They say that the difference between a promising individual and a successful one is mentoring. By ‘they’, I mean Richard Branson, founder of the multibillion-dollar enterprise ‘Virgin’. I completely agree with him, not just because he is one of my favorite entrepreneurs, but also it makes a lot of sense actually.

Everyone Needs a Mentor

Look at all the great self-made men today; Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. All of them had something in common; they established a multibillion-dollar empire from scratch. They also had another thing in common; all of them had mentors.

Steve Jobs was guided by Robert Friedland, even naming his company after the group they joined together. Bill Gates was mentored by the godfather himself, the inventor of the PC, Ed Roberts. Roberts had hired Gates and future co-founder of Microsoft Paul Allen to design software for his Altair 8800 PC, which sowed the seeds for Microsoft. What about Zuckerberg? He actually learnt from his mentor’s failures! Sounds confusing, right? We’ll discuss this later on.

Every highly successful individual has had a mentor at some point in their life that helped them get to where they are today. Thankfully, even some corporations are beginning to see the positive impact that mentoring can have on their employees. Many companies are now using employee mentoring software such as Together App to encourage and track the mentoring partnerships going on within their place of work.

For many people, including me, following someone else’s footsteps and doing what they want you to do goes completely against the notion of being a self made individual; how can I claim to be self made if I am still following orders from someone higher up in the food chain. Well, keeping aside the fact that a mentor shows you the ropes, tells you the dos and don’ts of the industry, you also get to learn a lot from a mentor, more specifically from their failures.

Learn From Other People’s Mistakes…

Wait what? Isn’t a mentor supposed to be an omniscient guider who can do no wrong? Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but even the greatest minds in the worlds do make mistakes. And this is actually the biggest thing you can learn from them.

Just look at the Zuckerberg example we mentioned earlier. The founder of Facebook was mentored by none other than the founder of MySpace; Sean Parker. Though Parker is most well known for his stint with MySpace, what many may not know is that he also found another enterprise by the name of Plaxo. What happened there was more like something out of a storybook, as Plaxo got taken over by the executive board who Parker actually hired, eventually getting a minority stake in the very company he started.

Learning from the mistakes of his mentor, Zuckerberg made sure this never happened to him by assigning two board seats to himself for Facebook. This meant that even though majority shareholders would have a stake in the company, Zuckerberg would be the one who would be calling the shots.

…As Well As Your Own

It’s easy to label someone as inept for doing something foolish, but as I said before, humans make mistakes. It’s an integral part of our nature, and besides, how else are we going to learn? You will also be making a few mistakes here and there on your entrepreneurial journey, but remember, that’s who we are. If you don’t believe it, go through the life of Henry Ford, who went through five-failed business before finally revolutionizing the car industry.