Why You Need Good Mentors To Succeed
Take yourself back to the days when you were in middle school. Imagine walking into a classroom, everyone sits down, and there’s no teacher there. You wait for the bell to ring signalling that class has begun, and still, no adult walks into the room. You and your classmates are of an age where you know better than to fool around turning desks upside down as elementary schoolers might, but you’re also probably not independent enough to pull out a textbook and start teaching yourself. Rather, you wait there wondering, and nothing happens. The teacher is the one who gives us guidance, shows us how we can accomplish what we set out to do, and supervises us along the way. Without them, we’re lost.
That’s the standard for everything in life — we can only accomplish so much alone, and especially when we’re working in foreign environments and dealing with new concepts, it helps to have someone experienced by your side to shepherd you along.
It’s no doubt that this explicitly alludes to the life of an entrepreneur — constantly surrounded by ambiguity, looking for the best path to take among infinite options. While there are those who got “lucky” in the business world and claim that they became uber successful without a clue of what they were doing, it’s asinine to bet on yourself to that extent. Mentors for entrepreneurs are crucial to achieving success. Without someone giving advice, listening to your problems, and helping to provoke your thoughts, you’re the equivalent of that middle school student in a teacher-less classroom.

At HiRide, we have mentors from all around the continent, from Waterloo, to Saskatchewan, to San Francisco. Without professional guidance, every decision made is a guessing game. Simply, having accomplished and qualified advisers increases your probability of making better decisions.
On a broader scope, it’s not only traditional entrepreneurs who require mentors. You don’t have to be starting and launching your own venture to seek out advice; you just have to be an entrepreneur of your own life. If there is anything that you’re striving to become, seek out advice from someone who has been there — they’ll probably be happy to help too.
All in all, helping each other feels good, and seeing someone succeed whom you helped feels even better, but in order to kick off that cycle of success, you have to reach out. Without the help you need, you’re a blindfolded squirrel searching for an acorn. All you have to do is take off the blindfold.