Recently updated on: February 12, 2024
We all heard about the importance of having a mentor, but have you considered that you also need an anti-mentor?
We all know the importance of having a mentor and their significant contribution to our career and personal development. Mentors can shorten our learning curve because they have already accomplished some of the things we want to achieve.
However, we also need anti-mentors to balance our learning. In this post, I'll discuss about anti-mentors and why we need them.
Table of Contents
- What Is an Anti-Mentor?
- Survivorship Bias and Mentorship
- What Does an Anti-Mentor Do?
- Why You Need an Anti-Mentor in Your Life.
- Final Thought
What Is an Anti-Mentor?
Like its name, an anti-mentor is the opposite of your traditional mentor. Instead of following in their footsteps to shorten your learning curve, anti-mentors are people we DO NOT want to copy and emulate.
If you think about it, there are people you don't want to be associated with to avoid the mistakes or failures that they encounter.
For instance, if you want to grow in your career, you would like a mentor who already accomplished what you like and will follow their footsteps.
You want to follow their habits and find similar stepping stones that can boost your professional life.
On the other hand, there are also people whom you want to avoid following professionally, especially if they are trapped in an entry-level position for decades. In this case, you also need to know and understand why that happened to them.
Survivorship Bias and Mentorship
In mentorship, as much as you want to copy the exact path of the best mentors, you should also understand the concept of survivorship bias. This fallacy involves focusing on the people who "made it" and ultimately forgetting about those who failed.
Going back to the career example, you may want to follow your mentor's path as much as possible, but in their case, there were also people who started the same way but eventually failed. This failure may have stemmed from external circumstances or by their own doing.
So, if you're only looking at your traditional mentors, you will fail to realize that it's also essential to look at how an anti-mentor -- someone who you don't want to be when you grow up.
What Does an Anti-Mentor Do?
Before you can find an anti-mentor, you should know how to spot them. Here are some of the things that a great anti-mentor will do.
1. They provide bad advice.
Anti-mentors can't give sound advice that you'll want to follow.
For instance, if you want to learn more about starting a business and someone says that paying taxes is unimportant, that qualifies as bad advice because you'll put yourself in a dangerous position if you're caught not paying taxes.
You can listen to what they say; just don't follow them.
Instead, list the things you should avoid because they are as important as what you would hear from your traditional mentors.
2. They engage in toxic behavior.
Anti-mentors have toxic behaviors that you wouldn't want to emulate. For instance, in a professional setting, anti-mentors would do wrong things just to get ahead, like lying and cheating, but are always looking over their shoulders. Anti-mentors can also be manipulators and spread negativity.
3. They hold back other people.
Anti-mentors are skilled at ensuring that they will always be ahead at the expense of other people. They can make you doubt your abilities, discourage you from improving, and even sabotage your progress.
4. They set as a bad role model.
Overall, anti-mentors are lousy role models, ironically making them "great" models on who to avoid.
They are the people you don't want to work with, converse with, or generally be with. Just keep your distance from them, or they can influence you negatively.
Why You Need an Anti-Mentor
While it may seem bad to surround ourselves with bad examples and anti-mentors, they still offer some value in our lives - as long as we don't follow them.
You will know what NOT to do.
Having an anti-mentor means you can shorten your learning curve by avoiding costly mistakes that they have made in their career or personal life.
For instance, if you want to develop a great relationship with your spouse. While it's crucial to have great examples and relationship mentors, it's also essential to look at the people who had failed marriages, look at the wrong things they have done, and avoid them.
Another is in your job. You may see people who have yet to get promoted and sat on their low-paying jobs for so long. You may learn what happened so you can avoid them.
In the early stage of my professional life, I learned that people deep in debt are more likely to settle on their jobs because they are afraid of missing payments. Knowing that debt can have long-term effects taught me to avoid it, so I am more free to choose today.
You can grow and become better faster.
Before taking advantage of the life lessons you can learn from an anti-mentor, you must solidify your principles first.
You need to know what you want to be and what you wish to accomplish.
So, once you see people doing the exact opposite of your goals, you can observe their habits, principles, decision-making process, and other clues that may have caused them to move in the direction where they are now.
Remember, you can't move positively as long as you're with negative people. Just observe and apply the opposite of what your anti-mentors are doing, and you'll grow faster.
Final Thought
We need to have mentors who will guide us through their years of wisdom, good habits, and other things that will help us grow in our personal and professional lives.
However, at the same time, we also need to have anti-mentors, who will also guide us on the things we need to avoid to ensure that we will be safe from the traps and mistakes they took.
Just ensure to always be on the lookout and limit spending time with them because you may accidentally acquire some of the traits you intended to avoid.
As iron sharpens iron,
Proverbs 27:17 NIV
so one person sharpens another.