Mentors and Protégés

By Ho’okani Higa

  In the world of business I have never seen anyone that is born with the knowledge they need to succeed.  Knowledge comes with research, schooling and experience.  In this article I want to take a look at one of the ways one can get some of the experience needed to succeed in whatever endeavor you take on – the mentor-protégé relationship.

  Before we go any further, let’s take a look at the definitions of mentor and protégé.  Mentor is defined as a trusted counselor or guide.  Protégé is defined as one who is protected or trained or whose career is furthered by a person of experience, prominence, or influence.

  In my opinion, one of the best ways to gain the experience to succeed in something is to hang out with and absorb the knowledge from someone who has been there and done that.  In other words, find someone who has the knowledge and experience you seek and become their protégé.

  This doesn’t necessarily mean going out and hanging out with this person 24-7, shadowing whatever they do.  That could get pretty irritating for that person.  An ideal mentor-protégé relationship involves the mentor guiding and training the protégé to perform the tasks at hand through personal contact in which there is a definite relationship.

  As an example, in the U.S. Department of Defense incentives are given to large Government contractors to set up mentor-protégé agreements with small-disadvantaged businesses to help them get started and succeed in the world of Government contracting.  These are actual written agreements between the large and small business outlining what the goals are for that agreement.

  For our purposes, we probably wouldn’t go so far as to produce written agreements between a ‘guru’ (mentor) and ‘newbie’ (protégé) and more than likely, the ‘guru’ and ‘newbie’ will never actually meet face to face.  The important thing is that the ‘newbie’ finds those whose success he/she admires and then learns from their actions.

  We see a lot of these internet marketing training subscription sites and ebooks that are intended to teach the marketing ‘newbie’ how to do business on the internet.  You could say that the site owner or author is the mentor and all the subscribers are protégés.  Some of these sites and ebooks are great and give you really useful and practical information but there are some that are pure junk.  If you would like to see what my recommendation is then go to http://www.inet-homebiz.com/imc.

  If you are looking for a mentor, just take a look around the internet and you’ll easily see who the successful people are.  Forums are also a great place to gather knowledge from those who have been through the trenches.  One of the greatest forums is the Internet Warrior forum but you can only gain access a few different ways.  Here are a couple of ways to get in.  http://www.inet-homebiz.com/h4p or http://www.inet-homebiz.com/warrior

  Here is one piece of advise if decide to hook up with a mentor.  Your mentor should not be your good friend.  A mentor must have the ability to give you un-biased criticism; a good friend may not be able to do that.

Ho’okani Higa http://www.inet-homebiz.com/ics Give Me Just 5 Days and I'll Show You How To Solve All Of Your Product Creation Problems Fast and Forever!

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