The Secret To 10X Your Career (Find Your Mentor)

What's up, marketers? Welcome to another edition of Adam's Letter. It's been a few minutes here, and the reason for that is I've been working, building the newsletter, and finally have a sponsor who is ready to support the newsletter and the podcast. That's kind of how this will go.

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It was going well. We're starting to grow. And I had a reader reach out to me and say, Hey, are you thinking about doing sponsors or have you done sponsors yet? And at the point I hadn't, but they have been patient and willing to work with me in building out our sponsorship program.

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As marketers, you know, our main job is to communicate customers and prospects, uh, what our value is. And then to help them engage, right. To help them make the decision that yes, there is product market fit here and I want to engage with this offering. A lot of times that can get muddled by questions or complaints or support requests or whatever.

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So please, please, please, please, please, if you're in marketing of any kind, go check them out. It's basically like ChatGPT for customer support. Don't overthink it. go to the website, go click on their ad, or go to getsupermoon and check out what they doing All right let get into the issue The secret to 10X your career is to find your mentor Deep down we all want a mentor in life Frodo had Gandalf Luke had Obi Rey had Luke, and similarly, we crave a person who can show us the way.

This is the person who will hire us for the job or make the introduction and invite us to the table. Apprenticing ourselves to a master of the craft we're pursuing is a tradition as old as the written word itself. Just a few weeks ago, I talked about how to engage informational mentors, right? I talked about how to get people onto your shows, how to begin to connect with mentors who are maybe outside of your actual relational capacity.

And I heard from several of you who wanted a deeper dive on more of the relational side. So that's what this is. Let's dive in. First of all, the idea here is that you need to choose upfront if you're going to pursue this person as an informational or a relational mentor.

And the reason that that's important is because if you're going after an informational mentor, you can just kind of like go through their resources, go through their work and begin to build that mentorship. Because informational mentors are those who we learn from, but who are not we're not tied to in any authentic way. Right. These are very helpful people for our career growth, but they don't know us.

They're the mentors we study. They perhaps are an author or a podcaster, someone we learn from by watching them at a distance as opposed to engaging them directly. For me, Ryan Holiday is the perfect example. I've read all of Ryan's books.

I've learned more than I can recount. I even exchange emails with him from time to time, but we don't have a real relationship. He doesn't know the details of my life and career. He doesn't have the context required to speak into situations I'm working through, his sponsors, his mentorship, excuse me, to me is exclusively informational.

All right, now let's compare that to an actual relational mentor. A relational mentor is forged through a relationship. Very well, very good class. Relationship mentors are individuals with whom we are engaged in a direct and mutually acknowledged relationship.

Where informational mentors are helpful, relational mentors are critical to our career growth. And my example here, Gene DeLibro. I've talked about him before, but he is my favorite example of relational mentor. I'll get more into our stories later, but he and I have had weekly calls for a decade.

He's well acquainted with my life. He knows my business, my family, et cetera. And he has the context and the relational capital to speak into the decisions I'm making. And more importantly, he's chosen to invest the time in cultivating a relationship with me, the most important part of this type of mentorship.

So we have a genuine relationship that's built on trust and mutual admiration. He is a relational mentor. So the strategy now, this is where it gets a little tricky, because you can't directly cultivate a relational mentor, at least not the way you're thinking of it, right? Any mentor worth having is likely approached by many people who are interested in farming them, essentially, for their wisdom, their talent their connections their money whatever and to further the interests of the apprentice And as a result these people will often be wary of over eager apprentices who want to use them to gain certain outcomes.

And again, it's not wrong. There's always a reason you have or are looking for a mentor. You may need an intro or you may need a job or an invite or whatever. But the fact is that mentors can sense this a mile away.

So you can't go into a mentor relationship with the sole purpose of gleaning that thing. That instead you should save for the informational mentor. The relational mentor must be built on a genuine relationship. And the key here is to find a worthy mentor in a context where you have a relational access point.

And this might come in the form of a job or shared workspace or a neighborhood or a club or something else entirely. But once you've established that starting point with the mentor, resist every urge you have to extract value. Instead, take a page from Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, or at least read a really good summary. And I'm going to give you a quick summary.

