945 Become an Accidental Apprentice

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You talk about accidental apprenticeship. What does that exactly mean?

So, Louis, you're a big fan of mentors and coaches. Do you just have one mentor?

I probably have about a hundred mentors.

Yeah.

And I have people that have mentored me that they don't even know they mentored me.

Yeah, I love that.

You know, and I learned, learn from people online. I learned from people just, you know, following them on Instagram. Even I learned how they're doing what they're doing. You know, I learned, I learned salsa dancing from a couple. I don't even know their name from YouTube videos on back in 2006 or seven. So, yeah, I learned from everyone.

Yeah, I think that's an, I think that's what an accidental apprenticeship is. I think a lot of us, when we talk about mentoring, at least when I heard this term, especially in my early twenties, I was like, okay, I need a mentor. I need a guide. I need Obi-Wan Kenobi to come find me and raise me up to be this mighty man. And after burning through two or three relationships, I just got really disappointed. I thought, Man, where's my mentor? Where's the guy that's gonna help me become a man? It's really what I wanted. And all along the way, I was sort of ignoring all these other people in my life that were influencing me. going, yeah, yeah, yeah, but we're not, that's not my mentor. I don't meet with him, you know, her for coffee every week and we talk about my life. And, you know, fast forward several years and I look back and I go, wow, I learned this and this and this from all these different people that kind of just showed up in my life at the right time. And when I was, you know, not being an idiot, I acknowledged that I could learn from this person and really try to engage in the relationship. One of the things that surprised me when I was interviewing all these people, and it helped me make more sense of my own story was that there was no one person that, you know, kind of like broke that person's career. It was a bunch of people coming together, even when everybody sort of like seemingly rejected them. Like for example, Ginny Pong, who has this TEDx video about how she found her calling to become a doula, a birth coach in Singapore. And she found that through this painful experience of, you know, having a baby out of wedlock, her parents kicking her out of the house 'cause she didn't wanna have an abortion, she wanted to have the baby, her boyfriend, basically disowning her and everybody that loved her just kind of slammed their doors on her face. So she, when you look at her story, you go, this looks like a self-made woman. And yet when we dug deeper, she said, well, this person helped me and this person helped me and this person helped me. And so even when we think you're doing it all on your own, you're not. An accidental apprenticeship, I think, is really about not going and finding the perfect mentor. It's about acknowledging the people around you right now and how you can get the most out of them. And a great example of this is Steve Jobs, who went to Reed College, couldn't afford it, so he dropped out. Then he started auditing classes. One of those classes was a calligraphy class, which he said was instrumental in, you know, the beautiful typography with the first Mac. He went and worked at Atari and, you know, used his friendship with Steve Wozniak to get a job, ended up going to India. And all of these things could have just been random experiences. But if you read Jobs' story, you see that there's an intentionality that wherever he's going, he's soaking up every lesson that he can learn from every relationship around him. And he's not going, man, I wish I would have graduated college or man, I wish Hewlett-Packard would have hired me. He's just using whatever's around him to kind of create his own education so that he can do the thing that he wants to do and he's not even quite sure what it is. I mean, I think it's okay to not know, why am I learning from this person? And why do I want to talk to this guy down the street and just kind of pick his brain on something? And then, you know, a few years later, you realize, wow, these people were instrumental in me becoming the person that I am today. And so, I wish that we had apprenticeships like they did in the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the Renaissance. It doesn't work that way. And if you are trying to seek out some special mentor that's going to be able to meet with you all the time, that's going to be a really hard road to walk. And I actually don't think it's the best way to learn. I think the best way to do it is the way that you're doing it, Louis, cobbling together a bunch of relationships, some of which are people that actually know you and some you just know them. But using every opportunity that you have to intentionally engage in lessons that you can learn from watching other people, listening to them, and applying it to your own journey.

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