Why we all need to stand on the shoulders of giants + let mentors light the way.
Steven Spielberg said “The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.”
At Future Amp, we are passionate about giving young people access to amazing virtual mentors, career pathway and planning advice, and the right kind of support they need to make informed decisions about their futures.
Indeed, we know that it is through the receipt of active mentorship that we can each hold a mirror to ourselves and come face to face with our pressure points, blindspots - and our latent, unrealised potential. And this can make all the difference to our success trajectory down the line.
Our Future Amp Cofounder Madeleine Grummet wrote this piece about the power of mentorship, and how it has helped her shape her own career choices and pathways in entrepreneurship, investment and edtech.
Read the full article here.
Here’s an excerpt:
”It is directly because I have been fortunate enough to have lived the benefit of active mentorship that I have been empowered and guided and able to achieve what we have so far.
Of course we have stacks more to do. But daily, I still draw on the support and experience of my mentor caucus to stay afloat, accelerate our opportunities and make better business choices.
In fact some of the best decisions I've ever made were co-shaped with mentors.
But mentors can sometimes take a while to find. There is no one size fits all, and mentoring at its best is about cultivating positive and rewarding two-way human-to-human relationships, which can take a bit of time to nurture. (Listen to This Working Life , where Madeleine joined Lisa Leong to discuss The Power of A Good Mentor and tips on how to find one).
It was apparently Isaac Newton who said “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Certainly, some of the most successful founders I know have attributed regular mentoring to their success, and say that by putting themselves and their vulnerabilities out there and building a trusted group of mentors around them, they have achieved far more than could ever have done on their own.