Adopt a Mentor to Improve Your Writing

Or any skill, really

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I.

Imagine you’ve decided you’re going to be a blacksmith. Where would you start?

Would you go on the internet and watch every tutorial video, read every book and consume every course on beginner blacksmithing you could find? Of course not.

Instead, you would find a master blacksmith and apply for an apprenticeship. You would see that master blacksmith as your mentor and expect them to teach you about the craft, the business, and the industry of blacksmithing.

When learning any skill, the internet provides us with a wealth of resources. However, having so much information at our fingertips can also confuse and paralyse us. Some of it will inevitably be contradicting. How could you, a beginner, judge which voice to follow?

You don’t. You find an expert to tell you what to do.

Find one expert in your chosen field and adopt them as your mentor.

How to determine who would be a suitable mentor? There are three criteria.

1. They should publicly display the expertise they claim and be vetted by other experts in the field. Otherwise, how would you know they’re a true expert?

2. They should offer some specific, easy-to-follow guide or instructions. This could be a course, a video series or a how-to book.

3. They should appeal to you personally, both their style of doing the skill as well as their teaching style. You admire them, you want to be like them.

Once you’ve found a suitable mentor, think of yourself as their apprentice. They don’t need to know about it, it’s purely about your mindset. Consume their teachings, not only once but many many times, until you could recite them in your sleep.

Don’t just learn passively but practise what they preach. If they have exercises or action steps, do them all. Many many times. Do exactly as they say and then experiment. Get as much value out of them as you possibly can. Every blacksmith has to practise smithing, right? Practise, practise, practise. Judge your results against the results your mentor claims you’re supposed to get. Evaluate, discard what doesn’t work and double down on what does.

This is where fun comes in. If the skill you want to master isn’t even remotely enjoyable to you, it will be extremely difficult to keep up the relentless practise. Fun is your motivator. Ideally you do the thing for the sake of doing the thing, not for any external goal.

II.

We tend to fall into the trap of consuming advice from too many contradicting sources. Maybe not in blacksmithing but knowledge work, where the definition of good vs. bad is more vague and subjective, is especially prone to it.

After years of consuming every single piece of productivity and writing advice under the sun, I’m sick of it. Not only have I heard it all before but I thought I would assimilate those teachings just through osmosis, without having to do anything else. Even if I had, I’ve realised it’s not enough.

Passive learning through osmosis will never be as effective as active practise, informed by analysis of what does and doesn’t work. Instead of hoping for the subconscious to do whatever it is the subconscious does (experts are still not sure about that), I’ll do my best to learn through deliberate practise.

I’ve known this for a while too but never grasped its full implications.

• I didn’t analyse what works vs. what doesn’t work in my own writing and that of others farther along than me, who I admired and wanted to learn from. I want to do this much more going forward, daily if possible.

• And I didn’t adopt a mentor whose advice I could focus on. This is how creative writings programs work, by the way—their main draw is experienced mentors who can teach students about writing for (traditional) publication and might even help them network. In absence of a creative writing program aligned with my actual interests, I’ll choose my own mentor.

Of course, there are more factors that played a role in my journey but the conclusion I’ve come to is this: I’ve adopted a mentor to teach me online writing¹.

III.

I’ve had fun with my little apprenticeship and analysing role models for the past few days and weeks. For others, however, doing this might take the fun out of writing. Which one is right?

It all comes down to one question: Do you want to treat your writing (or similar skill) as a hobby or as a business?

Decide on one and then act accordingly. Any unhappiness you might experience stems from a lack of clarity. For the longest time, I wanted to make a business out of writing but I was still treating it as a hobby. Writing what I wanted. Putting little to no effort into improving. Now I can be honest with myself and try to do better.

By the way, treating your writing as a business doesn’t mean trying to sell something all the time. Desperately asking people to buy your product won’t get you anywhere. It’s not cool. It’s saying: I have to ask my readers to buy my work again and again, otherwise they won’t pay attention to me. It’s signalling that you don’t believe your work speaks for itself. It’s also signalling that you don’t trust your readers to know what’s good, you have to tell them. Multiple times. IN ALL CAPS. If someone did that to me every day, I’d feel insulted.

Instead, treating your writing as a business means doing what’s uncomfortable in the short term, not just what feels good. It means showing up and working on it every day. It also means thinking about your audience and genuinely wanting to offer help or fulfilment to them². It might mean sacrificing other activities you enjoy while you try to gain some traction with this.

It might not always be fun but it should be fun most of the time. (If not, you might be in the wrong business.)

Writing hasn’t been this fun for me in a long time. Not coincidentally, this month has also been my most productive of the entire year (so far) in terms of word count. And it’s only getting better. That’s how I know I’m on the right track and I can keep working on it, getting better over months and years. I hope sharing this part of my journey helped you in some way too.

IV.

Let me know where you are with your writing! Are you fine with it being a hobby or are you struggling to get more out of it too? Perhaps you even have some advice to add? I’d love to know!

1. It doesn’t matter for the sake of this article but for those curious, it’s Nicolas Cole, author of The Art and Business of Online Writing. He has achieved so much writing online and I’m at a point in my journey where I want writing to be my—dare I say it—side hustle.

2. I recommend Seth Godin’s book This is Marketing. Good marketing isn’t about manipulation, it’s about serving your audience, giving them what they didn’t know they wanted.