AP 0453: How Do I Find a Mentor?

AskPat 453 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 453 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

We have a great question today from Jay, but before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor which is Lynda.com. I've talked about them many times before, and it's because they're awesome. Lynda.com, which is spelled L Y N D A .com. On that site you can get access to over 3,000 on-demand video courses to help you strengthen your business, technology, and creative skills. I've been taking a Lynda course on using my DLSR camera, how to get up to date with the latest version of Photoshop. I've even taken some InDesign courses back when I was trying to do all that stuff on my own, and it's great. You can watch and learn from top experts who are passionate about teaching. They're very, very easy to understand. You can browse through the transcripts for each of the courses as well. You can download the tutorials and watch them on the go as well on your iOS or Android device. Seriously, check it out. You can check it out for free, actually, for 10 days. All access to all of their on-demand video courses. You will be happy with it. I promise you. To go to Lynda.com/AskPat. Again, that's L Y N D A .com/AskPat. Go ahead and check it out.

All right. Here's today's question from Jay.

Jay Mackey: Oh, my God. Pat Flynn. This is Jay Mackey. I have a blog at respect, the number one, S T.com. So that's, Respect1st.com. I'm just brand new in the marketing space, internet marketing space. Super excited to be here. You've got me all fired up. You know, I'm super stoked about my 800 Twitter followers in the last two months, but I don't know … I get lost in the melee of all the things that I need to get done, and I hear you constantly referring to mentors and how they changed your life and how they can change a person's life. How does a new person get access to a mentor and someone that they can ask their questions to on a regular basis, or a go-to on a regular basis? Again, thanks for being my hero, and I look forward to your response. Bye.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Jay. What's up? Thank you so much for the question today. It's really cool that you are starting out, and you're already doing what you should be doing to connect with influencers and other people out there who could potentially help you. This is something that it took me so long to figure out how to do, and here you are already getting featured on AskPat and making connections. That's great. I love it, and I'm gonna help you out because I love the fact that you know that mentorship is really important. I've talked about it before.

To be honest, I've never had an official mentor. Somebody who I could continually go back to and ask questions, sort of a mentee/mentor relationship, although I've had unofficial mentors. I define an unofficial mentor as just anybody out there in the world who inspires you, who can motivate you, who, through their teachings online, through other platforms like a blog, podcast, video, Periscope, wherever, they can teach you in that way, and you can follow their direction based off of the path that they've led for you. That's kind of what I feel is a unofficial mentor. They haven't really … You don't even have to know these people. For example, I feel Elon Musk is sort of an unofficial mentor right now. I'm following him very closely these days with how he's building his companies: SpaceX, SolarCity, and also Tesla. I've read his biography, and I just love the way his brain thinks. I'm trying to expand and kind of feel his energy and use that in to my business as well in thinking beyond what I feel my limits are. So that's kind of how I'm pulling inspiration from him.

I also have unofficial mentors for a number of other different things too. From writing to speaking, for every kind of division of what I do in my blog and my brand, I have these kind of unofficial mentors. People who help me through them leading by example and just keep … The way that they do what they do is how I incorporate them into those different segments of my brands. So, even before you get access to somebody who could potentially become your official mentor, getting unofficial mentors in that way has actually been very, very helpful for me. Yeah, I've had conversations with those people every once in a while, not Elon Musk. That would be amazing, but one of these days I will. I'm sure, maybe. I don't know, but anyway I'm kind of a fanboy of his.

Anyway, for these other people, I've had conversations with them. I've asked them them questions here and there, but, again, they aren't official mentors. Somebody who has said, “Yes. I will be your mentor. I will be here to answer all your questions. I will guide you. I will hold you accountable,” that sort of thing. I get my accountability and my guidance a lot from the other people in my MasterMind groups. Again, that's a little bit easier to find or start than finding somebody out there who is likely very busy, already successful. Although there's a lot of people who are very successful who they feel it is their duty to have mentees and to teach. I love how we're kind of moving into that world of kind of how we were back in the day, where there's a lot of people teaching other people, kind of getting getting people under their wing, in terms of the best way to get educated.

