by Voyage | Jun 25, 2015 | Audience, Entertainment Business
One of the worst things that a screenwriter or an author or any content creator can do in their career is operate in a vacuum or think that they’ve got to figure everything out on their own and learn everything by themselves. For some reason, content creators take it upon themselves to think of their pursuit as a lonely one – like this romantic image of a writer stuck in a hotel room in a foreign country writing by himself. If you’re a content creator looking to achieve a result in Hollywood, then you’re going to be really well served to not just learn on your own, but learn from other people’s mistakes and successes and then leverage that learning into your own career. What Makes a Good Mentor There’s a world-renowned success psychologist named Martin Seligman and one of the things that he modeled or created was a framework for identifying who’s a mentor. In other words, who’s worth listening to and who’s not? He said a mentor, a quality mentor who can help you achieve a significant result or a significant outcome, has to satisfy one or more of the following three things. 1) They have to have done successfully what it is you’re trying to do. 2) They have to have helped others achieve success – helped other successfully do exactly what it is you’re trying to do. 3) They are world renowned experts in the field. Anyone who does not satisfy one or more of those equations is not a mentor worth listening to. If they’re not meeting one or more of those equations, they’re...
