My Three Mentors
The Amplified Impact Podcast
August 2nd, 2023
I want to dive into a topic we hear a lot about…mentorship.
Successful people everywhere talk about how crucial mentors have been in their journey, and that’s no exaggeration.
But what’s interesting is that many folks, especially those starting out, often have a skewed expectation of what a mentorship really entails.
This leads them to ask that dreaded question, “Will you be my mentor?”
Here’s the deal…mentorship isn’t necessarily about sitting down for structured meetings or formal coaching.
It’s about gaining wisdom and insights from experienced individuals who inspire you. And guess what?
You don’t always need a personal relationship with them.
You can even have mentors you’ve never met in person.
The abundance of information available today through books, podcasts, blogs, and videos allows us to consume insights from the greatest minds out there.
And it’s all ripe for the taking, you just have to take the first step.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“A mentor is really more of a high level person who is able to give the high level strategic advice that you can then figure out how to tactically apply to your life.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino [00:00:00]:
One of the things we talk a lot about on this podcast and you hear it all over the internet when you, when you listen to like, hyper successful people is that over and over and over again, they talk about the, the role that mentorship has played in their, their journey. And what I find really interesting about this is a lot of people, depending on where you are in your journey and what your experience level is, having had mentors, I find that a lot of people kind of have a skewed expectation of what the mentor mentee relationship really looks like. And this leads then to people who maybe are earlier on the journey. If you’re younger or you’re just finally stepping into your greatness and you’re starting to pursue some of these things that you’re hearing other people talk about, which is, like, masterminds and mentorship and coaching all these things, well, it leads to people reaching out and asking one of the worst questions you can ask somebody, which is, will you be my mentor? Right? We’ve talked in a previous podcast episode about why this is a really bad question. It’s a really bad way to actually get somebody to mentor you. But if you’re listening to this, you’re like, okay, well, what do I do then? How do I get a mentor? Because it’s a real chicken and an egg type of problem. You’re kind of like in this position where you don’t really have much to offer the mentor, right? Like you’re new and fledgling and all you have is gusto and dreams and so you don’t really have anything of tangible benefit in a lot of cases, to be able to offer somebody who’s further along on the path than you to make them want to turn around and help you along. Now you could pay them.
Anthony Vicino [00:01:34]:
That’s a kind of a coaching relationship, but I wouldn’t call that a mentor. A mentor is really more of a high level person who is able to give the high level strategic advice that you can then figure out how to tactically apply to your life. And I think one of the common misconceptions that people have around mentors is that you hear somebody, if I say I was sitting down with my mentor, my mentor said this thing to me once, and it really resonated. That gives this image that we’re sitting down once a week with our mentor and having a conversation and unpacking things in a very deliberate, specific way. And that’s really never been the case, at least for me. And in a lot of the conversations I’ve had with other successful people, that’s not really the way that their mentorship relationship really unfolds either. And when I think about my relationship with people who I would consider mentees, it’s not that way either. It’s not a formalized process.
Anthony Vicino [00:02:31]:
We’re not really sitting down and troubleshooting things on a consistent basis. What it is in a lot of cases, if we do have a personal relationship, it’s much more in passing, like a quick text or a quick phone call or quick meetup for coffee. And some conversation occurs around a topic that you then go, that’s a light bulb moment that I can apply over here. Or more commonly, the way that I really think about mentors isn’t that I have to know the person personally, like, that we don’t actually sit down and that they are actually giving me feedback on my life. No, the way that I really think about mentorship is who is a person that I am consuming information from on a consistent basis, whose frameworks and viewpoints of the world is something that is having a measurable effect on how I move through the world. And when you look at it through that lens, it’s less about, do I need to have you actually responding to my text messages? And more, how do I get inside your brain, this person, to see how they see the world, to start adopting their frameworks. And there has never really been a better time in the history of humanity to be able to do this right. We have access to so much information these days that between books or podcasts or blog articles or tweets or YouTube videos, there’s a library, a very deep amount of information out there, pretty much on every person you could ever want to have as your mentor, right? Like, if you wanted Warren Buffett to be your mentor, well, go start by reading all of his mentors books.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:04]:
Benjamin Graham. Go read The Intelligent Investor. Right. And then go read every investor memo that Warren Buffett has put out over the last 30, 40, whatever, many years that are all available on their website. And then go read his autobiography. Then go listen to his podcast, and then go listen to the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meetings. You can consume so much information from that person, and it’s like a mentorship. And so what I want to share with you today are three of the mentors that have had the most profound effect on my life, who I’ve never actually met.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:39]:
Let me just double check this. Yep. I’ve never met these guys. So I got three here I want to share with you. Warren Buffett, that’s one, but he’s not one of the three I’m going to mention. Okay, so the first guy is Naval Ravicant. I first learned about Naval maybe back in 2018. So this was probably I think this was before he went on the Tim Ferriss podcast and then the Joe Rogan podcast.
