Entrepreneurship, Learning, Mentorship

A close friend of mine from my undergrad years is finishing up a graduate program in entrepreneurship and he recently asked me to come in as a technical consultant on a project he and a few of his classmates are putting together and hope to be their first post-school venture.  The project they’re working on is quite interesting if you are in the appropriate demographic to see the value of what they’re putting together (it’s a small but valuable niche!).

They wanted my input on some of the technical details of voice over IP technology and general data and networking protocols.  The beauty of these areas is that the underlying technologies have been around for decades and we are just now seeing some of the power and possibilities of these technologies trickle down to end-consumer use.  For example, I’ve started seeing commercials for ‘personal cloud’ technologies and ‘cloud computing’ and ‘cloud data backup’.  If I didn’t know any better I’d believe that cloud computing is some newly invented technology just no being tested and released.  But I do have a bit of experience in this area and, quite simply, cloud computing was born since Lawrence Roberts and developed the first computer-to-computer communication via data packets (see Wikipedia here and topbits.com article here).

That said, in my research I came across a few very interesting patents related to data exchange and switching.  One of them is a patent for an intelligent switching system created by Keith Raniere (abstract here).  It’s a rather interesting patent, but perhaps more interesting to me was the patent creator.  I met Keith a number of years ago after I’d taken an Nxivm/Executive Success Programs training that a close friend had recommended me to. Nancy Salzman led the training.  Nancy is an incredibly interesting woman.  Her background is in NLP and she’s now the president and top trainer of ESP.  I got to know Nancy some and, having had a conversation with me about my background and interests in technology as well as the direction I wanted to move in my life, she introduced me to Keith.  Keith, as it turned out, created the concepts underlying the ESP coursework and also is a brilliant technologist and entrepreneur (I just found this bio on Keith).

I got the opportunity to work with Keith on a couple of projects and, between the Executive Success Programs training I participated in and subsequent mentorship of both Keith and Nancy, which significantly changed the direction and velocity of my life.  In my own estimation I’d hit a bit of a dead spot in my life at the time.  I knew what I wanted to do and I knew, generally, where I wanted to go but I’d hit a plateau in a number of areas in my life.  I’d achieved a high level of success professionally and had traveled around the world and had, by all accounts, a much sought-after lifestyle.  But I had hit some kind of limit and I had been at that spot for quite a while.

That all shifted quite a bit after I took the training with Nancy.  The education really shifted my perspective in a number of was and I ended up shifting my business and, eventually, sold it in order to fund a number of projects I’d wanted to do since I graduated from college.  When I evaluate my level of success now I find it difficult to even compare where I was before to now – my evaluation criteria for success has fundamentally shifted and looking back, though I’d achieved quite a bit, I feel as if I was more or less just getting lucky.

That said, the success I’ve experience is partly due to the education I sought out, but perhaps more important is the mentorship I had the privilege to receive from Keith.  After meeting him it became apparent that he had, in certain ways, walked the path that I was trying to get myself onto.  I can’t hold a candle to his intelligence or to the passion with which he pursues the things that he pursues, but he was able to help me get to the place that I couldn’t quite find myself.

I took one invaluable lesson from those years that I try to give to whoever asks me for advice about their careers – get educated and find mentors.  This perhaps holds especially true in entrepreneurship where quite often there is far less structure and there are far more question marks.  No one can walk the path for you, but quite often someone can help you get out of your own way or show you a something you never knew existed.

As a post-script, I recently read John Wooden’s A Game Plan for Life, in which he goes into a great deal of detail about his philosophy on mentorship.  It’s one of the best things I’ve read in a long time and I highly recommend it!