Why you need a mentor and how my story can benefit your career.

Mentorship is receiving timely guidance and counsel from an experienced person in an area of life or career. When the right mentorship is missing, people become a victim of negative societal or peer pressure. In other words, when people are not in the hands of deliberate mentors they will fall into the hands of wrong mentors who will indoctrinate them with wrong mindsets that could lead them in the wrong direction and destination.

I was thinking about this lately. I thought most of the troubles people battle with today would never be if people have good mentors to train them.

Growing up as a younger person I had the opportunity of being guided by many great people who mentored me. And except for their mentorships, I would have probably ended up in the wrong direction, being misguided by peer pressures and societal influences. 

The first person that mentored me was my late Brother Wilson Olatunbosun Akinrinlola. You may have read in my previous articles that he was the person that taught me how to read and write. He was also the person that first told me what it means to be a Local Champion. Do you know what that means? A local champion is a person who is superior only in the midst of local unskilled people. Once he or she gets outside in the midst of skilled and excellent people he or she becomes inferior because he or she is only superior to illiterate and unskillful people in the local environment. 

Brother Wilson explained to me why I was feeling great about being the best student in my class in my local hometown grammar school. He thereafter transferred me to a better grammar school in my state capital city, where indeed I met a lot of students who were more excellent and superior to me. It was there that I was exposed to quality education and first learned about the possibility of going overseas for further education.

Another mentorship I received from Brother Wilson was after I completed secondary school. That time I thought that settling for a temporary job or getting recruited into the Navy will suffice for me, but Brother Wilson told me that pursuing higher education will be better than both options in the long run.

I was also privileged to be mentored by another person as an undergraduate student. That person was a professor, Dr. Tony, who has a great heart for his students. One day Dr. Tony told me, "Rufus, with your Second Class Upper degree, you can get anywhere and any height in the world that you wish to get". Before he said that, I was being discouraged, thinking that since I failed to graduate with a First Class degree it would be difficult for me to achieve my career goals. Later on, Dr. Tony, told me what I needed to do to apply for a scholarship to enter a graduate school in the United States. And here I am today,  8 years later, a Ph.D. student in a high-ranked university in the United States. 

Any time I think back on these things, it reechoes to me that every person needs a mentor. And this takes us back to the picture posted with this article. That was six years ago, as the president of my community development society group - PEER EDUCATOR TRAINERS - I was speaking to some teenagers in Ilorin, Kwara State Nigeria about the need and how to protect their future. I was telling them is better to avoid premarital sex so they could focus on building the future they desire for themselves. 

The truth about mentorship is this, everybody needs a mentor regardless of our age or achievement. There is always someone who can show us what we need or needn't do to avoid a regretful end but takes us to a rejoiceful destination.