There are six ways you can make mentors like you according to Dale. Number one, become genuinely interested in other people. Genuinely interested. For some of you that are less empathetic, this is going to be difficult.

You got to figure it out. Go read the book. Number two, smile. Easy enough.

Number three, remember a person's name is the sweetest and most important sound in any language, right? People want to hear their own names. They want to know that you know their names and they want to hear things in context of their name. Next one, be a good listener.

Encourage others to talk about themselves. Next one, talk in terms of the other person's interest. That's very, very important. You're coming into this again with some outcome probably that you want to achieve by having the relationship.

Okay, that's fine. But don't couch your conversation in terms of that. Instead, couch it in terms of the other person's interests. Finally, make the other person feel important and do it sincerely.

We talked about this even with the informational mentor. Make them know that you value them and that you think they're important. These are really important. These are key ways to develop relational mentors, encourage other people to talk about themselves, talk in terms of their interests.

This is exactly what I did. So our example this week is that I already told you about Gene. He's been an incredible mentor to me, and I value his wisdom and his friendship deeply. But what I didn't tell you is how I came to know him or any of the benefits he's brought me past his wisdom and friendship.

So here's what happened. I met Gene when I was working. He hired me to work for him at an agency as a strategist. And the first day I walked into the agency, I saw how he interacted with the employees and how people respected him.

And I was like, yep, that's my guy. I got to find a way to get closer to him. So I did. We went on to a couple of meals together.

I was asking him probing questions about his life, his career, his family. And I asked him all about his different work histories and the projects he had built over the years. And we began to get close. Then he left Just a few weeks after we had begun working together he was gone So I thought potentially the relationship was over but instead I doubled down I began calling and checking in with him.

Most everyone else at the agency moved on from him when he did, but I continued to follow up and stay in touch. I offered to help him move. I visited him in person before he left town. We kept talking semi-frequently.

And as fate would have it, he hired me again a few years later. Now, at the beginning you're probably thinking, well, if I don't go after the thing that I want, how am I going to get it as a result of the relationship? Well, this is a perfect example. I went into this with not really having any clear idea of what I wanted.

I just knew I wanted to have a relationship with this person. I valued him as a human. And as a result now, he hired me not once, but twice for well paying above market value jobs. And that was just a result of the relationship we had built.

So once again, I pestered him with questions on how he built what he did, his interests outside of work, and the value that drove him to work like he did. And we began to grow closer. This time, I was the one to leave for the agency for greener pastures. And still, I pursued my mentor.

We began monthly calls. They eventually became weekly calls. He offered me an opportunity to be a guest speaker at NYU. He gave me the opportunity to freelance writing gig.

He introduced me to job opportunities over the years. He poured time and energy and value into my life with no clear return to himself. And of course, some of this is just because he's a good person with a good heart. But here's the crazy person part.

I never asked him to do any of these things. I didn't ask for the job. I didn't ask for the intros. I didn't even mention wanting to speak at NYU or wanting to write for the publications.

I didn't have to. I had spent the time and the work, as Gene calls it, on building the relationship to the point where he knew and trusted me. He knows that I would tell him if I wasn't a good fit for something. And I have done this.

In fact, this year, he approached me to the project and wanted to work together on it. I had to say, Hey, I value you. I value our relationship too much to just take money for something that I'm not going to do well. So he knows I value the relationship I have with him above any short term that I returned that I could get from a job or a project.

And the level of mutual respect that's been built over the course of a decade on the back of real interest in who he is, what he values, and how I can help him to get the things he wants in life. In return, he's done the same for me without either of us ever having to ask the other even once. That is a relationship based mentorship. Is it rare?

No doubt. Is it hard? Certainly. And is it worth it?

Absolutely. If you don't have a relational mentor, I can't encourage you enough to begin the process of looking for one. It's a lifelong process and it's a lifelong pursuit, but it will alter the course of your career and your life. And I'm so grateful I found mine.

Listen, I'm so grateful for you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for joining me along this journey. Please, please, please, please, please go like, subscribe, share this newsletter, www.

adamsletter.com. Also check out our friends at GetSupermoon, GetSupermoon.com, or go to my website, click on the latest issue, click on the ad.

That would be great. I appreciate all of you. Thanks for all you've done. Talk to you soon.