digital mentorship

February 2023

Your heroes say a lot about you. They reveal what you care about and the journey you’re on.

You model the people you spend time with. You copy their habits and beliefs. Best to be deliberate and invest time picking the right ones.

Traditionally, mentorship was this formal, ordained thing. But now there’s a new internet-native mentorship - it’s delivered through software and it’s one-way.

Digital mentorship is about picking people to learn from without ever speaking to them. Thanks to the internet, you can choose anyone in the world and make them your mentor by consuming their content. Like Tim Ferriss says: to learn from the best, we don’t need to meet them, we just need to absorb them.

I have three main digital mentors. I read, watch, and listen to everything they ever put out. They have no idea who I am, but they’ve transformed my life.

Most great potential mentors are too busy doing rockstar stuff to mentor you in the traditional way. But digital mentors span infinite time and space. You can have them in your ear all day without them knowing.

The funny thing is this can make digital mentorship more intense than the analogue version. You can dial it up as much as you want. Every moment of potential dead time - cooking, doing life admin, travelling - turns into a mentoring session. Last year, I was in the top 1% of UK Spotify listeners. Much of that was time with mentors.

If you’re trying to create a unique life for yourself, at some point you’ll experience friction with people around you. You have different interests and ambitions.

You might think you’re the strange one. But don’t settle just to conform. Not fitting in is a positive signal you’re going places.

Somewhere out on the internet, there are people further ahead of you, living the life you want, and you can make them your digital mentor. Scour down rabbit holes to find them because once you do, your world will open up.

It’s better to be selective with just a few mentors than spreading yourself thin across dozens. The goal is to internalise their principles and frameworks, adopting them as your own.

We’re not here to collect one-off advice; we’re trying to reshape ourselves for the long-term and level up. That requires spending hours absorbing and lots of repetition.

Over time, you’re building rock-solid foundations for your own judgement and instincts. I like how Austin Kleon said it: “You don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.”