The Invisible Mentor

Posts Tagged ‘Steve Spalding’

The interviews on this blog are content rich, and there are times when important information goes unnoticed because there is just so much of it. I have extracted 10 tips based on the responses to the question, “As an invisible mentor, what advice do you have for my readers?” And remember that an invisible mentor is simply a unique leader you can learn from by observing them from a distance. I bring invisible mentors to you, so that you don’t have to search for them.

“Keep wishing, keep being positive about the dreams that you have because your dreams are attainable, you just have to keep going and don’t take no for an answer.” Robin Craig

“I wish I had someone I looked up to who would have been my mentor, because success is highly improbably without the willing cooperation of others.  My advice is to build a supportive network and seek mentors you admire who can help you travel the paths they have taken.” Alex Todd

“Be yourself, be truthful. Stick to your values and beliefs and it’s okay to say no sometimes.” Paul Copcutt

“Trust yourself that what you are doing is going to work, put yourself out there and show people that you care and build relationships. Stick to what you are doing and don’t give up when things aren’t going well.” Nathalie Lussier

“Setup a system to organize your work, immediately. I am not talking about a productivity system or anything complicated like that (though those can be useful for some people) what I mean is a systematic process for achieving your long term goals.

Entrepreneurs tend to get stuck on either the “big picture” or the small details, both of which are myopic viewpoints by themselves. To get anything done you need to be able to have a grasp of the actionable steps that have to be accomplished in order to achieve your goal. These steps need to be real and concrete for you. You should write them down and check them off as you accomplish them. Not only that but every so often you should look back at the list and see how far you have progressed, what you are getting stuck on and just how off the rails you’ve gone since the last time you looked. The more times you revisit, tweak and refine that list of steps the better off you will be.” Steve Spalding

“Find your passion and purpose.  I believe we were all empowered with a gift to give to the world.  I’d like to emphasize the words gift and give.  When we give of ourselves and our talents freely to others, amazing things occur.  This doesn’t mean what you always do is free, but find ways to give back.  It not only makes you feel good but also those you affect.  When you wrap the concept of giving around what it is you have a passion for, you find moments of joy that are truly amazing and almost unexplainable.  If you don’t feel you have found a purpose or passion, begin that search now!” Michael McCleary

“Nurture the people who give to you, always give back. Also, someone I spoke to recently said that one of his mottos was ‘you can’t have two faces’. Treat everyone with equal respect. That is so true.” Gina McAdam

“Realize that what gets everyone up in the mornings is one of four motivations or a combination them: money, power, self preservation and romance, which includes all the arts, and everything associated with the arts. These are the motivators, and put more emphasis on the self preservation and romance side, and less on the money and power side. You’ll be a happier person.” Duke Redbird

“Be yourself, develop your skills and do not take no for an answer. There is always a way. I have had quite a privileged life and I have to realize that some people don’t, so you have to embrace others and encourage them. I have always been supportive of my children and grandchildren and encouraged them in what they did and I believe that I still do that.” Lois Fallis

“Go for the grande, especially if your readers are women because a lot of us don’t think big enough. They may think let’s open up a coffee shop, let’s not create another Starbucks. Think bigger even if you don’t create another Starbucks, what if you end up with a chain of three or four coffee shops? Women need to think better and bigger, and I think that’s one piece of advice that I’d give to almost any woman that I meet.

For everyone else, I would say know your network, and know who you can turn to for really good advice. I think sometimes we build close networks of people who are vested in the outcomes of whatever we do, and we surround ourselves with people. So if your best friend doesn’t want you to get, or take that promotion, that’s not necessarily helpful information, you need to find people who will be able to give you good advice that’s in your best interest and not theirs.

Build a network of core people you can trust to help you build your business life and it turns out that they generally help you with your personal life as well.” Diane Danielson

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.

Image Credit: Google via Apture

Here are the ways in which seven very accomplished people succeeded in their careers. The interviews are very detailed, and important information often gets buried so I like to extract information for your benefit. I have deliberately not included the fields where these individuals excelled because the information can be transferred to any field. And innovation often occurs when information is taken from one area and applied to another. What are your thoughts?

