Mentorship goes by another name

As I mentioned before, mentorship is a two-way street.

The thread of your life weaves through thousands of others over the course of your life in ways that you may never get to see. With the power of the internet shrinking the world down into the palm of your hand, you have the potential to reach ever single person on the planet.

Another way to put it is that the ripples you make in the sea of life are exponentially amplified to the farthest shores.

This is also known as influence, impact, and inspiration.

Our mentors do this to us. In turn, we refract their teachings through the prism of our minds and share our experiences in many angles. Everything we do based on our perspectives of what we internalize through our own actions become our ways of passing it on to the next generation.

It’s an upward cycle that will continue so long as there are people in the universe.

Learn ←→Teach

I’ve thrown a few rocks at so-called gurus on the internet.

These are the people who teach others how to teach others about something that they themselves haven’t achieved. You seen or heard of them across your time on social media. They show how to grow an audience without ever having done it themselves other than by virtue of the fact that they attract an audience by claiming to know how to grow an audience.

Read that again.

Only on the internet can such a thing take place with such success. The first examples of these “vaporware influencers” were the ones who were famous for being famous. The followings they built were basically the equivalent of Tootsie Pops without the chocolate center, the Gobstoppers without a core, the Twinkies without any cream filling.

Their proof of having an audience for the sake of having one was all they needed.

In order to have an offer that has any substance, you must first have a core. You must first have experienced the craft and learned it to some extent. At the very least, some of the gurus out there learned the basics and proceeded to open their own digital kiosks to sell the shovels for outrageous sums of money simply because they could.

Ironically, this in and of itself is a skill called marketing.

I can’t hate the players, though. The game is one of the strangest things, and it only works because of human nature. You don’t see National Geographic documentaries of other species doing this sort of thing to each other.

Imagine a worker becoming a queen because they went viral.

I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that the learning and teaching cycle from your perspective starts with you having a mentor to learn from. The popular phrase these days is to “build in public” so that the mentor/mentee cycle is vastly reduced down to almost real-time. In the past, imparting knowledge and experience took much more time and could only be done locally.

In a few centuries, our species is now at the point where we share almost instantly.

Which brings me to the next point.

Everything counts now

Misinformation and disinformation have much more power today than it did even twenty years ago.

Every action, every word, every post, every article, every video that is published and distributed is instantly accessible to anyone now. Regardless of whether it is accurate, precise, or valid, if it taps into an emotional response or resonates with the recipient, they have the option to pass it along without a second thought.

Critical thinking is ground into oblivion under the pestle of FOMO.

Parenting used to be the only thing that had this effect.

Now that I have experience on both sides of the fence, I understand the mentor/mentee influence to a much larger extent. I picked up a great deal of my values and beliefs from my parents, but not only from their lectures and reminders to me. I also learned and internalized a great deal from watching, listening, and observing them in their interactions with each other and in public.

Everything counted, and they knew it.

In a way, being a parent presents a kind of maddening existence. You’re only human, and you can only be on your best behavior for so long if you are trying to be a “perfect” parent. You are the first and greatest mentor to your children, but your influence is only greatest with them for a few years.

Their hardware may be 50% from you, but their software is a timeshared SaaS.

With that, I’ll share the last point I want to make about your impact in this cyclical process.

Last, but certainly not least

The point I want to drive home about this ripple effect is this:

The internet gives us the power to simply amplify whatever is given to us.

To that end, we shrink the mentor/mentee cycle down to a dot without a second thought. If it moves us emotionally, the rest doesn’t matter. If you’ve read this far, then you know for a fact that this isn’t true at all.

Look at what is happening to our government for a prime example.

Your responsibility as a mentor is to intentionally shape the lessons that you provide to your mentee with a sense of purpose. Strive to be as clear as possible in your words and actions. What you pass on will not immediately produce results, but the results that come from it are significant over their lifetime.

Critical thinking is more important than ever as one of the things you can learn and pass along.

Regardless of the sphere of life it’s in, personal or professional, what you do with the content presented to you can make all the difference. Develop or rediscover that thought pause so that the learn/teach cycle has a longer timeline than the time it takes for you to hit the “share”, the “repost”, or the “send to” icon.

Ask yourself, "Who have I mentored/influenced in my life?”

Think about the impact you’ve already made on them. Where are they now? Are they there because or despite what you imparted to them? Could you have done anything differently?

Next time, I’ll share the indirect mentoring approach (the dominant form of mentorship because of social media).