I see a lot of people online asking others who’ve demonstrated some mark of mastery in an area to be their mentor. Now a mentor can provide numerous advantages, especially when they’ve been directly involved in the thing you’re pursuing, so this isn’t an attempt to argue otherwise. Let’s face it though, mentors are a privilege that not everyone will have.
Mentorship is a two way street and works best when both parties can benefit from each other. Most accomplished people have very limited time, so what’s in it for them? As a neophyte in that field, the chances that you’ll immediately be beneficial to them are very slim, so your public request for mentorship probably won’t get you anywhere. You might be lucky and they could be feeling philanthropic, so still go ahead and shoot your shot.
However, if you’re looking for another way to go about this mentorship business, I’d say keep learning, and build your capacity while waiting for the magic mentor to show up. Here are some things I recommend
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Find and read a book in that area which is recognized as a seminal work, meaning it gets referenced a lot, experts would be familiar with the details, and even non-experts know of its value, even if they’ve never actually read it before. In my experience these books are usually older and not on any trending list, but if you asked anyone with years of practical experience in the field, they’d be able to point you in the right direction.
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Find a way to start doing the thing. Start by dabbling, then pick up the pace. Teach others what you’ve learned, volunteer if you can afford to, just find a way to do the thing at whatever scale you can, because you need to be able to practice to incorporate all these things you’re learning.
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Do other things to increase your surface area of knowledge in that field. For example, find others who talk about it, take a class, find podcasts, go to events, immerse yourself somehow in a way that the information starts to come to you.
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Identify the experts in that field. Every field has them, and you have to be able to spot them amongst all the influencers. Influencers know enough to drop soundbites that seem knowledgeable enough but ultimately they have very little deep or specific knowledge that’ll be useful to you. Twitter is the one social network where experts congregate, so that would be a good place to start. Find the first person(a creator or referenced on a book or podcast), see who they engage, and slowly collate a grouping of similar people. This way you can easily understand what the leading thinkers in this area are focused on, or excited about.
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Write your thoughts or learnings on the subject. At this point if you’ve been applying yourself, there’ll be things you know for sure that you know, or don’t know. You’re now an informed beginner, with an opinion of some sort. Be sure to publish these thoughts somewhere you can reference easily. They provide tangible proof that you’re doing the work. You could even stumble into an ‘original’ or new line of thinking this way.
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Ask questions. If you ask an interesting enough question about something another person, famous or not, is really into they’ll probably engage you as long as they see it. You can construct a ‘thoughtful’ question based on what you think they’d want to see, but my advice is to be genuine and ask to figure out something you’re really curious about, stuck on understanding, or just doesn’t make sense to you.
If you do most of these things, you’ll be better placed to find that mentor you’ve been seeking for, or might even realize you don’t need one as urgently anymore. The level of your output will increase, and at the very least you’ll be able to ask pointed questions instead of a generic, “please be my mentor”. Who knows, you might even get an offer to mentor you, from someone who’s been following and impressed by your progress.