What are the steps you took to succeed in your field?

Steve Spalding

I made a lot of mistakes. It didn’t stop there though, in the wake of every failed idea or half-cocked project I tried to pull out that reason that everything went wrong. I think it’s OK to fail. I think that entrepreneurship of all stripes, especially in something as esoteric as the web, is about testing and iteration. That being said, I also think that all this embracing failure stuff only works if you understand the fact that you need to use your failures to make better decisions in the future.

Sometimes people listen to folks like me and get too comfortable failing. You should never be comfortable failing! I don’t want you to fail, ever if you can help it but most of us can’t and I want you to accept that and do your best to lose the fear, minimize failures and learn from the ones you can’t get away from.

Gina McAdam

Generally, I was never afraid to try something new and see where it would lead.  I didn’t have fixed ideas and notions about myself. When I did, I knocked on the right doors. But I was lucky always to have an orbit of good and wise people around me for support.

Deborah Koehler

Paying attention to where I spent my brain time.

David Gray

To be successful in my field one typically needs empathy, compassion, a conscientious work ethic and a background in HR. However, to be truly outstanding one additionally needs a great degree of life history in a variety of business settings as well as a high degree of intuitive and innovative intelligence in order to be able to work with people from numerous diverse backgrounds who are each struggling with very individual career and life challenges. In a word, one needs wisdom. And typically, that can only be accumulated over a long period of time after encountering a variety of challenging situations in one’s own career and life.

Michael McCleary

The big thing was really to make a decision that I was going to commit to my career choice and continue to pursue it even when times were tough.  By taking committed steps of action towards a goal, the path becomes clear, even when at first it doesn’t appear to be.

Lynn Kahle

Not so sure that I have but I do keep up and change the content of a course to be as relevant as possible.

Don Martelli

Good education. Staying grounded in my beliefs and vision for my future. Working with smart people that I can learn from. Helping others learn what I know.

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.

Photo Credit: Google via Apture

Related Posts

The Invisible Mentor Interviews Steve Spalding Part 1, Part 2

The Invisible Mentor Interviews Gina McAdam Part 1, Part 2

The Invisible Mentor Interviews Deborah Koehler Part 1, Part 2

The Invisible Mentor Interviews Michael McCleary Part 1, Part 2

The Invisible Mentor Interviews Lynn Kahle Part 1, Part 2

The Invisible Mentor Interviews Don Martelli Part 1, Part 2

Today we present the second part of Steve Spalding‘s interview. As was the case with the first part of the interview, part two is very detailed and loaded with solid information that you can use.

Tell me a little bit about yourself.

What I’ll tell you is that I find questions like that to be hard, on principle. The problem, I guess, is that I never know what it is that you want to hear.

The easiest thing to say is what I do. I run a small firm called Crossing Gaps LLC. We help big brands and small creatives tell their stories using the web, which really is a fancy way of saying that we do strategy design and consulting.

On top of this I write. I write for my blog, howtosplitanatom.com and I write for our stable of side projects.

When I’m not doing that I spend the rest of my time waxing poetic on Social Media channels. Right now I’m pretty deeply interested in psychology, behavioral finance and how all of that ties back into the ways we use the web for business.

As an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Setup a system to organize your work, immediately. I am not talking about a productivity system or anything complicated like that (though those can be useful for some people) what I mean is a systematic process for achieving your long term goals.

Entrepreneurs tend to get stuck on either the “big picture” or the small details, both of which are myopic viewpoints by themselves. To get anything done you need to be able to have a grasp of the actionable steps that have to be accomplished in order to achieve your goal. These steps need to be real and concrete for you. You should write them down and check them off as you accomplish them. Not only that but every so often you should look back at the list and see how far you have progressed, what you are getting stuck on and just how off the rails you’ve gone since the last time you looked. The more times you revisit, tweak and refine that list of steps the better off you will be.

How do you integrate your personal and professional life?

Once again, organization is key.

Entrepreneurial types are chronic workaholics. We have it in our heads that working more equates to working better. This is fine and dandy when it’s true, but there are a lot of times when we work so hard that we become useless to ourselves and those around us. The smartest entrepreneurs know that those are the times to stop and step away from the desk for a while.

