The Invisible Mentor

Posts Tagged ‘Napoleon Hill’

Over the past month, I have been paying close attention to the analytics for The Invisible Mentor blog, and I am sometimes amazed by what landed readers on the site. Today, I want to highlight some of the posts that landed people on the site from search engines. Next week we’ll return to the regular schedule: Adventures in Learning, Booked for Mentoring, Wisdom of Life and the Invisible Mentor Interviews.

Cover of The Prophet

1. Einstein Distraction Index: A Method of Deep Focus
2. Review: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, Translated by Edward Fitzgerald
3. Summary of A Technique for Producing Great Ideas by James Webb Young
4. 2011 Interviews for Mentoring
5. 2011 Books for Mentoring
6. How to Analyze Information
7. How to Master a Subject
8. What Did Napoleon Hill Omit? Invisible Counselors vs. Invisible Mentors
9. Wisdom Wednesday: Charles Babbage, Father of the Computer
10. Review of The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
11. Enchiridion By Epictetus: A Book Review
12. Review of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

In 2012, I will work harder at integrating ancient and modern wisdom to serve you better. The ancient wisdom will be in the people I profile and some of the books I review, and the modern wisdom will be in the people I interview and some of the books I review. If you have other suggestions, please let me know. Please write your thoughts in the comments section below.

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The Prophet, The Prince, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: The Five Authorized Versions (Classics Club).

Over centuries, mentors have been playing a significant role in the lives of successful people. Mentor first appeared in Homer’s Odyssey where he was left in charge of Telemachus, the young son of King Odysseus who went to fight in the Trojan War. The Goddess Athena disguised as Mentor advised Telemachus when he grew older, to go and search for his father who had now been gone for 20 years.

Image via Wikipedia

In more recent times, Freddie Laker mentored Sir Richard Branson, Roger Corman mentored Martin Scorcese and Ron Howard, and former Xerox CEO Anne M. Mulcahy mentored Ursula Burns to take over the reins.

Since Mentor first appeared, the mentoring role has evolved into what it is today. According to Dictionary.com, a mentor is a “Wise and trusted counselor or teacher, an influential senior sponsor or supporter.”

But mentors can be invisible.

That means that the mentor does not know that they are mentoring us. These invisible mentors are our role models. We choose them because we want to study their behaviours. We want to learn from them so we can possibly mimic their actions. Often they have done something that we would like to do, or are trying to do but with some difficulty.

Mentors who are invisible to their mentees have been around for a while.

The concept of the invisible mentor is not new. Napoleon Hill talks about them in his timeless classic Think and Grow which was first published in 1937, but he calls them “invisible counselors”.

According to Hill, “I followed the habit of reshaping my own character by trying to imitate the nine men whose lives and life works had been most impressive to me… Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Paine, Thomas Edison, Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, Luther Burbank, Napoleon Bonaparte, Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie… I studied the records of their lives with painstaking care.”

He not only studied the lives of his nine invisible mentors, but he blended the information he learned with his knowledge, and he acted on the information by imaging their good qualities. This investment in time spent getting to know these nine men benefitted him tremendously because he knew them so well that he could anticipate how they would respond in various situations – and he responded that way.

More recently, in 2000, Washington State University professor Karen L. Peterson in her paper “Invisible Mentor: Communication Theory and Lilian Katz” wrote about invisible mentors and described the mentee as an absorbent learner. “Invisible mentors are not “super-human” persuaders or orators, nor are they icons with intractable wisdom. An invisible mentor has the capacity and capability (albeit a gift) to see just above the “tree top” and the ability and commitment to come “back down” and tell many below what can be seen… The invisible mentor has the instinctive capability to sort out the valuable from the superfluous,” said Peterson.

Invisible mentors are still relevant today.

After researching the idea of “invisible mentors,” I concluded that they are unique leaders you can learn things from, by observing them from a distance. It is not enough to have one traditional mentor, because no one person can fill all the roles we need them to. But invisible mentors can complement our traditional mentor. Napoleon Hill had his personal Board of Invisible Counselors. And we can have the same.

It is easier for us than it was for Napoleon Hill because of the unprecedented access we have to information. Today, most of us have access to the Internet, which opens us up to online databases, videos, podcasts, e-books, free courses, you name it. At the click of a mouse, we can learn about almost anyone, we can find and study our own invisible mentors.

And with social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, it easier to contact people who once appeared untouchable and unreachable to us. In addition, Skype allows us to talk to people in other countries without long distance charges that can be prohibitive.

