Ask HN: Tips on finding mentors?
The best tip I&#x27;ve followed is &quot;When the student is ready, the master will come&quot;.<p>Mentors are abundant. Most people out there can teach something and are learning something. Like dating, most of those people are not the right fit. And yet there&#x27;s so many that you&#x27;re likely to have a few in your life without trying to find one, but searching helps. There&#x27;s always a level above you but often that level is invisible to you if you don&#x27;t qualify.<p>You need skill in that the student can absorb the mentor&#x27;s lessons. If you&#x27;re too far below the skill level, the mentor looks like an idiot. Their advice can run contrast to &quot;common wisdom&quot;. 90% of people are in the bottom 90%. You have to be at a high enough level that you can see the flaws in common advice.<p>You have to be open to be proven wrong. The philosopher al-Ghazali used to say that you have all the advice you need. Why aren&#x27;t you following it? Why does the advice taste bitter? To many people, knowledge is something you use to get something - work, promotions, recognition, validation. But that makes it difficult to learn. Knowledge is a tool to be used. If you&#x27;re not using it, chances are you fear disproving what you know.<p>Now a lot of potential mentors are <i>happy</i> to teach. Partly because it&#x27;s lonely. They want someone who understands them, and there&#x27;s an ego boost to impressing someone. They want to bounce ideas off someone on the path, especially younger people who often see things from a different perspective. And sometimes there&#x27;s a pragmatic use of an apprenticeship. One of my favorite mentor-apprentice relationships was reverse engineering a game, where the apprentice found me tons of data and I taught him how to process it.<p>But I&#x27;d still say the simplest route is improving yourself. Apply all of the advice you&#x27;ve been given, until you know what works and what doesn&#x27;t. Which would often make the right mentor visible and attract their attention.