Stop chasing mentors and start earning them through value

Strong mentor ties rarely start with the question, “Will you be my mentor?” They start when someone makes your work easier. Imagine opening your inbox to a tidy one‑pager that summarizes three months of scattered notes into a clean brief with sources, then a polite question you can answer in five minutes. You help because it’s already useful.

That’s how Ravi caught a director’s attention. He noticed the team was debating next steps without a shared picture of the problem. He built one page, sent it with a calm note—“This might help you prep for Thursday”—and asked a single question about success criteria. The director used the page in the meeting and replied, “What are you trying next?” Ravi closed the loop a week later: “We tried option B, here’s what happened.”

A micro‑anecdote: a grad student sent a senior researcher a crisp replication of a figure, then asked one question about a method choice. The researcher wrote back the same day, and two months later invited the student to co‑author a short note. No big ask, just a series of useful touches.

The science is prosaic. Mentors invest where they see performance and potential, and where the cost of helping is low and the payoff is visible. Reciprocity is a basic social rule: we help those who help us. Vague asks are high‑cost and low‑signal. Useful briefs, focused questions, and closed loops flip the equation. Over time, the label “mentor” matters less than the reality: a senior person who answers because you make doing so worth it.

Pick one senior person whose work you can materially support and deliver a small win, like a clean brief or a correct data pull. Ask one pointed question that a five‑minute answer can improve, then report back within a week on what you tried and what happened. Repeat sparingly so each touch is useful and closes the loop. You’ll find that mentorship grows out of shared wins, not labels. Draft that one‑pager this afternoon.