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“Becoming wealthy is a full-time job.” (Author: Chris Welch , Source: Investor Geeks)

Here’s my response to Welch’s article on mentors (with some minor edits):

I’ve been looking for a single financial mentor for a couple of years now. What I’ve found is that I have many minor mentors but no single major mentor. That is, I discuss targeted topics with specific people, but no one person seems to have a broad enough perspective to suit my needs, or personality. I often know more about certain topics than many potential mentors. In fact, some people seek me out for financial advice.

Interestingly, I have found that a couple of my mentors are virtual. My knowledge and guidance comes from financial newsletters, written by very smart folks that I have come to trust over time. Typically these people are savvy at sales and marketing but they do stay humble and maintain end user focus. They tend to explain how they are strong and weak, versus always trying to display victory or success.

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So, on the topic of usability, who is your mentor? Think of what you might learn from someone who has been in the trenches for years and has little interest in selling you any other products or services. What if this mentor was available to answer tough usability career questions, such as how to better position UX your organization, or how to get UX into a company in the first place.

I suppose I’ll cast out a line here. I’ve been thinking about offering usability mentoring services. I have no clue if this kind of mentoring service is needed in the marketplace, but I do know that people need help. Not help in actually getting usability done, that’s easy, but instead how to understand how UX fits in organizations, and what it means as a career.

If you’re interested in this kind of service, email me: john dot rhodes at gmail dot com.

If you have opinions, be sure to comment.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 29th, 2006 at 11:54 am and is filed under Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.