Over the next several years, Lou and Ian spent a considerable amount of time together. Ballantine taught Lou much about the history and, more importantly, the philosophy of book publishing. One of Ballantine’s lessons to Lou was to “zig when everyone else is zagging,” his way of suggesting that the fastest path to success is often to go against the flow. This struck a special chord with Lou. “From the time I started in the business, I’d been hearing about the ‘conventions’ of book publishing. It seemed there were a lot of rules about what you could and couldn’t do, which didn’t seem to make much sense to me, since readers don’t read by rules. Ian didn’t believe any of that, and he’d been overwhelmingly more successful than the people spouting these rules were. Right then, I decided to become a publisher who would publish books I loved with only a nodding glance to ‘the rules.’ ”
The approach served Lou well. He had his first book imprint by the time he was twenty‐six and became deputy publisher at Bantam and then publisher at Berkley Books and Avon Books before turning his attentions to writing. Before Ian Ballantine chose to mentor him, Lou knew he wanted a career in books. But in addition to teaching him the nuances of the industry, Ballantine helped him identify the particular part of publishing that truly brought him to his Element.
The second role of a mentor is encouragement. Mentors lead us to believe that we can achieve something that seemed improbable or impossible to us before we met them. They don’t allow us to succumb to self‐doubt for too long, or the notion that our dreams are too large for us. They stand by to remind us of the skills we already possess and what we can achieve if we continue to work hard.
When Jackie Robinson came to play major‐league baseball in Brooklyn for the Dodgers, he experienced levels of abuse and hardship worthy of Greek tragedy from those who believed a black man shouldn’t be allowed to play in a white man’s league. Robinson bore up under most of this, but at one point, things got so bad that he could barely play the game. The taunts and threats rattled his concentration so badly that he faltered at the plate and in the field. After a particularly bad moment, Pee Wee Reese, the Dodger shortstop, called a time‐out, walked over to Robinson, and offered him encouragement, telling him he was a great ballplayer destined for the Hall of Fame. Years later, during Robinson’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony, he spoke about that moment. “He saved my life and my career that day,” Robinson said from the podium at Cooperstown. “I had lost my confidence, and Pee Wee picked me up with his words of encouragement. He gave me hope when all hope was gone.”
The third role of a mentor is facilitating. Mentors can help lead us toward our Element by offering us advice and techniques, paving the way for us, and even allowing us to falter a bit while standing by to help us recover and learn from our mistakes. These mentors might even be our contemporaries, as was the case with Paul McCartney.
“I remember one weekend John and I took the bus across town to see someone who knew how to play B7 on the guitar,” Paul told me. “The three basic chords you needed to know were E, A, and B7. We didn’t know how to do B7 and this other kid did. So we got the bus to see him, learned the chord, and came back again. So then we could play it too. But basically, mates would show you how to do a particular riff. I remember one night watching a TV show called Oh Boy! Cliff Richard and the Shadows were on, playing ‘Move It.’ It had a great riff. I loved it but didn’t know how to play it. Then I worked it out and ran over to John’s house saying, ‘I’ve got it. I’ve got it.’ That was our only education experience—showing each other how to do things.
“To start with, we were just copying and imitating everyone. I was Little Richard and Elvis. John was Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. I was Phil from the Everly Brothers and John was Don. We just imitated other people and taught each other. This was a big point for us when we were planning the policies at LIPA—the fact that it’s important for students to rub up against people who have actually done or are doing the thing that the students are learning. They don’t really need to tell you much, just show you what they do.”
The fourth role of a mentor is stretching. Effective mentors push us past what we see as our limits. Much as they don’t allow us to succumb to self‐doubt, they also prevent us from doing less with our lives than we can. A true mentor reminds us that our goal should never be to be “average” at our pursuits.
James Earl Jones is known as a superlative actor and one of the great “voices” in contemporary media. Yet most of us never would have heard that voice had it not been for a mentor. One can only imagine what Darth Vader might sound like if Donald Crouch hadn’t entered Jones’s life.
As a child, Jones suffered from crippling self‐consciousness, largely because he stuttered and found it very difficult to speak in front of people. When he got to high school, he found himself in an English class taught by Crouch, a former college professor who had worked with Robert Frost. Crouch discovered that Jones wrote poetry, a fact that Jones kept to himself for fear of ridicule from the other boys in school. “He questioned me about why, if I loved words so much, couldn’t I say them out loud?” Jones says in the book The Person Who Changed My Life: Prominent Americans Recall Their Mentors.
“One day I showed him a poem I had written, and he responded to it by saying that it was too good to be my own work, that I must have copied it from someone. To prove that I hadn’t plagiarized it, he wanted me to recite the poem, by heart, in front of the entire class. I did as he asked, got through it without stuttering, and from then on I had to write more and speak more. This had a tremendous effect on me, and my confidence grew as I learned to express myself comfortably out loud.
“On the last day of school we had our final class outside on the lawn, and Professor Crouch presented me with a gift—a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self‐Reliance. This was invaluable to me because it summed up what he had taught me—self‐reliance. His influence on me was so basic that it extended to all areas of my life. He is the reason I became an actor.”
Mentors serve an invaluable role in helping people get to the Element. It might be overstating things to suggest that the only way to reach the Element is with the help of a mentor, but it is only a mild overstatement. We all encounter multiple roadblocks and constraints on the journey toward finding what we feel we were meant to do. Without a knowledgeable guide to aid us in identifying our passions, to encourage our interests, to smooth our paths, and to push us to make the most of our capacities, the journey is considerably harder.
Mentorship is of course a two‐way street. As important as it is to have a mentor in your life, it is equally important to fulfill these roles for other people. It is even possible that you’ll find that your own real Element is as a mentor to other people.
Anthony Robbins is one of the world’s most successful personal coaches and mentors, often credited with laying the foundations for the personal coaching profession. This sector is growing exponentially around the world and has become a multimillion‐dollar industry. All of this speaks eloquently to the appetite for mentoring and coaching and to the profound roles these can fulfill in many of our lives. More and more people are discovering that being a mentor, for them, is being in the Element.