People Get Mentor Wrong. Hopefully, You Didn’t.

Here’s how you completely rock at this.

I imitate writer Tim Denning as if nobody’s watching. People think I’m crazy: I highlight almost every line of his article.

They say you only highlight things that resonate with you but everything he writes resonates with me because I want to write like him.

He’s my start. The problem is: people miss that point.

Cementing the sky is the end already.

Ryan Holiday will kill me for this: Ego is *not* the enemy.

Ego makes things easier and the growth faster. You just need a dash of self-awareness with it. Self-awareness means a dire to grow.

Ego high means I hate everyone’s work. Ego low means I love everyone’s work, except mine.

When I hate everyone’s work, I feel I’m valuable. When you hate someone’s work higher than you (mentor’s) that’s the key to growth. Growth comes from quantity. Zero ego forces you to focus on quality to stand out and keep procrastinating to perfect everything and devalue your own work. Quantity is quality.

The idea is to have someone higher than you in your field as a mentor. You don’t need to communicate with them ever, however.

Mentors are Nike’s hamburger.

We get mentors wrong. We think we are entitled to get free guidance from someone higher than us just because they have done it and we think they have more free time than us now.

We also think we have to keep working under them for decades to finally learn something.

What if that isn’t true?

True learning from mentors starts with imitating them. Imitating is free. They don’t need to guide you, you have to study them. I call this contactless mentoring.

I studied Tim secretly. I didn’t let him know about it in his comments section or let him know how much I admire him though. Until one day, I did. His message wasn’t what you might expect, however. He didn’t tell me he’ll mentor me for free or guide me with a certain amount of money. He did give me his paid eBook for free though.

With that gesture, he just meant this: “I’m there for you when you fall, but I won’t become your support.”

If I’d wait for him to have time to mentor me, I’d still be waiting.

He told me this which I want you to know as well:

“All I can say is keep writing. Don’t get distracted, and definitely don’t idolize people like me. We’re all imperfect. You have loads of passion and that is a resource more scarce than gold. Use it to do something awesome.”

Here’s the trick I follow:

The trick is to be grateful for having them. Not in public though. Everyone is doing that already. You think what’s unique about that so you take them for granted.

Secretly study them. Let nobody know about it. Until one day, everyone will tell them about you.

Your road suddenly becomes less scary.

People think Tim is a robot. I used to think the same. I didn’t know him when I started writing but I’d always see his latest posts on my Medium feed.

Everything changed when I studied him. People calling him a robot is a sign of them putting fewer efforts into whatever they do — i.e. writing.

I can never see him working but when I analyzed him, I felt him working. Earlier I used to procrastinate. Now I too feel I can easily work.

It doesn’t have to be someone higher than you.

Everybody has something to teach you. My younger brother is my thinking mentor.

Learn from someone higher than you (not age-wise) otherwise you’re saying you are the best. That stops all kinds of growth already.

Use them as a way to measure what matters.

I don’t know what success is like so I don’t want to be ignorant when I do reach there. A mentor helps you know that.

You feel like a superhuman when you have a small win. My small win was when I learned how Tim chooses his feature images. The next small win was learning how he uses different settings to make the image better than he finds it.

I learned these things the hard way by trying things myself, not through his course. It’s fun to figure something out the hard way.

Feeling like a superhuman means getting one step ahead of the game.

You don’t know what matters. People higher than you know it better. Use them as a way to learn it sooner.

You need a start for everything to make sense later.

I always knew I can write well but those writings were nothing people felt good reading. Making them feel good is getting them to take action.

Earlier I used to directly write out the exact thoughts in the exact way presented by the founder of our team in his youtube videos and publish it.

I used to learn something from somewhere and share it as stories of my own. Nobody knew me. I didn’t bother either. I didn’t know much.

I was stealing content but learning presentation. Your content could be good but presentation the worst. Presentation and contents are different things we miss.

Presentation means your personality. Everyone has it, even doctors. Your presentation makes you unique. How you choose words, which swear words or local slang you use, how you write a common phrase differently, how you hold a toothbrush and convey it to your audience is all part of your personality — presentation.

Not having to care about coming up with newer or better contents and using someone else’s content taught me that, so I could study Tim and learn the writing presentation from him, rather than wasting time procrastinating for new ideas.

When you’re at this level, you’re growing enormously.

I see some people feel good when they say they knew a new post was by Tim Denning just by seeing the article’s feature image choice. That’s plain. Tim chooses bizarre images anyway. It’s easy to differentiate.

But here’s what I don’t see people doing but I wish I do: When I see an underline in a keyword in his stories, I know which other stories of him he’ll link. I even know the exact title without clicking the underlined link.

I read and studied him so much I feel like I know him better than he does.

Let them clean the road for you.

That’s a bad way to see it but that’s what it is. Let them clean the road for you.

When you spend time studying someone higher than you, you realize what you felt hard is easy. It’s still hard but it’s easily achievable now.

They make everything, including the process easier for everyone and I just have to make it better for me. Then make it better for other people. For example, how to get into the flow.

The worst nightmare is to be the first mover. Be the first fast mover instead.

Here’s the bonus:

The online world changes quickly. You can be out of the game anytime. Trust this when something goes wrong in the online world (for example, some platform starts paying you less), someone higher than you is the first one to decide the next step. They quickly shift to something else that’s better or hold on if they still believe. Most of the time their decision is right. They know everything better than you.

Use them as a boundary of success ONLY.

Don’t follow them wholly even. They could be wrong too. They’re still figuring it out and that’s the best part. You’ll always learn something new (and better) from them.

The good news is: you don’t deserve success yet so you can always learn.

You have to first enter someone’s road before making your own.

Imitating someone is the best way to grow I learned. People are afraid of what others might think. They miss this: nobody cares the next day.

Someone higher than you is your start. Everything will make sense later.