The way I work it is that on weekdays I keep working until I feel like I am losing focus, when that starts to happen I step away and run some errands or read a book or do something outside. Once I’ve cooled down a little, I come back and start again. I also carve out at least one day a week where I don’t work at all, and if I do it’s only when something is critically important.

I’m definitely no expert on work/life balance, but this system is a whole lot better than the other ones I’ve tried.

What’s a major regret that you’ve had in life?

I am sure that if I were being really hard on myself I’d be able to come up with something, but honestly I don’t do regret.

Everything bad that has ever happened to me has contributed to who I am today. When I’ve made mistakes, those mistakes have kept me from making bigger ones later on. It’s really difficult to predict how changing our actions may have affected a situation, There are far too many variables and far too many things working behind the scenes. If you think about it for too long and wallow in regret, you’ll go insane.

To protect my sanity, I just try my best to deeply consider my actions before doing them so that even if I regret an outcome I can say that I did everything that I could to make it right.

What are five life lessons that you have learned so far?

1. You can’t predict the future, though you should try to come close
2. You’ll never be perfect, though you should try to come close
3. You’ll fail over and over again and if you aren’t you should be doing more interesting stuff
4. The only way to learn anything at all is to do it over and over again until your brain is too annoyed at you to forget it
5. Everyone has something to say, everyone is interesting. It’s up to you to be humble and to accept this and learn from as many people as you can

When you have some down time, how do you spend it?

I read (mostly science fiction), I write (mostly non-fiction), I travel (mostly in the U.S.), and I am an assistant coach for the University of Florida Fencing team (mostly to keep sane).

When you live behind a desk, it’s nice to have something that forces you to go outside and interact with people. It’s also nice to have something that gives you a little bit of exercise.

Other than that, I try to keep up on the industry and keep working on any of the dozens of little side projects that are floating around in my head.

What process do you use to generate great ideas?

Remember when I said everyone is interesting and it’s important to recognize that? Well, there is an adjunct to that — to me — everything is interesting as well.

Most often I get my ideas from books, movies, conversations, podcasts and just about everywhere other than my work. That’s why I spend so much time buried in one of those. I think it’s good for knowledge workers to have wide experiences, as you never know when you can draw connections from something seemingly unrelated that will become critical for a project.

What’s your favourite quotation and why?

I have so many of them.

Most recently, it would be this one from Pulitzer prize winning author Annie Dillard,

“If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be too cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

It’s sharp and true and wonderfully apropos for any entrepreneur who is trying to figure out an honest way to look at risk.

How do you define success?

Success to me is being happy to wake up and go to work more days than you aren’t.

It doesn’t mean that you aren’t annoyed or frustrated. It doesn’t even mean that you have to like the details all that much. All it means is that when your eyes open and you think about how you are going to spend the next 8-10 hours of your life, you are content with what you come up with.

Money, fame, cash and prizes all come afterward but happiness is critical. Without happiness the rest — as they say — isn’t worth a hill of beans.

In your opinion what’s the formula for success?

Pick something that you want to do. Make sure you are capable of doing it. Break it apart into small, achievable goals and then work until you’re bleeding on the floor to accomplish those goals.

Somewhere in there you also have to be willing to recognize when the environment changes and it is time for you to adapt your goals and your wants to the new landscape.

Stagnation is the kiss of death in entrepreneurship, and worse than stagnation is believing that you are right. You are always wrong, the faster you get used to that the better.

What are the steps you took to succeed in your field?

I made a lot of mistakes.

It didn’t stop there though, in the wake of every failed idea or half-cocked project I tried to pull out that reason that everything went wrong.

I think it’s OK to fail. I think that entrepreneurship of all stripes, especially in something as esoteric as the web, is about testing and iteration.

That being said, I also think that all this embracing failure stuff only works if you understand the fact that you need to use your failures to make better decisions in the future.

Sometimes people listen to folks like me and get too comfortable failing. You should never be comfortable failing! I don’t want you to fail, ever if you can help it but most of us can’t and I want you to accept that and do your best to lose the fear, minimize failures and learn from the ones you can’t get away from.