Invisible mentors are relevant today because if we choose our invisible mentors carefully, they can help to accelerate our success trajectory, but we have to be willing to invest the time like Napoleon Hill did to research those who have travelled the path we are embarking on. Or who have done, or are doing what we most want to do. And most importantly, we have to blend that newfound knowledge with what we already know.

So, what’s next?

• What are you are trying to accomplish in life?
• Who are five people who have done what you are trying to do?
• Have they written books or developed videos and other material that explains what they did and how they did it?
• If the five people who you chose are still alive, would they be willing to speak to you for 15 minutes?
• What skills do you lack that are critical to your success?
• Who possess those skills set that you can study them?

These questions are not exhaustive, they are meant to get you thinking. Do you see the relevance of invisible mentors? You could research Napoleon Hill’s nine “invisible counselors”, or you could look at some of the interviews on this blog to get ideas. Many of the people who interviewees choose who they would most like to meet would make incredible invisible mentors as well.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Related articles

• Adventures in Learning: DIY Mentoring Program (theinvisiblementor.com)
• 2011 Interviews for Mentoring (theinvisiblementor.com)
• Adventures in Learning: DIY Mentoring Program, Episode Three (theinvisiblementor.com)
• Create Your Board of Mentors – January is National Mentoring Month (theinvisiblementor.com)

I am always interested in rags-to-riches stories to discover how people attain personal and professional success. And more importantly, I want to know if  they are worthy of admiration, how did they treat their family and friends? How did they treat their staff? What moral compass guides them? Did they give back to their community? Would I want to study them, the way Napoleon Hill studied his invisible counselors. What kind of invisible mentors would they make? Are they unique leaders who we can learn from by studying them?

I have never met Ed Mirvish, but I have attended theatre performances at his theatres – The Lion King, Sound of Music – and I have eaten at his restaurants. Every Christmas season he gave out turkeys, and many would stand in line to receive their turkey. He also had door crasher specials and many customers stood in line, rain or shine for the Honest Ed store to open. This man gave back to his community. He did many outrageous acts and secured a lot of free publicity.

Honest Ed Mirvish‘s story is a real rags-to-riches one. He was born in poverty in Baltimore, US in 1914, and came to Toronto, Canada at age nine, when his father David Mirvish thought that he would fare better selling The Encyclopedias of Freemasonry in this untapped territory. Ed’s father didn’t have the Midas Touch, and even though he owned a business for most of his life, he was not an entrepreneur, and didn’t understand that operating a business required a lot more that dreaming. He didn’t understand that he couldn’t consistently write off receivables because clients couldn’t pay – he had too many customers who needed his ware, but couldn’t pay for it. As dirty as it may sound, you go into business to make money. Yes service is important, but you have to price your products at the right price and you have to get paid. Ed Mirvish learned these potent lessons that went right over his father’s head.

In How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate or 121 Lessons I Never Learned in School, an autobiography of Honest Ed Mirvish’s life, you learn these lessons and much more. Honest Ed, like countless others who achieved spectacular success, did not have a lot of formal education – he dropped out of high school out of necessity to work in the family’s grocery store – but he excelled in the school of life. How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate is in two sections. In section one, Ed tells his life story in the usual manner, and in section two he tells his story by using 121 lessons that he learned. Published in the early 1990s, some of the businesses mentioned in How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate are no longer around. I went on a little excursion and took photographs of the businesses that helped to make Ed very wealthy. I have created a little slide show for the fun of it.

Yes, Ed Mirvish was very lucky, and he admitted that in his autobiography, but he deserves a lot of respect, and we can truly learn from him. In the book you see this fearless, entrepreneurial, business savvy person who is willing to go against the grain. What he does often defies logic, and what we are taught -  to only go into a business that we know about.  Ed went into the restaurant and theatre businesses which he knew nothing about, and excelled at them.

“Thousands of teenage country girls were streaming into Toronto to build parachutes, fighter planes, and bombs in the war plants. For the first time ever, they had money to spend on smart dresses. And they spent.” Ed used this information to his advantage. Because the girls had money to spend freely, Ed allowed them to buy on credit while other retailers accepted cash only. Ed’s way of thinking was if the girls were allowed to buy things on credit, they would buy more which they did, and they didn’t default on payment because money was flowing to them. Ed also sold the payment contracts to Mutual Discount Company. When the girls came in on Fridays to make payments, he told them but they didn’t care who received their payments, but this allowed him to sell more when they saw all the new dresses.

