Book Ponder

In his book Mastery, Robert Greene talks about the importance of having a mentor when starting your career. A mentor can guide you on the mistakes to avoid and tasks to focus on to succeed in your apprenticeship.

Books Are Temporary Mentors

Similarly, if your circumstances limit your contacts, books can serve as temporary mentors, as The Improvement of the Mind did for Faraday. In such a case you will want to convert such books and writers into living mentors as much as possible. You personalize their voice, interact with the material, taking notes or writing in the margins. You analyze what they write and try to make it come alive__ the spirit and not just the letter of their work.

Robert Greene

Unfortunately, the laws of human nature make us wary whether our mentor is really trying to help us or wants to keep us under their wing and make sure we never pass them up. In other circumstances individuals do not have the luxury of having a mentor, this is when looking to the past can guide us. Robert tells us that books can serve as our temporary mentors, A book contains knowledge that took someone a lifetime to acquire. It is packaged nicely for us to learn from and use as a guide in our careers. Every career in the world has a success story someone put into a book, use it as your mentor when no one else is around to guide you.