What advice do you have for someone just starting out in your field?

First, do your best not to listen to “experts.”

Second, use your common sense.

If a strategy or tactic doesn’t sit right with you it might be because it doesn’t work.

The best thing anyone can do when trying to learn something new is to consider the incentives driving your teachers. Do they have a book to sell? A consultancy that is based around some particular tactic? Maybe they are trying to butter you up to parlay a speaking gig.

Figure out why someone might be trying to sell you on something counter-intuitive, and take their advice with whatever grains of salt you think their biases deserve.

That being said, don’t be afraid to listen to everyone. Even if someone is motivated by something that isn’t in your best interest, there is a chance that there is a kernel of truth in what they are saying.

If you are going to work on the web in any capacity, you need to learn to become a good filter and to never accept anything at face value.

If trusted friends could introduce you to five people that you’ve always wanted to meet, who would you choose? And what would you say to them?

I like people who tell stories, so if I could meet any five of them they would be:

Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers, Blink)

Ira Glass (This American Life)

Joss Whedon (Buffy, Firefly, Dollhouse)

Neil Gaiman (Sandman, American Gods, Stardust)

Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Resevoir Dogs, Kill Bill)

As to what I would say — I have this friend of mine who bakes. She’s great at it. Seriously, she is fantastic, if it has sugar and goes into an oven she probably knows something about it. Well, it was my birthday one of these months and she was going to bake me a cake.  She called me up and asked me what type of cake I wanted. I told her that I wasn’t going to tell her, in fact, I wasn’t going to say anything at all about it because I can’t cook my way out of an Easy Bake Oven and anything I said would probably just make her cake worse.

That’s how I treat the second half of your question. Each of these people is very, very good at what he does. If I tried to lead the conversation, I’d probably miss out on the best parts of what they had to say.

If I have to ask questions, I’d ask them each to tell me what they were currently interested in, what was keeping them up at nights. I think that would work pretty well.

Which one book had a profound impact on your life? What was it about this book that impacted you so deeply? Did you have an emotional or intellectual attachment to this book? Why?

I read a lot of comics as a kid. Heck, I read a lot now but I tend to call them “graphic novels” these days. When you work with stories and help people tell narratives it’s a very good thing to understand a variety of narrative forms yourself.

Anyway, the only “super hero” comic I can read without cringing is Iron Man, and I think that book profoundly affected the way I deal with the world. You’ve probably seen the movie or at least heard about it, but the long and short is that it involves a super hero without super powers. He is just a regular guy, rich as all get out and brilliant, but otherwise as normal as either one of us.

What always interested me about Tony Stark’s character is that the best parts of the books aren’t the super-powered fight sequences, they are when Tony is using his smarts to get over seemingly insurmountable odds. He is like Batman but for Engineers.

It’s a little strange that a comic would have such a profound effect on me, but it taught me that determination, discipline and knowledge where extraordinarily powerful weapons and in the hands of someone who knew how to wield them, they could change the world.

Melodramatic, maybe but that’s what comics are for — right?

If you were stranded on a deserted island, what are five books that you would like to have with you and why? Summarize the book in two sentences.

Catspaw (Joan Vinge) – This is the first Sci-Fi novel I ever read. Considering I’ve read dozens and dozens of others since then, I think this would definitely be worth keeping around.

Freakanomics (Stephen Levitt) – I am a big fan of economic theory turned to explain society and culture, that is what Stephen Levitt does in his book. I’m a sucker for anyone who can breath life into numbers.

What The Dog Saw (Malcolm Gladwell) – This is a great anthology from one of the more interesting thinkers of our time.

Something written by Andrew Keen – I so rarely agree with him that I figure time on a desert island might give me some new perspective on his work.

Have you read any books that inspired you to start a business, service or invent “something”? If yes, which book?

As I said I get my inspiration from all over the place. It’s hard to point to one particular book that has spurred me to create a new business. These days I am very deliberate about starting new projects, it would have to be quite a book to get me to go through that process.

What excites you about life?

