Recruit virtual mentors
I don’t know most of my mentors. Instead, I digitally stalk them, read everything they say and watch all their interviews and talks.
This has been decisive for me in that learning from these people has proven to be incredibly fruitful in terms of my own company’s revenue.
To recruit a virtual mentor, first find someone whose success and ideas you respect. Second, find literally everything that they’ve written. Third, find everything in video that they’ve done. Finally, find all of their products or apps or books and get them too. Once you’ve consumed everything that they’ve produced, setup a google alert for them and read anything new as it comes out.
One of the best ways to grow is to take things that your mentor does and apply them to your own company.
As an example, here are mine over the last few years. As you can see, they change based on what I’m currently doing.
Current (Focused on page flow, ‘golden mechanics’, and business):
Pincus
Past (Focused on testing and clarity):
Marissa Mayer
Eric Ries (Before he switched to self-marketing-mode)
Andrew Chen
Ryan Singer + Jason
A year ago (Focused on programming):
DHH (See “A little less hokus pokus“)
Yehuda (See “Writing code that doesn’t suck”)
Ilya Grigorik (w/r/t doing interesting stuff w/ ruby)
Norvig
pg
February 01, 2010

