One of the most common questions we get or emails  I get is, "Robert, can you be my mentor?" No. No.   I'm way too busy. I have a lot of stuff going  on. Biggest myth with mentorship is that you   need a guy from Shark Tank to be your mentor, or  you need some celebrity or some leader everybody   knows. The entire role of a mentor is to teach  you something that helps you at this point in   your career. You can learn from anybody. The second myth of mentorship is that it's a   constant. It's just not true. When you're  23 and starting in an organization,   the advice you need is going to be completely  different than when you're a senior vice president   at 45 in an organization. So your mentors,  like your life, will change over time.   One of the other big myths is that there  is a formal process of being a mentor,   that you somehow sign this invisible contract or  something that you're a mentor. Some of my biggest   mentors in my life had no idea they were mentors  to me. Like, one of the biggest mentors I ever had   was Warren Avis, the guy who started Avis Rent A  Car. I mean, if he was still alive today and you   asked him, "Were you a mentor to Robert?" He would  say, "I have no idea what you're talking about."   Mentorship sometimes is simply by watching,  learning, and osmosis by taking it all in. So it   doesn't have to be a formal relationship. You can  just learn, read, engage in many, many different   ways, especially today with YouTube. I've done  thousands of hours of YouTube videos. There's   probably no question you want to ask me I haven't  answered somewhere out there in the world.

The first key to learning and finding a mentor is  to be completely open to it. Ego has killed more   careers than anything else in the world. As great  as you are, as incredible as you are, as great as   your idea is, a little bit of humility helps. The  first key to it is being open to the idea that you   may not have all the answers. And it's great to  be confident. It's bad to be arrogant. You can't   learn from the world if you feel the world has  nothing to teach you. Mentorship is really about   learning. It's about being a constant learner  in life, and you can learn from everybody. One   of the greatest lessons I ever learned was from  a janitor, who had an incredible work discipline   and a really fanatical drive for perfection and  constant improvement. So it's all around you.   This idea of mentorship or opportunity was really  driven home to me by somebody I considered a   mentor who told me about the red car theory. So  if I asked you today how many red cars you saw   on the way to work, you probably would think  about it. You'd say, "I don't really know.   Maybe I saw a couple. I'm sure I saw a couple."  But you wouldn't know. But if I said to you,   "Tomorrow on the way to work, count the  amount of red cars that you're going to see,"   you would do it. Opportunity is like that, and  mentorship is like that. When you're open to it,   it's all around you. So be open to it, look  for it, and then never be afraid to ask.   My general experience in life is while there  are people who go home and beat their dogs,   and they're not nice people, 98 percent of the  people I've encountered are super nice. And if   you ask for help, most of the time, people will  help you. So never be afraid to ask for help.   What is the key to a great mentor, mentee — always  a funny word. It's like manatee. I don't know why.   I always think of the word manatee. Relationship.  Number one is respect for time. I am a very, very   busy guy. Now I don't mean that in an arrogant  way. And if I have free time, you know what I want   to do? I want to hang out with my kids. I probably  don't want to hang out with with you. So number   one, it's respecting the mentor's time. The other  one is finding the right time to ask the right   questions. And, you know, things that are natural  and flow in the course of a relationship work out   really well and knowing how to communicate. I'll give you an example. Mark Cuban doesn't talk   on the phone ever. He hates talking on the  phone. But if I emailed him at 10:30 tonight,   he'd get back to me within three minutes. So it's  knowing how to communicate with somebody, and   I'm the same way. I hate talking to people on the  phone because a phone call requires me to disrupt   my day in order to talk to you, whereas an email,  I can respond to in the right amount of time.   And I think the other one is there's an element  of personal and work. There's a line. You know?   People often say at work that work is like we're  one big family, and the reality is we're not.   You know? My company was not my family. It was a  business. My family was my family. And so there's   always that line that made me uncomfortable where  people wanted to cross it at night or at certain   times that took away from my family. So I think  it's clearly understanding what the boundaries   are, and everyone is different. Some people are  incredibly social, and they want you calling them   on the weekends. I don't want you calling me  on a weekend. So it's just understanding that.   But I'm also up at five o'clock in the morning  every day, and, typically, I don't get bombarded   with emails at nine. So if you reach out to me  between five and nine, that's a great time for me.   But that's on you. You have to know how I work in  order to get the most effect from me to help you.