There is so much that no one knows yet.

Really think about that for a second.

There are questions that exist that we can’t or haven’t answered. Not only that, there are just as many questions that we have answered incorrectly.

For an entrepreneur, that is a massive landscape to work within. Having the drive and opportunity to try to answer a few of those questions and make the lives of others better in the process is an extraordinary gift to me.

How do you nurture your soul?

I think I have the soul of a teacher, so to nurture it, I teach.

I might not have a huge amount of time, but I always try to make myself available to people who ask for my help. Sometimes that means falling behind on things, but the truth is that none of this has a point if you aren’t using a few cycles to try to make the world a better place.

If you had a personal genie and she gave you one wish, what would you wish for? Or, if I gave you a magic wand, what would you use it for?

I would give myself more hours. You can buy just about everything in the world except for time, and in this new world we are all living in time is the biggest and most scarce resource that we have.

If I could wish for anything it would be for more time to work, play, and learn.

Complete the following, I am happy when…..

I am awake.

How can you apply information from this interview? What are your thoughts? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please comment. 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. I created a Mini Learning Toolkit and you can grab a copy by clicking here.


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How tuned in are you to what’s going on around you? I have pulled the interview responses from several interviews to give a different perspective because the interviews are rich in content so you may miss key information. I usually allow interviewees to interpret questions which has resulted in a minefield of very rich content. Take a look at the diversity of responses to each question. Which answer would be closest to yours?

What’s the most important business (or other) discovery you’ve made in the past year?

Steve Spalding

My most important business discovery has been that working more does not mean working better. In the last few months I’ve realized that you need to take some time out for yourself and do things completely different than what you spend 50-60 hours a week doing or you’ll start to stagnate.

Go for a hike, learn about Jazz, take a trip to New Zealand, do something entirely different and see how it ties back into your day job. You might not think that your career has anything at all to do with the plot of Pulp Fiction, but the lesson that most entrepreneurs really need to learn is to take lessons from everything they do.

It’s a badge of honor among entrepreneurs to brag about how many hours you work on your business, that’s great and I do it all the time myself but the truth is that success is much more a function of efficient time use rather than raw volume.

Shannon Van Roekel

I have been startled to recognize that God is not at all intimidated by business. That world belongs to Him, too. I am trying to learn to strive less and to depend on His nudges and promptings more. He is the best agent/manager anyone could ever have.

Deborah Koehler

I am good at whatever I set my mind to do.

Dennie Theodore

The best skill to have is the ability to adapt.

Don Martelli

The most important discovery I’ve made is pretty simple — social media is great, but it doesn’t replace the human aspect that’s needed to close business deals. Yes, clients like the fact that we are on the cutting edge of social media, but if we don’t vibe well with the client, we won’t win the business. Relationships and personal, face-to-face interaction is key to bringing in new business and keeping current clients happy.

What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?

Steve Spalding

In the realm of Social Media (where I work most often), the biggest advances are coming as large companies start to care less about the number of people coming to their sites and start to care more about the quality of those people.

Almost every client meeting I have starts with the person wanting to get millions and millions of hits, as if traffic alone was somehow going to drive their business forward. I have to tell them that if that is all they want, that’s not too hard but no matter how many million people show up to see whatever stunt we devise to attract them, none of it matters at all unless those people eventually turn into customers.

I think companies are getting a more sophisticated understanding of how to read their own analytics and this understanding is translating into making discussions about “quality over quantity” a lot easier.

Shannon Van Roekel

I write contemporary Christian fiction; the biggest advance in that field over the past five years has probably been the growing interest in reading about real life issues, including international crises.

Deborah Koehler

Of course the movement of natural and organic products.  Nepal is ideally suited to deliver wonderful products that are non-chemical, utilize wise water usage and zero carbon footprint – all the new buzzwords. My business works to support new business opportunities in these areas.

Dennie Theodore

Women seen as necessary in leadership positions to move projects and business forward.

Don Martelli

That’s simple — social media. It has greatly impacted the way we think about our business and our client’s business. Every program we develop is run through a digital prism. The lines of advertising, marketing, journalism and PR are blurred because of social media.

