“Re-imagine what mentoring is all about.” – Mark Schaefer in today’s Tip 814
How do you reach the next level when it seems like the odds are stacked against you?
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Cumulative Advantage
Mark Schaefer on LinkedIn
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. If you’re already on the listener list and you get my weekly newsletters then you know that I just finished reading Mark Schaefer’s newest book: “Cumulative Advantage.” I was planning to share my own tip about one of my favorite concepts from the book, because it’s been a pretty significant theme on the Sales Success Stories podcast recently, but I thought it might be even better if you got to hear it directly from Mark. Here he is:
Mark Shaefer: This is Mark Schaefer. I’m a Marketing Consultant, a Keynote Speaker, Author of nine books, including “Cumulative Advantage: How to Build Momentum for your Ideas, Business and Life Against All Odds.” With that last phrase, against all odds, I think is particularly important because we’re in a time right now where really the odds are stacked against us. Maybe you feel like you’re doing your best work. Maybe you feel like you’re doing great work and you’re still being buried. You’re plateauing. You just can’t seem to get to that next level.
Now I’m not the type of person to say, “Oh, well, we’ve got a problem because there’s so much competition in the world. And there’s so much information that we’re competing with today. How do we stand out? How can we be the signal against this wall of noise?” I’m not going to give up. I want to find answers. And in my latest research, I turned to this idea of momentum. How do we reach that next level when it seems like the odds are stacked against us? I started doing research and I dug into research in sociology and ideas about momentum that really started in the 1960s, but they really haven’t been applied to our lives and our businesses today. This is what I really outlined in my book Cumulative Advantage. I talk about five steps to build momentum, but I think the most important one and the one I want to talk to you about today is reaching up and reaching out. It’s a new way to look at mentorship.
Now, mentoring traditionally is thought of as a long-term relationship with somebody who teaches you something. I think that notion is out of date. If you want to learn something, you don’t need a mentor. You need to go to YouTube. You can learn almost anything there, but the role of a mentor today is really about creating momentum. It’s about encouragement. It’s about opening new doors, new opportunities, creating new connections that can help people advance their businesses and their careers.
Now, this requires a new mindset about how we approach potential mentors and how we establish relationships. I’m a senior person in business. I don’t want another full-time, job mentoring somebody. However, I will come alongside them at their point of need and help them, especially if I can see some mutually beneficial connection. So this requires an entirely new way to think about mentoring, both being a mentor and being a mentee. And there’s lots of ideas about how to find these relationships, how to nurture and establish these relationships in my new book.
So we need to, re-imagine what mentoring is really about. We need to rethink how we make these connections, how we make it mutually beneficial, and we don’t need a long-term relationship. We just need to come alongside people who we aspire to be. And by the way, they don’t necessarily have to be people who are older than us, or even at a higher level than us. There are a lot of people that we can learn from. There’s a story in the book. Someone talks about some of his favorite mentors are book authors who aren’t even alive anymore.
So let’s, re-imagine what mentoring is all about. And if you want to learn more, I hope you’ll check out Cumulative Advantage: How to Build Momentum for your Ideas, Business and Life Against All Odds. Thanks so much for listening to me today.
Scott Ingram: Of course you’ll be able to find a link to get your copy of “Cumulative Advantage” at DailySales.Tips/814, and it’s worth pointing out that this tip is rather meta. I reached out and up to Mark and he was kind enough to share this tip. He doesn’t know it yet, of course, he will when he hears this, but I’m also planning to buy an hour of Mark’s time so he can come alongside me and help me think through how to apply the Sonic Boom concept that he also talks about in the book.
If you want to follow along as I continue to execute on this tip. Join the listener list. You can do it on the same page where you’ll find that link to Mark’s book at DailySales.Tips/814
Once you’ve done that. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!