If You Can't Find a Mentor, GET YOURSELF A FRENTOR

At the age of 11 years old I taught myself how to code. It was intense and difficult and I felt stupid and alone through most of it.

I remember sitting down at the desk in my room and logging into the dial-up internet with that crackling, undulating telephone tone that modems once made when you “connected” to the Internet so that I could meet up with my friends on mIRC chat (whatsapp-like chat app in 1995/6-ish) and talk about our website, html, hosting, buying domains and the like. I was about 13 years old at this point and would stay up late into the night hoping my parents wouldn’t see the glimmer of my screen from under the door as they walked past.

This is what mIRC looked like back then:

And here’s that dial-up internet sound that still rushes me back to the thrill of “getting online”:

This is how I taught myself to learn.

I learned from other people and curated their lessons.

I figured out which people were good to listen to and which people were trying to sound smart but had no depth.

Since then I have been on a lifelong hunt for the best people. Always looking for someone to guide me through my journey. I wanted someone who could show me how to write the best code, or start a business efficiently, and guide me through my thinking, goal setting, ambitions and life in general.

I never found a mentor in the traditional sense. After many years of looking for one, I realised that the world was changing and shifting so quickly that the concept of a mentor needed to change too.

So here’s what I suggest you do if you can’t find a mentor, or even if you have a mentor and need a different kind of push:

Start a chat group with your most talented and ambitious friends and label it something like “Frentors”. This is a place where you and your friends can help each other think through problems, challenge your thinking, share interesting links, test out business models and bend and break ideas.

If you read that last paragraph and can’t think of any friends you would want to add to this group then you have an entirely different (and bigger) problem. You have shitty friends.

In Greek culture (as in many others), kids are assigned godparents who are meant to guide them through life. Mine, unfortunately, did not manage to do so and the adults in my life seemed to struggle to maintain their own day to day existence, never mind guide me through mine.

So I set my own goals and from a young age tried to surround myself with the best people I could find as friends. Sometimes I was successful. Sometimes I found an asshole disguised as a nice person and dressed in nice clothing because they had rich parents.

Over the past 15 years, I have worked tirelessly to find the best people and help them, befriend them, learn from them and work my way into their lives. These people all lead different lives but are exceptional in their own way. Actors, entrepreneurs, speakers, writers, lawyers, executives, athletes, musicians and anyone else who is excellent, unique or special in some way, have all become my mentors over time.

Not having a mentor has been difficult but it’s also taught me how to figure things out for myself and how to trust my friends, learn from them, support them and allow them to support me.

Don’t be held back because you can’t find a mentor, trust me, your frentors can be even more valuable.