“My first mentor strongly encouraged me to take a job that wasn’t really a fit for me, rather than continue to work on my own startup,” Eric Koester, a serial entrepreneur and professor at Georgetown University shared. “That turned out to be some of the worst advice I ever got… I was pretty much fired from that job nine months later.”
Koester’s early challenges with mentors led him to research the mentors of the world’s most successful people. He shares his findings in Super Mentors: The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Asking Extraordinary People for Help.
The book is a hands-on, practical guide for any ambitious person who is in college or graduate school, early in their career, looking to start a new business or venture, or considering a change in vocation.
“Mentors matter, perhaps more now than ever before,” Koester says. “But most of us are doing it completely backward.”
Koester details that years later, after his first negative mentor experience, he met Steve Blank, the noted entrepreneur and creator of the Lean Startup movement. Steve would become Koester’s first Super Mentor. “Steve was the other extreme for me. He was never a formal mentor per se, but what he did for me helped me start my next company, connected me to future investors, and changed my entire trajectory. And, it was because he did what Super Mentors do. He gave me an opportunity.”
Super Mentors details the surprising approach of modern mentorship built around the creation of a network of casual mentors who offer opportunities rather than advice. At the heart of this approach is the project — a tangible, finite, meaningful thing providing us a reason to engage with people.
Koester’s book is based on his popular classes at Georgetown University. “I realized that if I could help my students define a project that could attract people to them, they’d start to see an increase of surprising opportunities too.”
The results of his work are staggering. Alums of Koester’s classes who are leveraging this framework have been hired into dozens of high-profile companies, industries, and venture capital firms; and started countless businesses, leading to hundreds of TEDx talks, and much more. “I realized that no one was teaching people how to attract Super Mentors. So, I have made that my life’s work.”
Koester’s research backs up the results, finding that many of today’s most successful people built their mentors through a process he’s coined “aiming higher, asking smaller, and doing it again and again.”
“Only about a third of people even have a mentor,” Koester shared. “We get so fixated on finding a mentor, that we forget why we want one in the first place. By starting to design a project that matters to you — a nonfiction book, a podcast, an event or conference, a YouTube channel — you figure out what you want first. Then you figure out whom to attract to collaborate with on the project. For me, Steve invited me to help him design and teach a class, and that led to me being hired at Georgetown, a school I wouldn’t have even gotten into as an undergraduate.”
The book is packed with tangible and practical insights around modern mentorship, building on the four laws of mentorship: identifying the right person, right ask, right start, and right time, the PAST framework. The blending of stories, principles, research, and interactive elements make the book a great read and a guidebook all in one.
“I can’t stress enough that it’s a huge problem that only a third of people have mentors,” Koester continued. “And it’s worse in first-generation college students and graduates, and individuals of color. This creates a disparity in opportunities. Even Sheryl Sandberg noted this in her book Lean In that women are often without mentors because other successful women have limited time and energy. What I hope is we can see mentorship not as that single person who guides us, but a network of individuals that are aligned to help us solve our problems and create opportunities.”
It’s quite a noble goal for the person whose first mentor led him down the wrong path. The book isn’t just for individuals who are starting their careers, as it offers practical advice for peer mentoring, leveraging mentorship in transitions, and even expanding a skillset. The core of the book is a message of reimagining mentors and our role as mentees in unlocking those around us to become our Super Mentors. It is filled with data and research, including insights from Koester’s coauthor Adam Saven who brings data from millions of mentoring interactions into their framework.
Super Mentors is an incredibly practical and useful guide. Eric Koester and Adam Saven distill the most fundamental information about mentorship, so you can build the relationships that will help you achieve more success, happiness, and wealth.
