Leadership
A quote is a sliver of an experience with all the context stripped off. If you want to learn from someone, study how they think, not the magic sentence their ego handed you.
My first real job in business was answering emails in English for a dollar a message, or maybe a leu, I do not remember which. I did not speak English well. School had me among the top students on paper, but I could not string a real conversation together. Google Translate did not exist yet, so I copy-pasted words from Google and tried to stitch them into something coherent. That month I made about two hundred and fifty dollars doing it. I saw it through, and eventually I ended up in charge of operations at that company. That is where I first learned what mentors actually are, and are not.
I would not say I had proper mentors in the classic sense, because everyone had their own work to do, and I think that is how people generally are. But it is good to be a sponge when you are around people with a certain mindset, especially self-made multimillionaires, people who built it themselves rather than inheriting it, because blood and sweat cannot be bought, that part you make yourself. The point of being a sponge is to understand their principles of operation, because you will never be able to take everything they do and apply it to yourself. It will not work, since the context of your life is different. But when you do not know a path, you can borrow an existing formula of thinking from a mentor you have seen up close and trust.
The warning is this. If you try to do that with people from the internet whom you do not know personally, it probably will not work, because there are so many hidden substrates beneath the quotes you see from successful people. A quote is only a fragment of what they actually experienced. We love grand, sweeping quotes that deliver some enormous conclusion, but most of that is noise. To understand a person, you need to see them in their environment.
Let me give you a real one. Another man I would loosely call a mentor has a castle in Scotland, an interesting character, and in the advertising he did for the seminars he runs there every year, he said he made fifty million dollars in his first year of business. If you take that at face value, you think, wow, fifty million, this is the man to work with. And he is. But when we got there, he told us the rest. Yes, I made fifty million dollars in my first year, but do you know what the profit was? Zero. So you think, fifty million, incredible, and the truth is he made no profit that first year. Now, if you can convince someone to hand you fifty million to intermediate something and you keep almost none of it, you walk away with the experience and the taste of big money, which is a completely different thing from hearing a story that someone made fifty million dollars. Not everything is what it seems.
Hold that story next to the headline it came from, because the gap between them is the whole lesson. The headline is fifty million dollars in year one. The reality is fifty million in revenue, zero in profit, and an education in moving large sums that most people never get. Both are true. But the headline is the version the ego puts on the advertisement, and the reality is the version you only get by being in the room. If you had built your strategy on the headline, you would have chased revenue and ignored profit, and learned the wrong lesson from a man who was actually trying to teach you the right one. That is what quotes do. They give you the number without the footnote, and the footnote is where the truth lives.
This is why I do not fully trust self-promotion, the summits and conferences where people flower themselves up and present ideas as if they were deities. Nobody is a deity. Luck shows up in these stories far more than the ego wants to admit. Even a great copywriter is great partly because they reached notable performance across many successful campaigns, but somewhere in there, there was probably some luck too. There might have been science, or art, or talent, but there might also have been luck. And if it were truly pure genius, a constant genius, then that person could tell you exactly how to build the best marketing campaign in the world. But they cannot. What they can give you are their conclusions, their epiphanies, their breakthroughs. What they usually will not give you are the thinking algorithms underneath.
And the thinking algorithms are the only part that matters to you. As a beginner in a field, you do not need the magic words, the this is how it is done, if copywriting is emotion then copywriting comes from the soul. That means nothing to you. Real talent, real expertise, real progress, all of it is details. Details about how a specific thing actually works. So be very careful when you choose your mentors, and even more careful when you listen to them, because they often do not have time to say much, and when they do, they will not go into the details, and they will drop a magic quote you then interpret in a way that may be wrong. Not wrong for the general situation, but wrong for the algorithms that actually produced that quote or that achievement.
