Quick question!

From your second post, it sounds like you may be looking for something like an internship. Another way to go might be to work as a virtual assistant.

Finding a mentor that can recognize your talents and guide you toward your "best path" can be difficult and frustrating. With little experience, you may be a long way down a particular path before you realize that it isn't one you like or have an affinity for. Strangely, most "pupils" take a lot longer than a good mentor to discover what an iindividual is best at doing, but this does take a fair bit of time and close association.

There is a lot of learning in the process, and during the initial learning phase (pretending for a moment that learning tapers off after awhile) it takes a lot of the mentors' time, just to provide the basics of each process. Once you "get it" and can perform certain tasks with little supervision, there are always more challenges.

The problems with mentoring in the IM world are that you are operating in a long distance relationship and usually need to have some sort of idea of the direction you want before you can be really effective and learn what you want to without becoming frustrated with your (apparrent lack of ) progress, as the assigned tasks are often repetitive and seemingly meaningless. There are so many mundane tasks to learn along the way it is easy to become disillusioned when things don't seem to be progressing. This is quite contrary to the typical "direct mentoring" of a typical "brick and mortar" type environment, where the mentor can evaluate your actions and gude your tasks to more easily develop your innate talents. As you can see, the actions of a truly good long distance mentor are quite a bit more difficult than those of the typical workplace. IM and the internet once again complicate what used to be relatively easy and simple.

Sometimes (often) mentoring happens without the recipient requesting it. Fifteen years ago, I had several "pupils" that I mentored in the Information Technology field that didn't even know I was acting as a mentor for the first six months or so. They each realized and recognized the process at different times, and to my knowledge never disclosed that to the others (perhaps it never came up in general conversation?). At any rate, each of them took a separate and specific path in IT that fit their own desires, capabilities and sensibilities, without specifically starting out with that as a goal. Such can be the benefit of a mentor that recognizes the specific talents of an individual and helps bring them out. At this point in my life and career, I probably wouldn't do an individual mentoring without a lot of interaction up front. On the other hand, I've had a less specific, more generic and less demanding (for the pupil) mentoring program delivered through a membership site in development for a while now. If my initial tests prove there is enough demand, I'll probably offer it to the public get it out in a month or two... (However, a start in January, after all the holidays might be better overall for everyone...)

But I digress. Getting back to your original issues, finding a mentor that can provide guidance and experience in IM...

If you don't get any offers from this thread that seem to go where your want, check out other posts in this forum, along with WSOs and Warrior Room to see what seems to "click" with your needs and desires. If you find one or two vendors that seem to provide the direction you are looking for, you may want to purchase one or two of their products. Often, (from a long distance perspective) you can learn quite a lot by reading and implementing some of these products. It's not the same as one-on-one mentoring, but can provide much of the same results. Once you have contact with vendors that seem to match your needs, you may find these same vendors have mentoring programs that make sense for you...

So it's like your mentor is training you for free, correct? I guess it's still best if you post a question on a thread, and make others comment about it. Check each comment if it really does improve things on your side. Atleast you have tons of advices unlike getting one from a single expert.