CHAPTER TWO — THE MENTORS
Part Two — IS IT INDOCTRINATION INTO A FIRM OR A CULT?
I owe a lot in my life to a South African — Portuguese Australian, by the name of Kellan. Pronounced Ellen Degeneres with a K.
He was a great mate from uni and someone whom I could always turn for advice.
We shared a similar passion: success.
We both wanted to be successful in this life and we were both working on ideas. We knew nothing of the start-up world, or what it was like to be an entrepreneur, other than what we read in books and saw in movies.
Kellan and I were both struggling through our internship, both coming to the realisation, “Is this what life is all about? Working nine to five, Monday to Friday, only to get smashed on Friday night.”
We were both coming to grips with the environment we found ourselves in. We were looking for mentors, for teachers, for future colleagues who we could share our future success with, and with whom we could build it.
We both found early on that our search was pointless.
The people in the firm weren’t ambitious go — getters of life. They were boring, mediocre, average and at best plain. That’s not to say that they didn’t seem like they were having fun, they were, but only on Fridays. They often complained about their job and were plotting how to leave, and travel the world, if only they didn’t need the money that the job provided. If only they didn’t need the security that the job provided.
Kellan and I soon discovered, that what was really going on in the firms, and the universities countrywide, was really akin to brain washing, and indoctrination into a cult.
The hype around the uni campus was as if the internship that we had landed ourselves with was the bee’s knees. Instead, the hype was as out-dated as that previous reference.
To counter our disappointment with the reality that we had found ourselves buying into, Kellan and I started to come up with more business ideas. None of these ideas really took shape, despite us writing a business plan for one of them, in a period of a month. We were too inexperienced and didn’t have anywhere near enough knowledge of running start-ups.
