"Mentoring is the only shortcut to excellence."
Most of the time, mentoring gets "short shrift" in the big picture. Consider mentoring through history.
Aristotle mentored Alexander the Great. One of history's great thinkers influenced one of history's great doers.
Benjamin Franklin chose the arduous nine-year printing apprenticeship for exposure to voluminous writing on his journey to become a great communicator.
The entertainer Usher discussed mentoring in his MasterClass. He recommended studying your "mentor's mentors." He considered Michael Jackson a mentor, therefore recommending study of James Brown and Gene Kelly.
Many here know that Phog Allen coached and mentored Dean Smith from 1949 to 1953. Fewer know that James Naismith mentored Phog Allen.
So it goes James Naismith -> Phog Allen -> Dean Smith
Develop a perspective on mentoring:
Many of us consider our high school coaches our first mentors. Pete Newell noted that copying your coach's system often results in "a poor reproduction of the original."
Mentoring has complexity. John Wooden's father Joshua most shaped his development as a man, while Piggy Lambert, his Purdue coach, influenced his basketball thinking. Lambert emphasized speed, conditioning, passing and aggressive team basketball.
Steve Kerr includes mentoring in his big three influences of mentoring, mindset, and culture. Kerr is part of the Gregg Popovich coaching tree as a player, not as an assistant.
Joe Mazzulla considers Brad Stevens a mentor. Mazzulla later described being allowed to interview for the Celtics head-coaching position in 2021, although he wasn't ready - as “a gift that [Stevens] gave me” because of what he learned from the process.
Mentors are transformational not transactional. The successful mentee eventually becomes unmistakably himself or herself.
Beyond "share something great," one of my core mentoring beliefs is, "make friends with the dead." Only about seven percent of people ever born are alive. That leaves a vast repository of "the departed" available to share, teach, and 'correct' our thinking. Using Artificial Intelligence allows us to have 'representative' conversations with them.
Knowing the past helps us to understand the present.
Even if we don't align with a coach or leader, that shouldn't prevent us from learning from them.
Lagniappe. Every coach can benefit from understanding core concepts from Sun Tzu and his classic, "The Art of War." Most coaches develop familiarity with game concepts and strategies. Elite coaches understand not only technique and tactics but the psychology of leadership and coaching people.
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