Your Ideal Mentor

[techhelpbb]

The four functional types that make innovation happen:
http://www.fastcompany.com/3009426/l...ovation-happen

Let us consider the issue with 'the perfect fit'. It is the equivalent of the 'overnight success'.

Ask Dean about overnight success:
http://www.kauffman.org/InfectiousTa...r,-invent.aspx

I've been doing this on and off for 17+ years. The sort of perseverance to prove you can make this work and that was required early on, has now given way to dogged determination to do the best you can as the challenge to bypass the critics gives way. Critics have it easy: it's an easy job and there's hardly a shortage.

Diversity, which brings so many strange fits and effort to absorb those differences, brings with it greater opportunity for ideas from angles that others simply are not considering.

Time matters: be it time to communicate, time to work, time to joke.

Ultimately, however, commitment is commitment.
Show me commitment and I will find opportunity.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Theodore Roosevelt

[mdiradoorian]

For me, (not speaking for my team) the ideal mentor would be someone who has a decent amount of FIRST knowledge on how to compete and be successful. Also who is capable and assisting the design and manufacturing process. It also would not hurt if this mentor is fun and caring of his students and team members on their well being. I am looking at this from the eyes of a four year veteran on my team and after seeing different kinds of mentors and also how I would like to be as I move forward into becoming a mentor whether it would be the team I started out with FIRST or it be another team that needs my assistance more.