Note (before you decide to spend time reading this piece): Finding a good mentor is hard. This post isn't for someone who isn't convinced they need one. But if you've found someone, keep reading.
I find it fascinating how many people seek mentorship these days. This is great. More people are identifying when they should ask for help. But when I look deeply, a lot of you aren't actually in a mentorship. You're shopping.
A good mentor sees three things:
- Where you are right now.
- Where you should be heading.
- Sometimes, the exact path from A to B.
But — and this matters — many times they don't know the path either. They have to figure it out as they go. They learn alongside you. That doesn't mean the mentor isn't good enough. If the answer were obvious, you'd have found it yourself already.
Mentors are people, not God.
A lot of people, when they start working with a mentor, expect to understand every piece of advice they receive. They want to be convinced before they act.
But think about that for a second.
If I, as a mentee, understood everything the mentor was telling me, the why behind every action and the full map of cause and effect, then why would I need a mentor at all? I would just tell myself what to do. Wouldn't I?
Many times, dots can only be connected looking back. No one, not you or your mentor or the smartest person you know, can connect the dots forward. That's not how life works. Your mentor is making their best call based on pattern recognition and experience, not on their sixth sense.
And if you're sitting there, arms crossed, waiting to be intellectually satisfied before you move, you've missed the point entirely.
A lot of the questioning mentees do isn't curiosity. It's evaluation. You're sitting there asking yourself: Can this person really help me? Is this advice going to work? What's the logic here?
If that's your posture, you're not in a mentorship. You're in a store, browsing. You're picking up advice, checking the price tag against your own understanding, and deciding whether to buy.
That's not learning. That's shopping.
“Faith is not a dirty word”
I know. I just said mentors aren't God. And now I'm about to say the word faith.
Faith, in a mentorship context, doesn't mean blind devotion. It means something simpler:
I submit myself to you because I believe you can help me, and I submit because I don't understand myself yet.
It's saying:
I know my own thinking got me here. If my thinking were enough, I wouldn't need you. So let me set my thinking aside for a moment and follow yours.
This is scary. It's supposed to be. You're giving someone else the steering wheel when you can't see the road.
But here's what happens when you do it: dedication shows up. Not the performative kind. The real kind. The kind where you do the work not because you're convinced, but because you trust. And that trust, that submission, creates a momentum that intellectual certainty never will.
But isn't this just blind faith?
It's a reasonable question. And yes, from the outside, faith and blind faith look identical.
The difference is this: blind faith doesn't let you see yourself. It doesn't stop to ask is this working?
Faith, the way I'm describing it, comes with a built-in safety mechanism: the retrospective.
Every few weeks, sit with your mentor and ask honestly: Have I made progress? Do we both believe this is working?
If the answer is yes, keep going. If the answer is no, you have data, not doubt. You course-correct together. That's not blind. That's eyes wide open, just deferred.
Blind faith never looks back. Faith looks back on purpose.
A mentor can't guarantee your future. But if you're too busy evaluating whether they're right, you'll never find out.