Mentors don't just have to be people who are older or more experienced than you are. Mentors are people who really care about you, know you, and want to offer feedback and advice to help you grow.
I always wish I'd had more mentors, better mentors, wiser mentors, people who were proper professional working musicians to guide me as I was coming up.
I have so many mentors. I'm really lucky to be surrounded by incredible mentors, whether it be Solange Knowles or Gloria Steinem or Ava DuVernay, there are so many awesome people in my life, and so I'm lucky for them to kind of have fostered my identity as I grow into myself.
My advice is for veterans to seek out mentors, people who are doing what you want to do. You have to decide what you want and have a goal. Don't worry about how you're going to do it. Just trust that you'll get there.
All of us are mentors. You're mentors right here and now. And one of the things I've always done throughout my life, I have always found that person, that group of people that I was going to reach my hand out and help bring them along with me.
I think a lot of male artists should and probably are thinking in the same ways. The culture has moved in a more democratic, pluralistic direction. You now find a lot of people who are looking outside of the mainstream of the history of art for their mentors. Maybe not heroes, but mentors.
There are lots of women I look up to, but mentors are someone you talk to and not just admire. A lot of my friends that I trust are my mentors.
Listen to advice from people who have been there and done that. It is so hard to believe that when you are young, but parents, mentors, teachers, they can all be so valuable when it comes to advice.
Think bigger than society lets you think. And find mentors. My life is filled with people who knew me when I was 19 and had a horrible South African accent and bleach-blond hair and who believed in me in a way that was brutal. They were just unbelievable and consistent and smart. Find mentors who, every time you're with them, you're being schooled. Just absolutely schooled.
At TechStars, I have the privilege of working with hundreds of the best and brightest start-up mentors on the planet. We coach our mentors to take a Socratic approach and to provide data rather than decisions.
I think mentors are important and I don't think anybody makes it in the world without some form of mentorship. Nobody makes it alone. Nobody has made it alone. And we are all mentors to people even when we don't know it.
People want to offer opportunities to people they care about. They want to help people they believe are good people or have shared life experiences with.
My mentors in life are much older than me and have been through life. They can actually give me some sound advice on what I'm going through.
Your environment doesn't define you. I don't have a lot of money, but I can help train people and I can talk to people. We can all be mentors to the next generation.
Mentorship is an incredibly huge responsibility. And you need to choose your mentors carefully, just like mentors choose their apprentices carefully. There has to be trust there, on a very deep level.
Most people who decide to grow personally find their first mentors in the pages of books.
Instead of looking to male mentors, saying this is the paradigm of a candidate and it looks like this, we're suddenly finding that there's some powerful female mentors - and they look a little different.