What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Steve Spalding

Unfortunately, when you are in an information or knowledge based business like mine you only really have one threat — obsolescence.

Every day you wake up and your industry has moved forward a step, if you aren’t keeping up then it won’t be long until you have nothing to offer your clients that they can’t just read on the Internet.

I think the hardest thing about working in this field is the fact that not a day goes by where you can be complacent. If you are not constantly improving then you’re dying, and that death will come suddenly and without warning if you aren’t paying attention.

How do I handle that?

Well, mostly, I use the Internet a lot. I also try to avoid the trend lines. I am more apt to observe early adopters rather than be one myself, if you spend your time too deeply tied to the hot new trends you start to lose the forest for the trees and when you make your living off of the trees, that can be a serious problem.

Shannon Van Roekel

Three threats to my business and success would be

1. Not placing God first.
2. Lack of discipline
3. Getting distracted (can you spell f-a-c-e-b-o-o-k?)

I handle these threats, more or less, depending on the day, by starting it with God, keeping a day planner and working through the tasks I set for myself one at a time. Keep on doing the next thing.

Deborah Koehler

Local corruption, unskilled staff, and lack of testing facilities.

1. Local corruption: I face it without a Nepali present.  Usually corrupted officials are unwilling to ask for bribes directly to foreigners.
2. Unskilled staff: I teach in a college, train my own business staff, and offer suggestions where I can.
3. Testing facilities: I find existing documents and then talk to different labs and see if they can create a similar testing program or request that the testing be done in the clients home country.

Dennie Theodore

The usual… Similar Circles is run out of my kitchen with no funding, no time and is too GTA-centric. I’m handling them by asking my community to pitch in and they’ve been giving with both hands.

Don Martelli

There really isn’t three threats. It’s just one — social media. However, it’s also an opportunity. Social media has all but leveled the playing field for agencies. We are all “experts.” We are all going after the same budgets. It’s created a very intense and competitive environment, even more so than it was before. So the key is to stay on top of the trends and develop programs that are so forward thinking that the work you do speaks for itself. Clients hire on experience.

What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Steve Spalding

I think the most unique thing we provide is that we try to avoid stunts. A lot of Social Media tactics can devolve into pet projects that look great in a case study but don’t provide real client value.

At our core, we are educators, I want our clients to leave us, not only able to use the infrastructure we’ve built up for them effectively, but to also use some of the intuition that’s necessary to grow.

Shannon Van Roekel

I like to weave a story around a real issue, not normally in our radar, that will hopefully, not only inform and entertain, but also lead readers to compassion and empathy. Information dumps have caused us to shut down to the need, because we are intimidated by the enormity of the situation—especially in the third world arena. I believe touching hearts through the power of these stories can pull one out of that inertia into a state of true identification and hope.

Deborah Koehler

Traveling to and living in Nepal for 25 years, as well as working outside of my own culture has made be astute to cultural dynamics and my communications skills help me to facilitate new transactions.  I am accepted on both sides of the transactions.

Dennie Theodore

I’m not trying to offer a 10-step “how to” process, but rather open discussion on “why to”. By creating an emotional/mental comfort zone, folks feel better about mentoring and networking.

Don Martelli

Our unique perspective on this business stems from the mashup of the PR world before the web and since eruption of the web 2.0. We have experience that runs the gamut and fusing that experience with the knowledge of the digital space, truly gives our clients a 360 view of their brand and how we can help them move the needle.

What are your thoughts? How would you answer the four questions? Which interviewee do you identify with? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please comment. 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. I created a Mini Learning Toolkit and you can grab a copy by clicking here.

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I got the idea for this post after I read the headline “10 Reasons You Need a Mentor, Especially Mid-Career.” I decided to approach this post by presenting the responses to mentor questions that I ask accomplished people, and you get to decide if you need a mentor.

How did mentors influence your life?

Dennie Theodore

By believing in me. That’s the thing you need most when the world is feeling dark.

David Gray

Mentors have influenced my life more by their actions and their own ways of conducting themselves rather than by any specific mentoring per se.

