We All Need Mentors - No. 16

Mentorship is the forgotten path to timeless wisdom.

My Mentorship Journey

For some reason, I have always sought out mentors. I never had a plan, I was just curious and hungry for wisdom. In my experience, the more wisdom you get, the more you want. As a young man, my parents encouraged me to seek out mentors and spend time with older and wiser people. So when I was fifteen, I started spending time with some men I wanted to learn from. By the time I was eighteen, I had fully committed to a life of pursuing wisdom. I didn’t realize at the time, though, how much mentorship would be a critical part of my journey. 

By the time I married Heather at 26, I had been mentored by at least a dozen men. Some of them for years at a time, and others just for a season. I never really thought that I was looking for mentors; I was just looking for wisdom. When I met people who had it, I would spend time with them. Looking back, I think it is cool that I never really saw how unusual that was for a young man in his early 20s to be spending so much time with mentors.

On my wedding day, I looked around and realized that only one of the dozen or so men who had poured wisdom into me over the last 11 years had come to support me on my wedding day. Granted, it was a long way to travel, and my mentors were spread out across the world, but only one of them called me to congratulate me. I had spent lots of time with these men over the years and considered them close friends. I still get emotional, though, when I think about this because it was a low point in my mentorship journey, and I think many men have been let down by mentors in similar ways. A young man's relationship with a sage is very special, and I think each man has a deep longing for the men of earlier generations to come stand beside him. I wonder if the reason more young men will not seek out mentors is in part because of the wounding they have received from their father and other older men. 

My wedding day was so full of joy, but some deep part of me said, “see, you can’t trust men that mentor you, they don’t really care about you.” I felt like all the time and energy I had put into pursuing men of wisdom had basically failed. I had grown a lot through it, but I hadn’t come through those years with a tribe of men around me who wanted to stand with me on the most important day of my life. 

I had reorganized my life, time and again to pursue wisdom, and at that time I was honestly feeling like much of it had been a waste. I would wonder at times if I had given up important career-building years and fun adventures in my pursuit of wisdom, God, and time with mentors.

At 27, we had our first child, and I was building what I thought was my dream business. I had traveled the world and worked with all kinds of leaders on very cool projects, been mentored by incredibly smart and successful people, but still, I found myself feeling totally unequipped to build my business. I wouldn’t have said it that way at the time, but looking back it's obvious to me. What I did know at the time was that I needed someone to help guide me through my business journey. Something wasn’t working, and I wasn’t sure what it was, and I needed someone I could trust to help me figure it out. 

I started calling people, meeting with people, and reading every business book I could find to figure out what I was missing. I was really grabbing for anything. Most of the people I talked to would give me some interesting advice, but none of it felt applicable. I was thankful to have their advice, but I needed serious help. 

There was another thing I felt acutely at that time. Most people want to invest time in winners. I was not winning at the time, and because of that, I felt like I couldn’t get the coaching I needed. I wasn’t making much money, so I couldn’t pay for coaching. I felt like a loser, who was lost, who clearly didn’t understand how the world actually worked, and now it was catching up with me. I was trying to follow God on my business journey, and it seemed like an impossible math problem. 

There was this very well-known company in town that I really wanted to work with, and I drove past their HQ every day on my way to my office. Every day, I would hold my hand up when I would drive by and ask God to help me land them as a client. I didn’t know anyone who worked there, though, and wasn’t sure I should just walk in the front door. After six months of driving by and praying they would be a client, suddenly a thought popped into my head. I should text a guy I knew and see if he knew anyone there. He didn’t, but he asked his dad, who asked his friend, who asked his friend, and within a week, I had a lunch meeting set up with the CEO. That is the only time in my life that people have gone that far out of their way to help me get an introduction. Clearly, God had His hand on it. 