Anthony Vicino [00:05:00]:
Actually, maybe it wasn’t before he went on Tim Ferriss, but this was before he really exploded into the public consciousness. He was very famous within the tech circles of startup culture because he had started a company called Angel List, which made investing in syndicated startup funds very easy. But the thing that I find so interesting about Naval is not his business acumen per se, but it’s the intersection between life, philosophy, wisdom and entrepreneurship. And he does it in a way that is, I think, more deeply profound than the majority of thinkers out there. And that’s a high bar to cross, because in that space of philosophy, entrepreneur, there’s a lot of really brilliant people. As you escalate through those levels, people spend they have the capacity to think more deeply on things. They play at a different level. And so for him to be at the top of the top is a testament to just how brilliant I think he is.
Anthony Vicino [00:06:00]:
He has so many great podcasts. I would recommend you go listen to the Joe Rogan podcast he did. He’s done a couple with Tim Ferriss. He had his own podcast called Naval, where he unpacked a Tweet storm that he did that went super viral called how to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky. And in that, he talks about how to make money, but more importantly, he talks about the true wealth of life, which is beyond money, beyond currency, and how to get that. There was a book that came out a couple of years ago by Eric Jorgensen, which is The Almanac of Naval Ravikant. And that’s a mandatory reading where he just went through, took all the speeches, all the podcasts, all the blog articles that Naval had written, put them into one place, so it’s easily consumed. I think that is one of the most information dense books out there, page for page, it’s fantastic.
Anthony Vicino [00:06:48]:
Very easy read as well. So Naval Ravkant is definitely one of my mentors. Number two is Nicholas Naseem Taleb, who wrote books like Anti Fragile, the Black Swan Skin in the game Procrusty’s Bed. Taleb is another one of those really deep, profound thinkers. I remember reading Anti Fragile for the first time, and this was at a point in my career where I felt like I was pretty well read. I had read many, many hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books, and yet the concepts that he was sharing were so original and so from a perspective outside of my experience that I was just in awe. Like, there’s very few books anymore. That just truly put me in awe where I’m like, holy crap, I’ve never thought about things in this way from this angle.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:43]:
And he does that consistently in all his books. And I truly believe that his book, Anti Fragile is probably my favorite book besides Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. It’s fantastic. It’s just really, really good. Now, Nicholas is kind of a crazy coot. He’s also kind of fiery and gets into a lot of fights with people. And he has a lot of strongly held opinions that I don’t necessarily agree with. But the way that he thinks through things and comes at them from such a holistic and original perspective is something that I aspire to.
Anthony Vicino [00:08:15]:
And I get a lot of feedback that makes me very proud from listeners and subscribers to the YouTube channel about how a lot of times we’re presenting things that you already know, but trying to do it in a new novel way from angle that nobody had really considered before. So trying to connect maybe ideas from physics into the idea of making money. And a lot of that was really inspired by Taleb and his ability to take a concept and completely turn it on its face by introducing new lenses through which to look at this problem. So he is definitely a mentor of mine. And in more recent years, we got to give our boy Alex Hermosi some credit here, because I look up to him. He’s younger than me, but he has a wisdom far beyond his years. And he is just a really deep original thinker as well. But even more than just being an original thinker, I think he’s just a great communicator.
Anthony Vicino [00:09:11]:
And I think that’s something that I hold in high esteem because I think communicating is one of the highest value skills. And you’ll notice with Naseem, with Naval, with Alex, they’re all amazing communicators, not just brilliant people, they’re great communicators, great writers, great speakers. And I wrote about this a while ago, is that you can be the most brilliant person in the world, but if you cannot communicate the ideas inside of your head to the audience in a clear, concise, compelling way, people are going to think that you’re stupid. It doesn’t matter. You could be literally the smartest person in the world, but if you can’t communicate it, there’s going to be a gap between what you actually know and your ability to positively impact the people that are listening. And so it’s not enough to be brilliant, you have to be a good communicator. And that’s something that I take away from these three guys again and again and again is it’s just not enough to be brilliant, to be original, you also have to be a great communicator. And so those are three of the mentors that have had the biggest impact on my life over the last decade.
Anthony Vicino [00:10:12]:
Alex had probably been following him maybe since 2019, so a little bit before he really came on the scene in 2020 and really started blowing up Naval, I think I was a little bit ahead of the curve with him. Taleb, I was late to the game on that one. He had already written like his fifth book by the time I stumbled on Antifragile, and I was like, holy crap, where have you been my entire life? But these three highly recommend them. They will change your life. So those are three of my mentors. I’m curious, who are some of yours? Let me know. Go find me on Twitter at Anthony Vasino. I guess it’s X now.
Anthony Vicino [00:10:43]:
They just rebranded. You can find me on Instagram. The Anthony, Vasino or LinkedIn. Shoot me a DM, let me know. Who are some of your mentors, who are some of the people that you look up to or consume information on from a consistent basis. And I would love to go check them out and learn from them as well. So thanks, as always, for being here, guys. I’ll catch you back here tomorrow.
Anthony Vicino [00:11:02]:
Same time, same place. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.
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