Rodger Harding

Mentors have held up the mirror and shown me potential I did not know I had…Oftentimes I only realized the enormity of their contribution years later…

Deborah Koehler

They made all the difference in the world. They believed in me when I doubted myself.

Shannon Van Roekel

I never had a real mentor, unless I can count my mother, but I have had lots of examples of what not to do and a husband who is wise.

Brian Johnson

Interesting that I get to this question after describing the above. I have a complex relationship with mentors.

On the down side, had I followed a couple of “mentors’” advice early in my life, I never would have created my first business, eteamz. When I asked some pretty successful people what they thought of the idea, they thought it was a terrible idea and one actually told me “to take another hit on that pipe if you think you can pull that off.” They told me it would cost at least a million dollars to build the technology (we did it for less than $15,000 + 6 months of hard work and a lot of canned tuna) and reminded me I had no experience or contacts so who was I to get that money and build it (fair points as I had very little business experience and essentially no contacts). Oh, and they said I violated rule #1 of a business: the market has to “need” your product—which was a valid point because, at the time, there were only a few hundred teams and leagues in the world who were using the web so they didn’t think there was a need.

That was just the motivation I needed to rock it. I set the goal of getting 1 million teams in 5 years. (We got there in 4)

On the positive side, I’ve gotten amazing support and wisdom from some extraordinary human beings. Special thanks to Sam Wyly again, plus John Mackey (the CEO of Whole Foods) and Gay Hendricks (author of 30+ books including my favorites: “Five Wishes” and “The Big Leap”).

Being around these guys has totally changed my life. But, I’ve gotta say that it has been less what they *told* me (although they’ve each given me great practical advice) and much more about who they are and how they show up in the world and how that mojo has rubbed off.

For example, the scope of Sam Wyly’s vision is RIDICULOUSly big. He sees the world in terms of THE WORLD. So, when I’d tell him I wanted millions of people in our community at Zaadz, he’d nod his head and smile and say, “How can we do it and how much money do you need to do it?!?” (I remember one day when I met with him (a billionaire) and a nice, well-meaning potential investor (a millionaire) and the difference between how BIG they thought and the resulting advice they gave was *amazing.*)

Additional unsolicited advice: In addition to choosing your mentors wisely, I think the biggest thing to keep in mind is to trust yourself. Ultimately, a great mentor is someone who reflects back your highest potential and helps you tap into the wisdom you already have while sprinkling some tips they’ve picked up along the way. I’d personally run away from anyone who tells me I’m thinking too big or can’t do something or some such other nonsense.

As John Eliot says in his great book, Overachievement: “as soon as anyone starts telling you to be ‘realistic,’ cross that person off your invitation list.”

Steve Spalding

I like to believe that I learn something from everyone I talk to, that’s why I love chatting with different kinds of people.

As for my mentors, I think that all the people I would consider mentors had shared one thing in common — they have given me the opportunity to make mistakes.

What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Dennie Theodore

To be yourself, ask questions and be an advocate for yourself and others.

David Gray

Establish trust by being principled and doing what you say you will do.

Rodger Harding

That I am a gifted person who has loads of untapped potential…Using this potential will benefit myself and others.

Deborah Koehler

You know what you need to do within yourself, trust yourself and move toward where you are pulled.

Shannon Van Roekel

The best thing I can do to market my book is to learn to write well.

Brian Johnson

Trust yourself.

(I vividly remember a chat with Steve Wynne (the former CEO of Adidas who we brought on as our CEO at eteamz), when he told me the two most important things about business: 1. Trust yourself. 2. Business is simple, keep it that way.)

Steve Spalding

I think that is the core message. To grow as an entrepreneur, you need to have the freedom to make mistakes. If you don’t, you can’t expect to do anything interesting.

People grossly underestimate how complex business can be, they assume that everything will work out exactly as planned. What I will say is that in all cases that I’ve seen, it never does.

One of the few good things a mentor can give you is the room to breathe that you need to learn this for yourself, find a solution (or not) and fail with your head held high.

They need to teach but only after they’ve let you do it yourself for a while.

What are your thoughts after you have read the responses to the two questions? Do you need a mentor?

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