By Larry Chiang<\/p>\n
I study mentorship.<\/p>\n
When a mentor is assigned, the mentee mentor dynamic is short-circuited. In school settings the mentor is assigned. Those mentors are often under appreciated by mentees.<\/p>\n
In business, I see this also. Many startup incubators have entire pools of assigned mentors that are under utilized.<\/p>\n
“When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”<\/p>\n
In the concept of assigned mentorship, the student isn’t quite ready. (Or rebellious) Thus, the learning dynamic is short circuited. I messed up my mentor relationship with Augie Garrido. He is a legendary baseball coach at UT. (I was rebellious) I did not mess up my mentor relationship post Augie Garrido: Mark McCormack.<\/p>\n
Here are ideas to leverage the ‘assigned mentor’ pattern:<\/p>\n
-1- Make the student pay a price for access<\/p>\n
Students that pay part of their tuition do better in school. Compensate a student to be mentored and you get disastrous results.<\/p>\n
In the mentee mentor dynamic, the mentee must be the one “selling” themselves as ready for mentorship. It brings me to my next insight<\/p>\n
-2- The mentee should “pay” for access<\/p>\n
Let’s say you are a VC and your kid wants to learn to be a conductor\/composer. You as a VC could pay 100% of the price. But then your child as the mentee would get short-circuited. Instead, as a VC parent, you should teach your child to reach out via email themselves.<\/p>\n
Thus, the ‘price’ here is the work of drafting an email, researching the email and the time to send the email.<\/p>\n
VC is venture capital.<\/p>\n
The VC I’m referring to is David Hornik.<\/p>\n
DISCLOSURE: I pitched Noah Hornik to co-found a fund with me called July Capital. Get it?! It’s before August :-I<\/p>\n
My last point in leveraging Assigned Mentors<\/p>\n
-3- Pretend you paid thousands to get your mentor.<\/p>\n
Have the mentee write on a notecard: “ok, I paid Larry Chiang 15k for this class. Now let’s get that money back”.<\/p>\n
I mean if you paid tuition at that Top 50 engineering school, that’s true. Keep a journal documenting when you get that return on your $15k.<\/p>\n
If you don’t think you get your $15k back, you won’t.<\/p>\n
If you don’t think it’s worth 15k, you’re right.<\/p>\n
If you think you can get your $15k back with one really good Gua Gua Guacamole recipe executed in all its technicolor detail, you’re right.<\/p>\n
If you think you can get your $15k back by value addedly hijacking VentureBeat’s MobileBeat*, you’re right.<\/p>\n
If you think you can get your $15k back by value addedly hijacking DemoMobile’s** April 17 conference at Mission Bay center, you’re right.<\/p>\n
If you think you can get your $15k back by value addedly hijacking TechCrunch’s August Capital*** to launch your ENGR145 project, you’re right.<\/p>\n
-4- Pretend you paid $10.oo.<\/p>\n
Its scale. The dynamic is the same. In fact, the human brain knows no difference between getting ripped off $15k or 10 bucks. The brain just sees money in jeopardy.<\/p>\n
-5- Free books versus 95% subsidized book.<\/p>\n
If you want that baseball glove, you have to pay 15%. I know you’re my 7 year old nephew. If you want that baseball book, you are gonna have to pay 5%.<\/p>\n
If you want to attend baseball camp eight summers from now with Augie Garrido (when you’re 15), you better start saving up buddy.<\/p>\n
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