I’ve never had a mentor as an adult. I’m not even sure what the official definition of a mentor is.

Yet it seems that mentoring has become sort of a buzz word. I hear people say, “You need to have a mentor,” or “I had a great mentor who taught me a lot about business.”

But what does this relationship entail and how does it come about? Are you suppose to ask someone to mentor you? Is someone older and wiser suppose to seek you out and offer to mentor you? I guess I don’t understand proper mentoring protocol.

I’m not the only one who’s confused (surprising, isn’t it?).

Last week I was talking to a friend who also has never had a mentor. He too was confused about the dynamics of this kind of relationship. So maybe a lot of people are without mentors.

What do you think? Do you have a mentor? If so, how did this relationship develop and has it been beneficial?

On a recent trip to Philadelphia, I met a homeless couple on the street near our hotel.

David and Alicia recently moved from New Jersey to Philly looking for work. They have a three year old son and Alicia recently gave birth to what would have been twins if one hadn’t died in the womb. The surviving twin was born with multiple deformities and diseases. They didn’t say where the surviving infant was, but I’m assuming she is in the state’s care.

David and Alicia’s three year old son was recently taken away from them after they tried to check into a Philadelphia shelter. They were turned away and the shelter alerted the Department of Human Services. The shelter wouldn’t take them in because apparently you have to live in Philly for at least 30 days before a shelter will house you. So, they are being forced to live on the street until May 26th.

There’s no doubt that drugs had a hand in creating their present reality, but that morning, I could tell they were both sober. David told me they had been clean for over a year. I believe him.

The first time I saw them I was taking a short walk before our team met for breakfast. It was all I could do to ignore them as I walked by. There was just something different about them. Something about the innocent desperation in David’s eyes. But I forced myself to keep walking, justifying my callousness by thinking there’s nothing keeping him from getting up off that sidewalk and finding a job. What do I know.

I went back to our hotel room where the team was eating breakfast. We had a lot of uneaten food, more food than David and Alicia had probably eaten in the past two weeks. So I bagged it up and took it downstairs, hoping David and Alicia were still there.

They were.

What followed was one of the most heart-wrenching conversations I’ve had in a long time. This couple was sleeping in a park, had no money, just had their three year old son taken away from them, and somewhere their handicapped baby was living in state custody.

I gave them the food and a little cash, shook their hands and left. As I was getting up, David peeked in the bag. I’ve never seen a grown man be so excited about a bag of apples, muffins and granola bars. I hope it made their day on the street just a little easier.

So tonight, as I curl up in my warm bed I will remember David and Alicia sleeping in the park. I will remember the marginalized. Remember that everyone has a story. And I will remember that everyone deserves a chance to tell that story.

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.“
~ Henry David Thoreau

Simplicity is much harder to achieve than complexity.

It’s easy to make something complicated. It’s much harder to make it simple.

On the surface, this might sound like a contradiction. But it’s true.

Take Google for example.

I recently listened to Larry Page, co-founder of Google, give a commencement speech to the 2009 graduates of the University of Michigan. He described Google’s mission to “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” This is an extremely simple way to describe an incredibly complicated idea.

When I think about Google, I visualize the homepage with one search field surrounded by a sea of white nothingness. The homepage hasn’t changed much (if at all) in years.

Simple and effective.

Sure, the people at Google could get all excited and add tons of new features and gadgets to the homepage and probably drive a lot more traffic…for a while. But then it would start to look and feel like every other search engine.

Just for fun, compare Google’s home page to msn.com or yahoo.com.

Google made a conscience choice to pursue simplicity emphatically. I’d say it has paid off.

So how do you take a complicated idea and make it simple?

I’ll tell you how I try to do it. In the midst of the excitement/confusion/storming of an idea, I try to mentally separate myself from the discussion and ask a question that opposes where the idea is headed. This is sometimes called “dissent” or being the “devil’s advocate.” It forces you to think in a different way than you were before. Often, this new thought map leads to an insight that was missing in the previous line of thinking. And that insight is usually much simpler and more directed than the one before it.

Simplicity can sometimes be complicated to acheive. But it is always worth it.

I love this quote from Teddy Roosevelt:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

Is it fair to say that everyone wants to do something spectacular?  Something that makes a big splash?  Something significant?

I don’t know if it’s true for everyone, but it is definitely true for me.  I really want to make an impact by challenging the status quo and breaking through the mediocrity of tired ideas.

But what does it take to do that?  And why do so many of us settle for less?

I think it’s partly because it is so easy to get comfortable with the way things are.  It takes time, energy and a plan to do something great. We have to be intentional about how we use our precious “free” time. In my experience, it’s time that might be spent doing irrelevant, unproductive things anyway (like surfing Facebook). It also takes a willingness to fail (see my post on failure). The best way to come up with a great idea is to first come up with a hundred failed ones.

Another reason I think so many of us never reach our potential is because we are constantly distracted. Especially in the uber-connected world we live in today. For instance, at this moment, I have six tabs open in Firefox, I’m listening to iTunes, uploading a video to Vimeo, checking new Tweets in TweetDeck, and writing this blog. It is amazing how refreshing it can be to completely disconnect from your digital life for a day. Try it sometime.

A lot of us don’t believe we are capable of doing something great. We’re just average people. I think this is crap. Everyone has a story. Everyone has potential creative energy stored inside.

We can also get caught up in criticizing those before us who have tried and failed. It gives us a great excuse to not expose ourselves to failure. It’s much easier to be a critic than a craftsman. They may have failed, but I guarantee you they learned invaluable lessons in the process. Failure is an amazing teacher.

Like Teddy says, greatness can only happen when we actually get in the fight. And it will feel like a fight most of the time. It takes a scrappy resolve to do something great.

So the question is, what’s holding you back from getting in the fight?