Sometimes you’ve just gotta take a leap of faith…
I’ve heard a lot over the years of how important it is to have mentors and people you look up to. Over time I’ve begun to realise how important that can be for many reasons. Mentors are essential not just in business endeavours but in everyday life. Aside from the learning benefit of a mentor, they can also go on to become genuine life friends sharing similar passions, motivation and lifestyle choices. Personally I think the friendship side is more important. It’s difficult to come across people who share our interests and beliefs, so when you do you should make the most of it, and from the perspective of friendship the relationship can benefit from mutual respect and not be one sided.
With that being I’ve recently come across someone who I found very inspirational. As I read about them I discovered not only a parallel in terms of passion for indie dev but also in so many other areas of life too. I have a lot of personal interests and a lot of close lifelong friends. We share a lot of similar interests but not all interests overlap. However I found an incredible amount of overlap with this other indie dev. I genuinely wanted to chat with them about a lot of our shared interests. But how do you go about approaching someone who has never met you, telling them we share a lot of interests without sounding like a creep or that you’re just after something?
I’m not the most outwards person so it doesn’t come that naturally to just reach out to strangers however I really felt we could genuinely have a lot to discuss. So I thought what the hell! I knocked up an email describing myself, how I came across them, my interests and the fact that I’d like to consider them a mentor if that was OK with them and if not to just chat about similar interests. I wasn’t sure if I’d hear anything back and I would completely understand…
But a couple of days later I had a reply! I know how busy this individual is so it felt really nice that they took the time to respond, and what was even nicer was they were really appreciative of my email. I’m really looking forward to being able to chat with someone I respect on similar interests and hopefully we can both help each other out.
So it just goes to show it’s worth just giving it a shot sometimes.
Thanks
Stav