Listening to a tape by Brian Tracy ("How to Master your Time"), he says that a mentor can shave off years from a career path. I certainly believe it, as recently I've consulted a few who have years of experience in biotech (both from a marketing and from a sales perspective) and their experience has been priceless. It is difficult to evaluate in terms of how many years of anguish I've saved, but suffice it to say that it has been well worth it.
Keith Ferrazzi has a book out called "Never Eat Alone" and it is on my 'need to read this book' list. He makes such an excellent point about giving and being human - many an ambitious person has called me with a 'you know me through so-and-so and thus you owe me this-and-that' attitude that completely shuts me down. If you want to hear an interesting online conference he has one archived here that I recently listened to - it's worth the download, although Microsoft really needs to get their online act together, since many of the audio sections were duplicates so you need to check the title of each in order to not download the same thing twice or even three times. I wonder sometimes how Microsoft can afford to stay in business, what with their goofy dinosaur ads they spend Million$ of dollar$ on. Something to the tune of $150-$200M, not chump change, but not the $1B that the automakers routinely spend either. Yup, we hate our customers - unbelievable.
Oops, got off-topic. Anyway, being a giving, decent human being seems to be in short supply, but thinking about it, decency may have consistently been in short supply. The 'good 'ole days' were not that good, and if you think so it just illustrates a lack of historical perspective.
About two weeks ago I was invited by a friend from Toastmasters to join LinkedIn, a social networking site. This friend was, shall I say, very interesting from the point of view that she did marketing, which we had in common, but it was of the alternative / holistic healing / life coaching / world peace and harmony angle. Intrigued with the concept (being a reader of Fast Company, Wired, Fortune and Forbes I've encountered discussion of social networking many times), I bothered to fill in my work history and look up anyone I knew. Turns out quite a few of my old work associates (some I had stayed in touch with, others I haven't) were indexed on the site, and it still isn't clear to me whether or not their names were simply harvested from all over the WWW. So I naively started inviting several people, and selectively left out others I could not vouch for.
Then I get a few invites to 'connect via LinkedIn' to people I did not work very closely with at all, or not at all as they had joined my former employer after I left, and have contacted me for employment at my current employer! No phone call, no 'how are you doing?' invitation out to breakfast, nothing but an anonymous "I found you via LinkedIn and want to connect with you." It seems like the work of keeping in touch, the work of building credibility, the work of building up a 'positive bank account' (to borrow a phrase from Steven Covey) is short-circuited to an electronic connection via a website. I think that experiment (for me) is coming to an end, and I can't say that the results were positive.
Bottom line: keep your network up-to-date, and don't be afraid to be a decent, giving and humble human being. There is enough greed, avarice and pride in the world as it is.
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