Books as Mentors

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Since I have recently been asked to serve in two new board leadership positions, I have decided to brush up on my leadership skills. I have starting reading John Maxwell’s The 21 Most Powerful Minutes in a Leader’s Day which has a series of daily lessons and thoughts on leadership. On the second day, the thought for the day talks about mentors.

It has long been advised to anyone who wishes to be successful that having a mentor was critical. Well, my experience has been that having a mentor is also very much a luxury. With the globalization of business and increasing demands on everyone’s time, it is becoming increasing difficult for everyone who desires a mentor to find one who is willing and able to spend the amount of time historically invested in mentoring to ensure the success of the next generation. Additionally, the more successful one becomes, the fewer the number of people there are that are more senior and experienced. Does this mean that mentoring is only available to the few lucky ones and that it stops once a certain level of achievement has been reached? Most certainly not.

Fortunately, successful people have been sharing their experiences, both their failures and successes, through books for years. If used correctly, these books can provide a wide range of mentors on any area of your professional and personal life you could possibly imagine. The world’s most successful people in business, finance, real estate, marketing, sales, politics, families, religion, sports, cooking, child rearing, personal development, public speaking, etc., etc., etc., have given us access to all of their decades of learning. This is a valuable treasure that we should learn to mine.

The obvious first step is to become a prolific reader. Yet that is not enough. We have to spend time determining what portions of the materials apply to us and how we intend to apply the learnings. Just as it doesn’t make much sense to have a live mentor with whom you meet on a regular basis only to ignore everything they say, it doesn’t make much sense to spend time reading the books filled with a much wider range of information that could possible be provided by one individual only to ignore it.

The success of time spent with mentors, whether live or via the written word, is measured by the impact that it has on your life. Take the extra steps to ensure you get and adequate return on your time.

Have a powerful day!

Cecilia