The most common mentorship now

Less than a century ago, the vast majority of the world learned through books.

Less than fifty years ago, most picked something up from television.

Less than twenty-five years ago, the internet started its rise.

Today, YouTube dominates the landscape when it comes to the type of mentorship I cover here. Parasocial relationships are the lifeblood of digital entrepreneurship. As AI starts to flood cyberspace with repurposed material that it cobbles together from human experience, this passive mentorship that we’ve come to appreciate from one another is going to be tested.

Information is free. It’s the connection that we feel towards one another that is going to matter.

Let’s talk about how to leverage our need for that connection.

Humanity is biased

Some of our most powerful mentors are the ones that we have no contact or interaction with.

We admire them from afar, consume every single piece of content they put out, absorb their messages and lessons, yet we will never meet them for lunch. We will never get to see them in person, ask them about their opinions face-to-face, or get their direct feedback about our opinions of them.

We won’t, because they’ve passed long before we were born.

Einstein, Feynman, Marcus Aurelius, these are some examples of role models, public figures, and historical influences that we are influenced by on some level. Whether it is through this device that you are reading right now or how you respond to the next time your boys are destroying the house, such figures have influence. The ideas and lessons they share in their areas of expertise define your reality.

We are pre-disposed to our own when it comes to influence.

Someday soon, AI may recreate a virtual echo of these historic figures, but it will only be a simulacrum, an avatar, a digital homunculus. Their behaviors and responses to questions will draw from the work they’ve left behind. Even then, it’s only an approximation. For the most part, it will be sufficient for those who are simply looking for information. For those who are looking for a genuine connection, though, they will most likely hit a glass ceiling.

It’s like in video games where the NPC starts to repeat answers after a certain point.

At some point, the depth you seek from them will reach a limit. This is never the case with living beings. We change and evolve based on our life experiences, open systems that give and take, consume and produce. And this brings me to an important point:

Passive mentorships are powerful so long as you can draw from multiple sources.

The grand opportunity before us

Learning is a lifelong pursuit that only ends when we draw our last breath.

In your hands or before you on the screen now is a doorway in which you can create a virtual mentorship network. The internet is endless as the universe, and it is expanding faster with every passing moment. YouTube alone has over a century’s worth of content being uploaded every single day at this point (and that’s me extrapolating from the 2022 statistic of 82 years per day from a quick Google search).

You can curate, craft, and create endlessly from the firehose of material that exists in all of creation.

And yes, this can be daunting and overwhelming. No wonder doomscrolling is the phenomenon that it is today. Our addiction to our devices stems from our need as social beings to crave connection. We are wired to gorge on sugar, fat, stimulation, and engagement because these were in very short supply when we hopped down from the trees and started walking several million years ago.

It’s on you to be conscious and self-aware; to be intentional about your physical and digital diets.

Dan Koe says to “follow your curiosity”. Tim Denning preaches about obsession. Ryan Holiday emphasizes the stoic lifestyle. Each of these people are mentors to the masses that are in search of creating something real on the internet (and to make a living doing it of course).

These are just a few examples of people in my “Virtual Mentorship Network” (VMN).

I could list at least ten more off the top of my head who have taught me much, but I’ve never interacted with them or spoken to them. This is one of the criteria for those who fall in this category.

Here’s the set of rules for those who fall in this VMN:

1. You love their work.

2. You’ve never met or interacted with them.

3. You have applied their lessons to your own life.

4. They’re public figures with a footprint of some form.

5. You’ve subscribed to or bought one of their products.

For the vast majority who aren’t aspiring digital writers, this list is quite significant and skewed towards historical figures of various disciplines. For me, this list would explode if I dropped the second rule as social media has made it much easier to reach out directly to my virtual mentors. The only thing about that is whether or not they know you exist or have the bandwidth to care on a personal level. After all, Dunbar’s number states you can only really have up to 150 meaningful personal connections.

For introverts, that looks like a huge number.

Being one myself, I’d venture to say that if that’s the upper limit, then a vast majority of my connections fall into the VMN.

The island is an illusion

“No man is an island, entire of itself;”

The first two lines of the famous poem by John Donne is more relevant than ever in this day and age. Whether you decide to run away to the boonies and live in a ranch-style house surrounded by farm animals and cornfields or you hole yourself up in the penthouse in the middle of New York City, you are connected and influenced by those who have come before you.

Nobody is truly alone.

Your exercise for this issue is to reflect on at least three people that you’ve learned from without ever meeting them. Think about how you applied those lessons and what changed in your life as a result.

Better yet, write about this and where or who you might be now if you hadn’t.

Next issue, I’ll share the importance of intentionally becoming a mentor.