I had spent a lot of time with leaders and powerful people, so I thought I knew what to expect. Then I arrived at the lunch meeting, and the CEO never showed up. Finally, I called him and he had totally forgotten our meeting. When he finally arrived, he was about an hour late. I am pretty sure he had been doing yard work or something because he looked like anything but a CEO. Come to find out he was in the process of retiring and was spending less time at the office. He was extremely down-to-earth, humble, peaceful, and wise. I can’t remember what happened during our lunch, but it must have impacted me. 

He connected me with someone in his company, and Superfeet ended up becoming a client. Then, a couple of weeks later, I found myself calling him, asking if we could get together again. I had been really impressed with him, and so I did what I always did when I encountered people with wisdom: I went to spend time with him. 

The second time we got together, he told me several things I will never forget. They all felt like a kick in the gut. First, he said, “God isn’t worried about growing your business right now, He’s worried about growing you. When He has you where He wants you, He will worry about your business.” Then he said, “You're not that special, but with some work, you might be able to be of some use to God.”

I don’t even know why I kept hanging out with him haha. I was used to encouragement, and he was not at all impressed with me. Every time we got together for the first year, I would remind myself not to trust him but to just extract as much wisdom as possible. I would literally say that to myself on the way to meet with him. I know it sounds dramatic, but I knew that at some point he was going to let me down, and I didn’t want to be hurt again. 

That was almost 10 years ago, and Scott has become a second father to me. He has never let me down or abandoned me. Sure, he'll forget things from time to time, but he has always been exactly who he says he wants to be. He has displayed endless patience with me as I navigated business and personal challenges. He has given thousands of hours of his time and never asked or expected anything in return. When I was struggling financially in the early days, he would even buy our meals when we got together. I can say all this about Scott because it isn’t about Scott. It’s about what God has done in Scott to make him the man he is today. It’s also about what God is doing in me through Scott to become the man I am called to be. 

Business Education

Before I met Scott, I had been taught that success in business was the result of being really smart and capable of finding and capitalizing on great opportunities. Some people had what it took, and others didn’t. A part of me was convinced I had the touch and was going to make hundreds of millions. I was good at strategic thinking, had a big vision, and was good with people, so I could pull deals together and get people to believe in me. Another part of me, though, worried that I didn’t have what it took and was going to end up failing. I ignored that voice most of the time, but it was very real and it distorted my perspective on many things. 

Scott began to teach me a very different way of thinking about and doing business. When he graduated from high school, he was already a father. He didn’t come from family money so his only option was to start working right away to provide for his new family. Scott and Peggy got married and moved to North Dakota were they bought a small restaurant at a duty-free store on the US and Canadian border. Over the years, Scott would work his way up to running one of the top duty-free business in the western hemisphere. 

His lack of education and business training of any kind gave him a unique perspective on business. As a self-proclaimed country boy, he wasn’t trying to be the smartest guy in the room. He will tell you he always assumed everybody he was doing business with was smarter than he was, so he had to focus on mastering the fundamentals. 

Scott began to teach me his principles of business that he had mastered throughout his career. I have read hundreds of the best business books, and I still have never read anything as good as the simple education on business thinking that Scott gave me, sitting in his living room and at restaurants. We love to overcomplicate things, and Scott is a master at keeping things simple. 

What I learned from Scott changed my career. My business at the time was focused on helping companies build and execute communication strategies around the positive impact they were having in the world. As I began to learn and internalize Scott’s approach to business, I found myself helping my clients with their complete business strategies. I would get hired to build a communication strategy and then end up coaching the CEO on business strategy. At the time I didn’t think that much of it, but it became clear to me that I should be helping businesses with much more than communication. Scott helped me see this and transition the focus of my work to what I call growth strategy. We call it growth strategy because it is about aligning the core functions of the business around the simple principles I learned from Scott in order to help companies unlock growth. 

