Remember that good advice is harder to find than money...
My title is actually a quote from Penelope Trunk.
You can find it as item number four in her post entitled, "Get your next mentor by being slightly annoying."
Seriously... that's really the title... I'm not being facetious here... With a title like that how could you not read it? I was tempted the moment I saw the link. You have to admit that's a brilliant bit of word mastery that tickles the curiosity and makes one really tempted to take the bait.
Come on... you know you want to click that career advice link (LOL)
Turns out to be really good business advice because if you read my blog you know how annoying I can get (and become). Everything is a two way street with me and being a blunt person means I am liable to say just about anything. In this case, think of it as an exercise in equal opportunity shenanigans for the uninitiated (LOL). ;-)
In sum and substance here's some of what I learned today while lunching in Starbucks giggling over PT's get a mentor advice. I quote:
1. Don’t be discouraged by lack of response.
2. Find the person’s weakness, so you know where you can help him.
3. Be real. No one wants to mentor someone who is perfect.
4. Remember that good advice is harder to find than money.
5. In the end, you want the mentor to care about you as a person.
If the brief outline catches your eye then click the above link and go read her post to find out all the interesting stories you're missing under those headers.
Penelope also has a related post entitled, "Job hunt tip: The mentor matters more than the company," that's an excellent read. She talks about her writing mentor Jim and has inspired me to high-jack poor Emelia to test a few of my book chapters on before I e-mail my editor.
Penelope's advice may help some of you with your blogging habits as well. I'll leave you with a teaser quote to ponder before I go to Brooklyn on my photography session with Emmy:
"Read something you wrote out loud to a friend. If it's bad, you'll feel right away that boredom has overcome the room. If you have even one flat sentence, you hear it when you read it out loud. The first time Jim heard me read my writing, he said it was the best he’d heard anyone read in his class in a long time. Then he slashed everything I wrote for the next six years. Sometimes I'd hand in three pages of writing and he'd leave only five sentences. But this is the thing about those five sentences: they were great. And here's why I became a dedicated follower: Because I felt like he understood my compulsive need to write my life. And I understood his goal, which was to have interesting sentences. So when he cut full paragraphs that I thought were important because my sentences were boring, I felt grateful that he saved me from banality." - Penelope Trunk
I am going to get me a writing mentor...
I am going to annoy someone into mentoring me.
I will try to do this with less than 15 e-mails... which should be very interesting (LOL). What is the point of getting good advice if you don't take it, eh? ;-)
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