Eventually, other retailers switched to allowing these girls to buy on credit, and Ed switched to cash because by that time the war was ending, and many of these girls would no longer have jobs, and would likely default on their payments – he had great foresight. The potent lesson here is to look at what’s going on in your environment, and “the devil is in the details.”

5 Great Ideas

1. When opportunities come knocking, make sure you recognize them and open the door.
2. To stand out, go against the grain and do the opposite of what others are doing.
3. If you want to learn a craft, study the masters, then personalize, and put your unique touch to what you’ve learned.
4. Study your environment to predict what trends will unfold.
5. Fail fast to success.

15 Lessons from Honest Ed Mirvish

1. No matter how attractive the substitute, you must always give patrons what they PAY for.
2. We own nothing! We are all just custodians and caretakers.
3. To be of service IS to be happy. What else brings greater satisfaction?
4. People would soon suffer than change old habits.
5. Before you jump into anything BIG always check the DETAILS first.
6. It may be good, but it can always be better.
7. Listen to your instincts and follow your convictions.
8. Traditional methods aren’t always the best. Improvisation often pays off.
9. Sheer ignorance sometimes beats experience. But you can’t succeed if you don’t try.
10. Beware of experts who insist it can’t be done!
11. Dreams alone don’t run a business.
12. To have the right influences in your life is fortunate. They all pay off in the end.
13. Adverse publicity can often be a bonus – if acted on instantly.
14. Experiment! If it works, stick with it. If it doesn’t move on!
15. Anything you do to INVOLVE your customers keeps them involved with YOU!

I enjoyed reading How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate and learned a tremendous deal from someone who has the Midas Touch. As you read the autobiography you see Ed’s evolution as a businessman, and he builds on each success until he has an empire. He never stood still and How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate is the perfect example of where initial small steps can take you. Though Ed Mirvish had many successes, he also had several failures, but what he did was fail fast. It’s not where you start in life that really matters, it’s where you end up. I recommend How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate.

Here is a slideshow of Honest Eds store, Mirvish Village, which is essentially an artist colony, The Princess of Wales and Royal Alexandra Theatres. If you cannot view the slideshow please click here.

What are 10 takeaways from the book? What ideas can you adapt immediately? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right side) by email or RSS Feed. I created a Mini Learning Toolkit and you can grab a copy by clicking here.

Photo Credit: Google via Apture

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Further Reading

Review: The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence

Innovate The Steve Jobs Way

How to Build a Business by Doing These 10 Things

Review of How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate by Honest Ed Mirvish

Review: Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy by Isadore Sharp

Image by elycefeliz via Flickr

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl is a personal account of Frankl’s experience in a concentration camp and a psychoanalytic look at the suffering that took place there. This is a heart rending book and it must have taken a great deal of effort and control for him to emotionally distance himself from his suffering to objectively relate and analyze the events that transpired during the years he “lived” in the concentration camps.

The goal of Man’s Search for Meaning is to “try to answer the question: How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?” I think that as an author, Frankl answered the question. People were reduced to numbers, and Frankl’s number was Number119,104. When he wrote the book he had no expectations that it would be a bestseller and in fact he wanted to write  anonymously using his prison number. “I had intended to write this book anonymously, using my prison number only. But when the manuscript was completed, I saw that as an anonymous publication it would lose half of its value, and that I must have the courage to state my convictions openly. I therefore refrained from deleting any of the passages in spite of an intense dislike of exhibitionism.”

Would you have had the courage to write about such horrific experiences if you were in Frankl’s shoes?

Frankl identified three phases of the inmates’ psychological reactions to life in the concentration camps:

1. The period following his admission
2. The period when he is entrenched in camp life
3. The period after his release and freedom

One of the most difficult things for the inmates was the feeling  of no end in sight. They didn’t have an end date for their incarceration, and they weren’t like regular prisoners because they hadn’t committed a crime, they were incarcerated because of the “group” they  belonged to.  Because of the indefinite incarceration there was often a sense of hopelessness, and inmates who wanted to commit suicide had to be convinced that there was a why for living. Frankl often assumed the role of psychotherapist even when he didn’t feel like it.

“God knows,  I was not in the mood to give psychological explanations  or to preach any sermons – to offer my comrades a kind of medical care for their souls. I was cold and hungry , irritable and tired, but I had to make the effort and use this unique opportunity. Encouragement was now more necessary than ever.”

