7 Keys to The Mentee Mentorship Dynamic

Stanford CALIF.

By Larry Chiang

When you’re on the farm, mentors and keynote speakers come to campus as often as visiting Pac12 sports teams. VIP speakers come so often that you could be sitting in a packed room and not know THIS IS LARRY CHIANG speaking.

Hahaa, the scene from The Social Network Facebook Movie where they do not know it’s Bill Gates delivering a keynote.

Here are 10 aspects to the mentor mentee dynamic that will help you climb:

-1- Prominent ways to prime the mentorship pump

Do the work.

Homework entails reading every scrap of content your potential mentor has pushed out. Reading gets you a mentor mentee mind meld. Doing the prep work means to Preview, Question, Read, Summarize and Test yourself prior to the real test of meeting your mentor face to face.

PQRST [Preview, Question, Read, Summarize and Test] helps prime the mentee pump because you are going to succeed with or without direct mentor involvement. You’re extrapolating prior to a face to face. You’re watching videos of what a potential mentor said and asking intelligent questions.

Super majority of Stanford engineers do NOT google the speaker prior to the Entrepreneur Thought Leader preso. Hyper majority of Stanford Engineering 145 students do not cold email a speaker prior to their speaking.

Example of why I rose so fast in the Stanford Engineering and Entrepreneurship community

If hustling is not your jam…,

-2- Follow up with a speaker after a keynote using an email or In Real World mail

5% of the audience follows up. 95% just does nothing.

-3- Mentor “Payment” is not using normal currency.

Your mentor needs compensation or else why do you get mindshare! But you can’t “pay” them the way you want to get paid. You must gift them gifts that they want…

What gift do you give for the person who has a condo in a state that they never visit and never AirBnb out?!

Mentors want to be paid via

– Public gratitude.

– Token gifts to their puppy or children

– A lanyard with sentimental value at a conference they are going to speak at (versus the conference lanyard that everyone is sporting)

– Paper mail that says ‘thx!’

And this transitions nicely to my next point

-4- Communicate to your mentor in the channel they most want to utilize.

Mentees can be stubborn about en vogue ways to interacting with your mentor. If your mentor wants you to facsimile them, you fax them. If your mentor wants you to send smoke signals, get a campfire going.

If you’ve never used twitter because you do not feel validated on social media, your mentor may want to use twitter anyway.

Communicating via a fax machine with Mark McCormack was my sole use of a facsimile machine. Twitter may seem anachronistic but think of it as solo-purpose-messaging-app-that-documents-progress-from-zero-To-hero. All those stacks of old faxes became the basis for my version of What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School

Maybe your ascent, stratospheric rise and springboard can be documented on twitter?

-5- Channels makes me think of the concept of mentor mentee messaging ratios.

It’s not one to one.

Messaging your friends or people you date is one-to-one. Messaging your mentor is many messages from you to maybe one back from your mentor.

-6- Who’s Your Daddy!?

As a man, if you’ve a messed up relationship with your father, your likelihood of getting a mentor is verrrrry low

Prior mentors and your personal history of mentors indicates how likely you are to get a superstar mentor.

Problem: If your father was absentee, you are in a mentor deficit situation.

SOLUTION: Get a fake mentor that you say good things about even though they did not mentor you personally.

This leads to the next counterintuitive social dynamic…

-7- When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

The supermajority of people are not ready for a mentor. I am gonna guess that the reason for this disconnect is that they think tiny behaviors will never add up

-8- Leverage lack of structure

In school, you get assigned a great mentor that you did not pick and that you did not have to personally select and pay for. Not paying for a mentor is the hardest transition from Stanford to the real world.

Do not complain about the lack of structure, instead leverage it. This is the street smart way to leverage the clusterfark that is ‘mentorship-outside-Of-The-94305’

-8a- Using the media to pay your mentor

It used to be you had to get your mentors book back on to the New York Times bestseller list 😂

Now, you can just write up a WordPress or medium blog post thanking your mentor. You can cite and source specific examples.

An example of this is when I regurgitated a Mark McCormack Signature Business Recipe by branding it #GuaGuaGuacamole recipes #1 – #32.

-8b- Getting away from your starter mentor to your superstar mentor

Your starter mentor starts you up.

This initial mentor gets you ready to get mentored by a Larry Chiang quality mentor. Say something good about your last mentor and this will woo me into mentoring you. If you wanna make me your starter mentor, say something good about my mentor, Mark McCormack, on twitter.

-8c- Mentor leveling up

Here are the mentor levels

– Superstar mentors

– Junior mentors

– Cohort mentors

– Default mentors.

our relationship where I am your starter mentor is a blended version of cohort-junior-and-superstar. “It’s complicated” explains how I am underneath you and above you while also obviously being a celebrity as the *Third Institution Of Silicon Valley*. To encapsulate the complexity of the triumvirate of mentorship, here is a selfie no self of street smart optometry school mentorship with some Cal Optometry graduates who have matriculated to running their own optometry office

In short, the complexity of how I encapsulate mentorship, here is a selfie no self of baseball mentorship with some Stanford engineering graduates some who have matriculated to the MLB