The Credential You're Waiting For Doesn't Exist

I spent three years looking for a mentor.

I read the books. They all said the same thing: find someone who's done what you want to do. Learn from them. Shortcut your way to success by borrowing their roadmap.

So I looked. I emailed authors I admired. I applied to mentorship programs. I lingered at conferences hoping to make connections with people further along than me. I waited for someone to take me under their wing and show me the way.

No one did.

And for a long time, I thought that was the problem. I thought I was missing something essential—that the people who succeeded had mentors and I didn't, and that's why I was stuck.

Then I noticed a pattern.

The people I was trying to get mentorship from? Most of them didn't have mentors either. At least not the kind I was imagining. They didn't have a wise guide who held their hand through every decision. They had books. They had peers. They had trial and error and a lot of failure.

Their credential wasn't a certificate from some mentorship program. Their credential was the work itself. The years of showing up. The accumulated experience of doing the thing, badly at first, and then less badly, and eventually with something resembling competence.

I'd been waiting for permission from someone with credentials to tell me I was ready. But the credentials I was looking for don't exist the way I thought they did.

Experience is the credential.

The writer who's been writing for ten years didn't get certified by a mentor. They got certified by ten years of writing. The entrepreneur who's built three businesses didn't get their credential from a program. They got it from building three businesses.

I stopped looking for a mentor. I started doing the work instead.

Three years later, people occasionally ask me for advice. They treat me like I have something figured out. And the truth is, I don't—not really. I'm just further along than they are because I stopped waiting and started doing.

That's the whole secret. There is no mentor coming to save you. There's no credential that will make you ready. There's just the work, and the experience you build by doing it.

If you're waiting for someone to tap you on the shoulder and say "now you're qualified," you might be waiting forever.

Start anyway. The credential comes after.