Notice too that even the giants we admire built with other people. Steve Jobs had an eye for design and simplicity and refinement, but he also had an eye for talent, for finding people who could create a different kind of phone, a different kind of tablet, or the very idea of a tablet. The inventions, the innovations, were often made with his support by other people. You see the surface. You do not see the substrates. And you cannot fully reconstruct the substrates even from a biography, because part of every biography is censored, whether the author admits it or not, because the human ego intervenes there too.
So how should you actually choose a mentor? Look around you and see who and where can bring you value. It does not have to be someone in giant business. If you define success as money, that does not mean you should go find the biggest millionaire and talk to him constantly. That is not how it works. It means you should look at what you actually need first, and go find that expertise. My first true mentor was not the owner of the company, it was the marketing person, because marketing was what I needed to learn at the start. When you want to build something and reach some degree of success, your goal is not to go as an owner to the greatest business owner to be taught. Your goal is to see what you need first, and seek that expertise. Because you need that expertise, not a lecture on how to build a business. And around that expertise, you will build and learn how to run a business as you go. When you have a good product that sells, the rest is learned on the move. The business itself gets built on the move.
That reframing changes who you look up to. Most people chase the most impressive person they can find, the biggest name, the largest company, and then wonder why the relationship gives them nothing. It gives them nothing because they went looking for status instead of the specific expertise they actually needed. The biggest business owner cannot teach you copywriting if what is holding you back is copywriting. The unglamorous specialist who is genuinely excellent at the one thing you need is worth ten famous generalists. Find the person who is the source for the exact skill blocking you, not the person whose name would impress your friends.
There is one more thing about following a mentor's thinking algorithms, and it is the most important. You have to expect that at some point you will disagree with them. When I tell you something, I will not give you every detail every time, sometimes because I have no time, and sometimes because I want you to reach the conclusion yourself. And when what I say does not sit well with you, when I seem harsh or hard to understand, unless it is something plainly unethical, my suggestion is to hold off on judging, or judge only in order to understand, and try to work out why I said it. If you cannot find a conclusion then, one based not only on your own judgment but on what I actually said, leave it a while and understand it after the thing happens and you have done it. Because often, going through an experience, we realize we may need to be more aggressive in business. Aggressive not in an animalistic way, but in the sense of forcing change, sometimes at an alarming speed, because it is necessary, especially when we feel we are stagnating, when we hit a financial wall and feel flat on the ground. Do we get up? We do not even stop to brush off the dust. We move forward and force change, without fear.
And you should also learn to push back, elegantly. Say, I think it can be done this way. When you do that, I will either say let me think about it, or, most of the time, I will say explain why. And you will need to be well trained to explain in detail why, because if you have only an intuition that it should be done this way, that is fine, but my intuition comes after many experiences and yours does not yet, even if you happen to be right. That does not mean you will be ignored. If what you say resonates with me, a little light goes on, my intuition says yes, you are right, and we do it your way. That is why communication between people should stay open, receptive to what others say, even though, as a business owner, you will not always be able to do that with your employees. Sometimes you have to take the shortcut and say we do it this way because I say so, without much explanation. That happens because you are the one with the original vision, and if you are not the one with the original vision, you should not be doing that, because it means the business no longer belongs to you.
The disagreement, handled well, is where the real learning happens, which is why obeying a mentor blindly is as useless as ignoring one. If you agree with everything they say, you are treating them as an oracle, and oracles do not teach you to think, they teach you to depend. The value is in the friction, in being told something that does not sit right, sitting with it instead of rejecting it, and either understanding it later or earning the right to disagree by explaining, in detail, why. A mentor who cannot be questioned is a cult leader. A mentor you never question is a crutch. The relationship works only when you take their thinking seriously enough to argue with it.
So do not collect quotes. Collect people you can see up close, in their environment, with their substrates showing. Study how they think, not the polished sentence their ego handed the audience. Expect to disagree, and treat the disagreement as a place to learn rather than a fight to win. And remember that the fifty-million-dollar headline almost always has a zero-profit footnote that nobody puts on the slide.