Scott reconstructed how I thought about business, but he cared more about my personal journey with God than he did about helping me build a business or make money. I know what it feels like to be a man with a family to provide for and feel like my business and career are a failure. I felt so alone back then, and many people would offer advice and direction, but it always felt like I was down in the trenches and they were up above the trench, throwing down advice to me that often felt completely out of touch. Then they would walk away. I was thankful for their advice, but it rarely actually helped me. I think when a man goes through a season like this, it is like a dark night of the soul. 

I will always be indebted to Scott for so many things but one thing always stands out to me above all else. He jumped into the trenches with me. It always brings tears to my eyes when I think about it. I was alone and needing direction, and he cared enough about someone he had nothing to gain from to jump into the trenches with me. He never gave me money or introduced me to other clients. He just met with me week after week, hour after hour, and genuinely cared about helping me figure out how to provide for my family. 

Chairman of My Board

I was driving home one day from meeting with him, and I felt that God said something to me that was really scary at the time. He said, treat Scott like the chairman of the board of your life. If he says you need to do something, do it, and if he says not to do something, don’t do it. I didn’t tell Scott what God had told me, but I decided that until God told me otherwise, I would bring every meaningful decision in my life to Scott before I made it, and whatever he told me to do, I would do it. 

I had people I trusted that I would go to when wrestling with decisions, but up to that point in my life, I was mostly concerned with protecting my freedom. Authority was almost always a threat to my freedom. The idea of giving up my freedom and letting someone else have a definitive say in my decisions was very threatening. I thought I was giving up control, but the truth is I was really giving up autonomy. I never had control, I just thought I did, but by giving up autonomy, I was accepting the reality of my weaknesses. I was admitting that I didn’t really know what I was doing and needed someone else to help guide my life. 

Here is the crazy thing. After almost a decade, Scott has never told me to do anything. Every decision I bring to him, he asks me questions and provides insight, validates or challenges my thinking, and then encourages me to go back to God for direction. It has been such a beautiful thing to experience. Many of my mentors had wanted to control me, shame me, tell me what to do, and even manipulate me. So when God said treat Scott like the chairman of the board of your life, it was hitting on a place of hurt for me. It wasn’t easy for me to let go and just trust someone to guide my life. But, since God told me to do it, I did, and it was one of the best decisions of my life. 

Scott and I never planned out our meetings ahead of time he just suggested we schedule a meeting whenever God put it on one of our hearts. He talked about how people like to structure things to death and this is the kind of thing that is better left unstructured and led by God. So each week for the first couple of years I would call him and we would find a time to meet up at his house or somewhere for breakfast. We never set specific time windows for our meetings so often they would go for 3, 4, or even 5 hours. One time we met for an early breakfast at a restaurant and where still in the booth when the lunch crowd came in. We would talk about business, life and discipleship. Scott believes that business is not separate from life and discipleship, so every conversation ended up being a blend of all three. 

Discipleship 

I will never forget being in church one Sunday and looking around and thinking I don’t want to be like any of these men. I saw weak men whose faith was a box they checked. Sure they followed the moral codes of Christianity for the most part. But almost every man I met was uninspiring. They weren’t on a journey or in a fight. They weren’t going anywhere particular. Even as a young teenager I had the sneaking suspicion that the purpose of most men's lives was the gratification of their biological and psychological desires. Namely comfort, sex, food and ego. 

All of my mentors throughout the years embodied something I wanted, some in more ways than others. For instance, the way they thought, or the way they embraced challenges or the way they cared for people. When I met Scott I saw someone that I wanted to be like. He was on a mission that he took very seriously. He was a disciple of Jesus and he was not going to let anything come between him and God. 

Scott invited me into what it truly meant to be a follower of Jesus. I grew up in the Christian world and had heard all the rhetoric about following Jesus, but to be brutally honest, I had met very few people who actually took that seriously. Scott took it very seriously; he took what Jesus said to heart and let it change how he lived and thought. He had and continues to embrace dying to self. God had led him through a three year sickness where God methodically showed him areas of his life that he needed to surrender. 

