Over the years Angel and I have written a lot about our personal struggles in this blog. A related topic that we haven’t touched nearly as often is our professional struggles. We help our students with various aspects of career and business strategy every day, yet we rarely write about them publicly. However, Angel and I received three emails from blog readers this morning, all proposing the same basic question:
How do I find successful mentors who help me achieve my professional / business goals?
This is a great question, which I believe warrants a public response, given that we once struggled with the same situation and the specific solution we discovered continues to have a profound impact on our professional lives.
So it’s time for a short story about life and business …
Many moons ago, when Angel and I were young entrepreneurs at the age of twenty who had trouble getting our business going (with little money and basically no connections), we realized that if we ever did, we needed leadership and mentoring wanted to make our dreams come true by some successful people who had already followed the path we had chosen.
So we did the most naive thing you can imagine: We wrote cold email inquiries to the (basically famous) A-listeners in our industry – bloggers with millions of monthly readers, bestselling authors, social entrepreneurs and coaches with ridiculously successful companies and the list goes on. We let them know that we admired certain professional choices they had made and certain traits they had publicly shown over the years and that it would be a dream if we could learn directly from them, perhaps by taking ours Volunteer time to help them with some of their active projects.
We should have known better, right?
These were some of the busiest people on planet Earth! Who should we believe that they would answer a couple of twenty dreamers who have no publicly recognizable ability, other than perhaps the ability to write a coherent email? And we subtly asked them to offer us their mentorship … And we suggested that we would volunteer if they obviously already had successful teams of people they trusted … We were NUTS, weren’t we?
Then something unimaginable happened. We received an email response … and a second … and a third … And over the next few years we learned directly and indirectly from a hugely successful group of people who were undoubtedly our greatest heroes at the time (I. I am going to be names and spare details out of respect for privacy, etc.
For quite a while, when Angel and I were in the middle of studying and growing, we never really stopped asking why everyone was so nice to us …
One day, a few years later, five of these mentors – who were now our friends – attended a personal mastermind meeting that was part of the conference we were hosting. And one of them happened to be joking that she had met us through a cold email request that we had sent her once. The room fell silent for a moment. Then, at exactly the same time, our other four mentors who were present in the room began to giggle and nod their heads in agreement that they too met us through a simple, cold email request.
The whole room burst out laughing sincerely.
“Do you know why I decided to meet you both?” one of them asked.
Angel and I smiled and just looked at each other.
“Because after a few decades of running my business, every single person who turned to me with a cold request wanted something from me. They wanted my money, they wanted me to give them a job … they wanted something for free. Your request caught my attention because you were both the first to give me something and actually showed a well-researched, genuine interest in learning more about the projects that I was working on and that I was excited about. “
Angel and I looked around the room. The others nodded again in agreement.
Needless to say, we learned something important about life and business that day.
It’s your turn…
Can you relate to our story in any way? Would you like to add anything else?
Leave a comment below and let us know your thoughts.
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