I do want to highlight a book out there that's really good on this topic, Jay. This is by a guy named Azul Terronez, who is a person who is actually helping me with my book. He wrote a book called The Art of Apprenticeship. This is a book that I recently reviewed on SPI TV, episode 24, so if you go to my YouTube channel, YouTube.com/SmartPassiveIncome, look up the book review channel or the playlist or the SPI TV playlist and you'll see this there, episode 24. You'll hear me talk about some strategies that Azul mentioned, in terms of getting involved with mentors. One of the biggest strategies you can do is to A: Of course, find people who inspire you and who motivate you, who are where you want to be. And also to provide value to them in some way, shape, or form. To reach out to them. To not be afraid to communicate with them. There's a specific kind of dance that goes along with that. It's not like a formal thing, but I highly recommend you read this book or at least check out that review. It gives you some great information on how you could potentially do that. I'm not gonna get into that here because there's a lot that goes into it, but there's also the fact that you can take their advice even before they even share it directly to you and show that you're an action taker.

I think that's one of the biggest things for me is, when I get to the point where I am gonna have official mentees, people under me, and that I will get there … I want to get there. It would obviously want to be people who … Or I would obviously want it to be people who take action, who have proven themselves to have taken action on my advice, who are going to do the work that I tell them to do, who aren't wasting my time, that sort of thing.

So Jay, one of the first things you could do is, once you find these mentors who you feel like could potentially be somebody who you could continually go back to, who would want to teach you and show you the way, show and prove yourself first, and that is by taking their advice and then reporting that, the results with them. I think that's one of the best things you can do. It's gonna show that you have followed their direction, that you're getting results, that you are an action taker, and also they're more than likely gonna share you with their friends and their fans and their followers to show that there are people out there in their audience, you, taking action. If you continually prove yourself, if you continually provide value, perhaps even start to be involved in the community, help others who are getting involved as well with some of the stuff that you've already done, you're gonna stand out. That's one way you can make a connection and get on that person's radar as well. The last thing you want to do is just go up to somebody cold and say, “Hey. Can you spend all your time helping me out?” You don't want to that from scratch, so you want to prove yourself first and that's one of the best ways you can do it. Hopefully that tip helps you, Jay. Again, “The Art of Apprenticeship” by Azul Terronez, and again you can check out my review on SPI TV, episode 24. Just go to YouTube.com/SmartPassiveIncome, and you'll see that there.

So Jay, I hope that gives you some advice. Again, unofficial mentors and then taking action to prove, to potentially have somebody mentor you officially, and I wish you the best of luck. For having your question featured here on the show, you'll get an AskPat t-shirt, and, again, I wish you the best of luck moving forward as you begin to create your business. It's awesome. I can't wait to see what you do.

For those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com, and you can ask right there on that page. Just hit the record button. It doesn't matter what kind of mic you have, as long as we could hear you. That's all that matters, and we'll answer your question if we get to it. Of course, a lot of questions come in. I can't answer each and every one of them. If you do get featured, you do get an AskPat t-shirt sent to you free of charge. That company that helps manage all that, some of you have been asking about that. It's called Printfection. What's cool about it is we pretty much send people a link and they send a … They fill out the form for the shipping and all that stuff, and Printfection fulfills that for us which is pretty awesome. It makes it super easy on our end to do this. Some of you have been asking how we've been able to do this. Because I know a lot of you who actually buy the t-shirts yourself and ship them on your own when you give away t-shirts. Printfection makes it super easy. They didn't pay for this sponsorship; I just want to give them a shout out because they've been great.

I also want to recommend you go ahead and go to the blog and check out EmailTheSmartWay.com. That's a new guide that I created to help you help with your email marketing. Brand new created this month for what I like to call email marketing month on SmartPassiveIncome.com. All of the SPI TV videos and blog posts are about email marketing and even some of the podcasts episodes as well, because it was the number one thing that you wanted help on in a survey that I recently did. So, just giving you what you want. Check it out. Again, EmailtheSmartWay.com and you can check out all the content on the blog as well. I wish you all the best moving forward.

To finish off, as always, here's a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson. He said, “The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.” It's all right here, and by right here, I mean your head, because I'm tapping my head right now. So there you go. Cheers. Take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Thanks so much, guys. Bye.