I think one of the biggest problems in the Western church is that we have very few people who are actually becoming like Jesus. When you do meet a true disciple, it is totally captivating. If you take what Jesus invited us all into at face value, it sounds pretty rough - death to self, surrender to God’s will, possible torture…who would sign up for that? Well, meet someone who is truly being transformed into who God created them to be, and tell me something in you doesn’t leap with a desire to go on that same journey. We now have too much information about what we think we know about God, and far too few people actually walking the path He called us to. 

The Value of Mentorship

Now I have had close to 20 mentors over the last 20 years. Each of them has impacted me in unique ways. Some of them I continue to meet with regularly to this day. I recently added up what I estimated to be the amount of time mentors have spent with me over the years. If I paid them a reasonable hourly rate for business and life coaching, the time I was given would be worth millions of dollars. I am the most mentored person I have ever met. That isn’t something I feel good about, though; it's actually something that weighs heavily on my heart. Why aren’t more young men getting the investment of time and wisdom that I got? I don’t think I should be the exception. 

When Jesus wanted to share the gospel with the world, He gathered 12 unimpressive men and poured most of His time into them. The ROI on those 12 was way more impactful than the ROI on His speaking to crowds. Those losers built the Church and took the gospel to the nations. We don’t know how to value transformation, and we don’t really understand how it happens. A critical part of each of our transformation journeys is the opportunity to spend lots of time with people of wisdom. By being with them, we learn to be like them and think like them. We are literally changed by being with mentors. 

The way the modern world thinks about education is based on information transfer. We see the goal of a young person as memorizing information so they can pass tests. For most of history, education was based on a discourse and imitation style of learning that is more about passing along skills and thinking, with a huge emphasis on sharing stories. By focusing just on information, we have cut ourselves off from most of the biggest drivers of generational learning. Mentorship is a timeless form of learning. It’s not just a nice thing to have, I think it is essential. 

Mirror neurons are a critical part of how we learn. They are brain cells that fire both when we perform an action and when we see someone else do it, so it feels as if we are doing it ourselves. When we spend time with mentors, solve problems with them, and hear their stories, we are subconsciously practicing thinking and acting the way they do. Mentors literally show us how to think, act, and live. Ignoring this part of how our brains work costs us so much more than we can imagine. We have cut ourselves off from cross-generational relationships to our own detriment. 

Older people want to spend time investing in younger people. I think there is a natural drive to pass along wisdom that God put in us. Younger people need these relationships more than they are usually aware. We must make room in our lives, communities, businesses, and families for these critical relationships. I still spend hours every week with different mentors. This is time I am not working and I am not with my family. It is a sacrifice, but the fruit is so evident, I am a better husband, father, businessman, and disciple as a result of it. 

God led me into a mentor-filled life, and it has changed everything about who I am, how I think, and how I live. I have inherited something from every mentor I have spent time with over the years. Now, when I meet older men, I challenge them to invest in young men. When I meet young men, I challenge them to find at least one mentor and spend as much time with them as they can. This isn’t complicated, it is actually very natural. Our society has just forgotten that the most important learning happens through mentor relationships.

Application

Here are some thoughts to consider around mentorship. 

1. I talk to my kids about my mentors and talk to them about how someday they will find mentors of their own. I want them to see that these kinds of relationships are normal and something to look for. 
2. I make sure every major decision in my life is put in front of my key mentors. This isn’t formal, I just call them or grab lunch and share what I am thinking, and ask for their insights. 
3. I make time every week to talk to different mentors. 
4. I keep everything very casual. These are friendships first and foremost. I genuinely like being with these men, and so I don’t structure anything. My mentors are my best friends. 
5. These relationships take time. I never rush a relationship with a mentor. If God wants it to happen, He will make it happen; if not, it will fizzle out. 
6. Keep your eyes open, the best mentors are often the most down-to-earth people. They are low-ego people who care more about others than themselves. 

- John Walt

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