The author paints a very graphic picture of life in the concentration camps and you can see in your mind’s eye what happened. And what struck me was even things that most would consider ordinary or even mundane became important for survival. Inmates were exchanging recipes and talking about meals they were going to cook when they attained freedom. Watching the sunset was a simple pleasure for them. Frankl had imaginary conversations with his wife, and in the conversations he asked her questions and she answered,  and she asked him questions and he answered. For him that was a way to maintain his sanity and mental freedom . To some, that may seem crazy, but not as crazy as you may think. In Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill consulted with his Invisible Counselors and they too responded to his questions, and he didn’t have to endure living in a concentration camp.

“But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise…The guard rushed over and used his whip on them all [because a man had stumbled]. Thus my thoughts were interrupted for a few minutes. But soon my soul found its way back from the prisoner’s existence to another world, and I resumed talk with my loved one. I asked her questions and she answered, she questioned me in return and I answered.”

The meaning of life

Life means different things to different people depending on their circumstances. “Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answers to its problems and to fulfill the tasks it constantly sets for each individual. These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way.”

5 Great Ideas

1. A sense of humor can get you through tough times
2. You are capable of doing much more than you think
3. Don’t make success your goal because you’ll never attain it
4. “No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.”
5. You may not have a choice in the experiences you encounter in life, but you have a choice in how you react to them

After reading Man’s Search for Meaning,  one of the  core messages that I received is that if you have a why for life you can weather any storm, what’s the why for your life? I recommend that you read Man’s Search for Meaning because it will inspire you, and you’ll realize how much you take for granted. Man’s Search for Meaning is one of those books that transcend time. Though first published in the 1940s, the book is still relevant today. I will leave you with two quotations Frankl mentions, which provide good advice to live by. And, while you are reading the book, answer the question, “What does my life mean to me?”

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Nietzsche

“Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.” Bismarck

Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right side) by email or RSS Feed.

Related Posts

Book Summary and Review: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
Man’s Search for Meaning
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

Today I’m going to expand on Napoleon Hill‘s Invisible Counselors and my Invisible Mentors technique, but before I do that, I’d like to say that a few weeks ago I attended a networking event where Anna Rossetti, CEO, CPI Card Group was the guest speaker. She told the audience that today, having one mentor is not enough, we need a team of mentors (Personal Board of Directors) to help us get to where we need to go. I smiled when she said that because I have been building my Board of Mentors, and I plan to Build a Board of Invisible Mentors as well.

Image via Wikipedia

We’ve talked in detail about how to choose Invisible Mentors, so today I’d like to deal with the next logical step. Please also read “What Did Napoleon Hill Omit? Invisible Counselors vs. Invisible Mentors” to understand how Napoleon Hill used his Council of Invisible Counselors. This process involves a lot of research so let the Public Library, Google and Yahoo be your friends. Just a reminder, an invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing and studying them from a distance.

For each of your five invisible mentors find all the information that you can on them:

• Identify and secure biographies and autobiographies on your invisible mentors
• Conduct a video search to identify videos by or about them
• Conduct research to identify speeches and presentations given by and about your invisible mentors
• Read all the information that you have collected
• Identify themes that emerge
• Who were their mentors
• Who gave them their big break
• What are their philosophies
• In what way are they similar and dissimilar to you
• What did you discover that was very surprising to you
• What did you discover that wasn’t surprising to you
• How do they solve challenges
• How do they generate ideas
• For each invisible mentor, identify 10 great ideas from the information that you read about them
• Combine the ideas you extracted, among invisible mentors and identify new ideas
• How can you apply the new information to your work and life
• When you feel as if you know your invisible mentors, refer to “What Did Napoleon Hill Omit? Invisible Counselors vs. Invisible Mentors” and try to follow the Invisible Counselor Technique that Napoleon Hill perfected
• Now that you have read the information, processed and played with it, map out a strategy to get to where you need to go
• Implement the strategy and fine tune as necessary

After you have amassed and read all this new information on your five invisible mentors, you will discover that your body of knowledge has expanded tremendously. With your Board of Invisible Mentors in place, or what Napoleon Hill called his Council of Invisible Counselors, whenever you find yourself in difficult situations, you have more information to draw on to solve them. Because you know these people who you have studied, you are able to think like them and anticipate how they would respond in a variety of situations. You can also find invisible mentors on The Mentors page.

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the left side) by email or RSS Feed.

For an electronic copy of Think and Grow Rich, please click here.

Resources to Have in Your Library

Books of Famous Speeches
Books about people who have changed the world
Books about the great inventors of our time

Resources to Refer to

Famous People Their Lives
Biography.com
Biography Online
Famous Speeches

Related Articles

What Did Napoleon Hill Omit? Invisible Counselors vs. Invisible Mentors

Adventures in Learning: DIY Mentoring Program (theinvisiblementor.com)

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