, and disrespects us all. It reenforces the idea that people should have to work for free to "prove themselves", which shuts things out to only those who can afford to work for free (people from rich families, people who don't have a family to support)

Without context, working for free requires careful thought. But in the context of this conversation "free" means without monetary compensation, but you're still receiving the benefit of the mentorship (and thus not free).

TLDR; No one's advocating working for free. The Warren Buffett approach is "trade money for time with a good mentor."

The person above literally said "work for free". Those were the exact words said.

And I don't know about you, but I can't buy food or pay rent with "time from a good mentor."

I think you're missing the point, but maybe I'm missing yours.

Perhaps I could use some mentorship from you. =)

I'm saying that, when working for free becomes the norm to advance, the only people that can do so are those who can afford to work for free. If you're someone who isn't already rich, or someone who doesn't come from a wealthy family, you can't afford to work for free. You still have to pay for rent and food.

Um. Can't the same be said about college?

As someone who comes from a poor family, couldn't afford college, and went the mentor-with-free-work route instead, your comment is particularly and hilariously myopic. :)

No, it can't. For one, college has massive amount of financial aid that can come along with it.

And tell me, how did you eat while going the "mentor-with-free-work" route? How did you put a roof over your head? If the answer to those is "family", then you're not one of the people that my comment was about.

I moved into an overpriced shithole apartment at 19 while working at a NOC in the city. Before moving out, I was doing a 5hr/day commute and paid rent to my parents. Pretty sure I'm one of the people you're talking about.

Are you advocating against mentorship as a principle?

I'm advocating against free work. If you do work, you should be paid for it.

I agree with you but in reality you do what you have to do.

Btw Buffett's mentor did not hire him even though Buffett wanted to work for free. He later offered him a paying job.

I agree that 1) and 3) are hard, but you don't have to do 2) like you said. Asking strangers is not that hard, and most people I know don't find it annoying to be asked. Just do not ask for an unbounded amount of time.

Ask specific questions. Even to strangers. Many will be flattered you asked and will answer. Some will tell you that they do not have time or energy right now. Many will not answer at all (1).

How do I know? I do ask strangers for advice. And I am open to questions: From time to time, I publicly say that on Twitter (like "Reminder: Ask me anything about code quality, technical excellence, TDD or freelancing. DMs open"). I get interesting questions from total strangers, and I answer them as best as I can.

So, maybe also do search for people who offered their help to strangers in the past.

Maybe you will not find a mentor right away by asking strangers for advice, but maybe you can be able to evolve a conversation into a form of mentorship.

(1) If someone answers in a rude or condescending way, block them.

> Just do not ask for an unbounded amount of time.

Right. Lots of people ask "will you be my mentor", which is such an unspecified question that it is effectively the same as asking for an unbounded amount of time.

Asking a specific well-formed question or asking if you can meet with someone for a specified period of time are bounded requests. I'll bet there are other more creative types of requests we can come up with.

I haven't read it yet but this book has been highly recommended often.

You Had Me at Hello World by Dona Sarkar

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26166862-you-had-me-at-h...

That one strikes me as hindsight advice. As in, something happened to work well for me, so I'm listing it as advice for others, even though it's likely not really actionable. Not quite "win the lottery", but for every ten people who seek a mentor, I'm going to guess that nine of them either can't find one or find one who doesn't contribute to their success.

It's the difference between "buy a lottery ticket" and "buy a winning lottery ticket". The latter is complete garbage advice, but the former is good advice, if lottery tickets are going cheap enough to make the expected value positive.

Doesn’t this assume that trying to find a great mentor has non-positive expected value, which is probably not true?

Well, if it's time better spent on other things, or if the mentor gives bad advice (or worse, actively undermines you), then it's a bad idea. I don't see any evidence that a positive outcome is any more likely than a negative one, but we tend to only hear about the positive ones.

> if the mentor gives bad advice (or worse, actively undermines you), then it's a bad idea.

We’re talking about expectation here, not clairvoyance or hindsight.

> I don't see any evidence that a positive outcome is any more likely than a negative one

You don’t see any evidence for seeking mentorship to accomplish your goals? Is this what you’re saying?

Its advice that is useful if you interpret it as "keep an eye out for things which will help you actionably do X". But its also a category of advice I find personally frustrating, so I'm just trying to accelerate the process of finding those resources.

I dont know anyone that has a mentor, except maybe parents. Is it really that common?

Fraternities pair pledges with "big brothers". Groups like AA pair those early in the program with "sponsors". It's often not so formal, but any situation where someone is being "taken under the wing" is a mentorship.

Yes but we're talking about mentorship in business. For what it's worth I only know one person with a 'mentor' in that sense and it's just one of his rich dad's friends.

Not really. The problem is that people grow and change and even a few years so it's highly unlikely you'll have a single person who you can even constantly learn from, unless you're on a very long and well-defined career path and know somebody else who has been on or studied it well.

Most people just need a good group of people to talk to. It obviously helps if they have more senior experience and have seen the problems already, but sometimes exact peers can also help via adding a new perspective.

Perhaps "Look for and ideally find a good mentor or mentors" would be better? The point being, there's plenty of value in the process.

It's like dating. Yeah, suck. But others don't. And with each step - albeit some backwards - there's something to be learned.

p.s. When in doubt, read (books). There are plenty of top shelf mentors who have shared their "secrets." But again, this is a process. This is learning and growing.

> there's plenty of value in the process.

Right, if you know what the process is rather than just "stumble around frustrated" or "quit your job and move across the country without knowing how mentorship actually works". I'm just trying to save folks the cost of lots of wasted time/effort by fleshing out this process into something more concrete.

> It's like dating.

oh dear I hope its not that nebulous and terrifying.

> Yeah, suck. But others don't.

I think you might have dropped a word here.

> When in doubt, read (books)

Tip: asking for book recommendations on HN or a subreddit can give you much better results than just googling, as long as you write a well-framed description of your problem.

Excellent points worth bearing in mind.

If you're looking for a mentor (especially a technical one), check out https://www.mentorcruise.com - no affiliation, just a cool team working on a worthy problem...

Not to sound like a douche, but that sounds familiar to having a girlfriend/boyfriend.

I think you have to put something on the table that will interest the other party. It might not be huge, but being able to help back in a way or another will certainly motivate someone to spend time for you. Also, having a common interest for something, on which you could work together.

For example, if you really like some open source project, you could be mentored by a committer (common interest) which will have incentive to help you contribute (help back) to the project.

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