Don’t ask someone to be your mentor
If you want someone to be your mentor, don’t just call them up and ask, “Will you be my mentor?” Here’s why.
Most people who will make a good mentor for you are successful. That also means that they’re busy.
Because they have lots of commitments already, they’re going to be leery of taking on any new ones. Especially if those commitments are open-ended. And especially if they don’t know the person who’s asking.
There’s another reason that simply asking someone to be your mentor is a bad idea. You don’t know if you’ve got chemistry. And chemistry is important.
Most great mentoring relationships, certainly all of mine as both mentor and protégé, started simply. Then they grew. Here’s how to improve the odds that will happen.
Start with a specific question. If you’re making contact by email keep your email short and sweet.
Tell the person you’re sending email to that you’re writing to ask a question. Tell them why. If you’re asking because they’re an expert, say so. If you’re asking because someone you both know suggested it, say so.
Then ask your question. Make it simple. Make it specific. Make it short.
If you’re calling, the process is the same except for one thing. If you get someone on the phone, be sure to ask if they have time to answer your question.
Most of the time you’ll get a good and helpful answer. Most successful people enjoy helping others.
If that happens, say thank you. And send a thank-you note. And ask if you can contact them in the future with another question. Most of the time, the answer will be “yes.”
Good mentoring relationships grow from simple contacts and courtesies. But not every contact will result in a mentoring relationship. That’s OK. Your odds are better this way than the frontal assault of asking, “Will you be my mentor?”
February 2nd, 2009 at 5:03 am
Carnival of Personal Development – February 2, 2009…
Welcome to the Carnival of Personal Development. I’m pretty excited as this is the first time I’ve hosted a carnival.
Editor’s Picks
Relax presents How I overcome my fear instantly posted at The Wise Curve, saying, “I was exp…
February 2nd, 2009 at 8:15 am
[...] Bock presents Don’t ask someone to be your mentor posted at [...]
August 3rd, 2010 at 1:23 am
With a veritable army of Forex robots, buying and selling courses, techniques and pundits invading the net and ever newer strategies and indicators available it can make it difficult to select the perfect method that fits you. But in the end your buying and selling style should – and eventually will – reflect the sort of individual you are otherwise it won’t operate.
If you are a ‘hands on’ sort of individual, who likes to realize the nuts and bolts of how something works, then – poor you – you may well have to have to tread the long and torturous path of learning how to analyse the markets yourself. Here are some tomes to graft: for several the bible of TA is Martin Pring’s “Techncial Analysis Explained”, but also attempt the common “The Elliot Wave Principle” by Frost and Prechter, to catch those turns. Prefer trading the news? Just Google it to obtain sites related to fore.
If you are too busy to spend all day chart-gazing then you could test an automated trading method. The Meta Trader platform provided by most mainstream brokers allows you to pre-programme your charting package to automatically take trades on your behalf. Wallet-friendly Forex broker’s are on the market there, just Google it to discover the perfect for you particularly with competitive spreads and a rebate on trading costs.
Or you can leave the tough function of buying and selling down to somebody else: Forex Robots are entirely hands totally free and need no prior knowledge to operate. There are numerous articles on the net covering the several systems accessible it can be observed easily on net. Make sure you do your research – there are some decent robots out there but also a lot of pretty poor ones as well. From what I have heard the better robots such as the ‘F.A.P’ range developed by Marcus Leary, seem to boast regular returns of anything up to 20% per month – which if true is pretty beneficial.
Whichever system you decide to use, however, there are some fundamental investment decisions you can’t avoid having to make without the aid of artificial intelligence.
And these decisions mainly boil down to dollars management, and regardless of whether or not to continue buying and selling.
The moment upon a time on Wall Street traders made millions trading beans applying a 10 day moving typical but test doing that now and see what happens! Ultimately nearly each and every system or robot has a lifespan but how can you tell if its finest days are more than ahead of you shed all your funds applying it?
An individual helpful tactic is to chart your method or robot’s returns as an equity curve in excel or some other analysis package and analyse the equity curve to make decisions about regardless of whether or not to continue buying and selling. For example you could run a 50 day or 200 day moving common via your equity curve and when returns fall below the MA you switch off the tactic and wait until it comes back up over the MA before switching it back on. In fact you can use most of the chartist’s regular tools such as momentum, trend-line analysis and chart patterns to analyses your equity curve and this gives you further objective decision producing tools.
An additional fantastic idea is to diversify, so that you have a number of tactics working simultaneously, that way if 1 fails the other’s will make up for the losses.
Bucks management is the other fundamental area where traders can win or lose vast amounts. It can be tempting, for example, to improve your trade size after a winning streak – but be careful – it is typically when methods reach their peak performance that they are most vulnerable to having a sudden draw-down, just as peaks in the markets commonly come at the latter stages of a trend. Again you will need a definite technique for bucks management with rules about how you manage risk. Don’t leave it up to your emotions – and never ever fall into the trap of thinking you have observed a ‘golden goose’ because there isn’t an individual out there – you’re just playing the odds remember.
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