20 | MENTORS MAGAZINE | EDITION 2
dividuals were already right in front of their
nose, hiding in plain sight.
Key benefits that accrue
from being mentored
While mentoring can help you avoid critical
business mistakes, including missing big op-
portunities, it can also help in a broad range
of other important areas, including:
- Expanding your network of high-level
business contacts. - Having an expert directly give you ad-
vice that is tailored specifically to your
business’ circumstances rather than ge-
neric advice from a book. - Increasing your company’s chance of
long-term success by manoeuvring
around pitfalls before they have the
chance to trip you up. - Boosting your confidence. High levels of
self-assuredness have been shown to
be critically linked to entrepreneurial
success. - Helping to encourage you when things
are tough.
Giving you key management insights and the
wherewithal to deal effectively with stressful
management situations.
Examples of strong mentor-
ing benefits from the real
worldOne way we can tell that mentoring truly is a
major component of entrepreneurial success
is that we don’t have to look very hard to
find examples where it had a definitive effect
on a major entrepreneurial figure’s career.Take, for example, Warren Buffett. Buffett
always knew that he wanted to go into busi-
ness for himself, investing in his first stocks,
while still a teenager, with the earnings he
had saved from a paper route. But it wasn’t
until he attended college under the legend-
ary investor Benjamin Graham that he really
started to develop the sophisticated in-
vesting philosophy that would propel him to
historic accomplishments in the markets.In fact, like many burgeoning entrepreneurs,
Buffet deliberately sought out Graham,
choosing to attend Colombia Business
School specifically so that he could study un-
der his hero. And this turned out to be what
may be the most valuable mentorship in the
history of U.S. business. For the first two
decades of his career, he applied, nearly
without variation, the lessons that he
learned in Benjamin Graham’s business clas-
ses.This served Buffet well. By the time of his
40th birthday, he was worth the equivalent
of about $200 million today. But he got far
more than just fantastic wealth from paying
such meticulous attention to the lessons of
his teacher; he was able to put together an
entire philosophy of investing that would