How to Network Your Way to World-Class Mentors: The Thiel Fellowship Lecture …

Last year, PayPal cofounder and first outside Facebook investor Peter Thiel made waves when he announced the Thiel Fellowship, a program to pay twenty people under the age of twenty $100,000 each to leave formal schooling and learn in the real world, not in the classroom.

In May of this year, the Thiel Foundation announced 24 brilliant young inaugural recipients of the Fellowship. In June, they held they held their first retreat together, at the Headlands Institute in Sausalito, CA. I had the privilege of delivering the presentation below to the Fellows.

My talk was aimed at helping the Fellows see that—like all people, young and old, in college and out of college—they will get their education by finding great mentors and teachers. The difference between them, and their peers in college, is that they are getting a head start in learning how to find mentors and teachers outside of the classroom, out in the real world.

This is an absolutely critical skill for all of us to learn, whether we’ve been to college or not. I share my best secrets for learning that skill here, in 3 parts, in video (50 min) and edited transcription.

(For fun, you’ll see me on-the-spot with two live demonstrations of how I do this at networking events.)

Part 1, below, contains an overview. You can also watch the full 50 min video of the presentation below.

Part 2 of the transcript teaches you how to attract great mentors and teachers by giving them quality advice. (Huh? Giving advice to people you want to get advice from? That’s the great secret. Keep reading/watching and it will all become clear.) Includes one live demonstration.

Part 3 of the transcript teaches you how to attract great mentors by connecting them to other people in your already-existing network. Includes the second live demonstration.

[Disclosures: the Thiel Foundation paid my roundtrip airfare, NYC to SF, so I could deliver this presentation. I did not accept any speaker fee or honorarium for this talk. Earlier, I interviewed Peter Thiel for my upcoming book, and he subsequently endorsed it. I edited the transcription of my talk substantially for better readability and flow, and I also corrected a few minor factual errors in my talk.]

Enjoy!

We’re here tonight to explode a myth. This is a complete BS lie of a myth that most of the culture believes. And all of you here tonight are at the forefront of challenging this myth.

And the myth is this: because you are not getting a college education, supposedly that means you are not getting any education at all.

There are people out there who hate Peter Thiel’s guts for even daring to suggest that smart young people such as yourselves not go to college. In Slate magazine, for example, the editor-in-chief, Jacob Weisberg, called the Thiel Fellowship “nasty” and “appalling.” And people have written that you smart young people I’ve been getting to know this weekend are actually fools for taking Thiel up on his offer, and that you all are basically going to end up as garbage people because you don’t have a college degree. [Laughter.]

If even one molecule, one cell of you believes that myth—that you’re not getting an education because you happen to not go to college—you’re not going to accomplish what you want to accomplish.

The myth says, essentially, the only way to get an education is to go through a formalized schooling process that ends in college or graduate school. I want to reframe that for you tonight.

What I suggest instead is that the only way we can get an education—you, me, all of us in this room, anyone at all—is by finding people who are smarter, more accomplished, and wiser than ourselves, and hanging around them, soaking up their wisdom, and taking in their teachings.

That’s the essence of education.

Now one way to expose yourself to wiser, smarter, more experienced people is to go to college. That’s the way that most people do it, and that’s the way society says you have to do it. And of course, professors are some of the smartest people on the planet—a lot of them have done amazing things. However, I think that for a lot of people, it’s a very inefficient way to get an education.

The reason is, most professors, as brilliant as they are—and there are exceptions to what I’m about to say—but a lot of them haven’t actually accomplished much in the real world, outside of academia.

They went through schooling, they went through college, a lot of them went straight from college into graduate school. They went straight from graduate school into some kind of teaching. They’ve pretty much existed their whole life in this very comfortable, relatively cushy environment that is governed by bureaucratic rules and is highly insulated from the realities of making your way in a business or marketplace.

Now there are certain areas where that is a great place to learn. If you are going into the hard sciences, for example, you can meet people who have gone really far in their field. But if what you’re interested in starting a business—and that’s what all of you here are interested in—most of the people in academia (again there are exceptions) don’t know business from their elbow.

They collect their checks. They have their tenure track. Once they get tenure, there’s almost nothing they could do to get fired. They could run down their campus naked doing cartwheels and they could not get fired.

That’s just not the reality of business. The reality of business is that if you mess up, your customers fire you. So my argument tonight is that you are interested in starting a business—which is why you are all here—then academia is the wrong set of mentors for you to hang around, because they don’t know anything about business, for the most part.

Even a lot of people in business school. One of the guys I interviewed for my book—he said he was getting an undergraduate degree in business and he decided to drop out, because he was parking in the same parking lot as these business professors. And he was driving the kind of beat-up used car that students tend to have. And he noticed that it was basically the same kind of car the professors were driving, these used Honda Accords. And he’s like, “Wait a minute!” Not to say that you should judge your status by cars [laughter]. But it’s kind of telling.

So the way you get an education is by finding people who are experienced in the areas that you want to be experienced. And you hang around them and you learn from them.

Now here’s the tricky part: when you go to college, those older wiser mentors are basically fed to you on a silver platter. You go there and the first thing that happens is either you are your parents write a big fat check, and that goes into the college, and it pays their salary, and you get this nice fat course book that tells you the times where all of the professors are. You get to choose, like a menu, which ones you’ll learn from.

And as long as you are in good standing, they have to provide some type of mentorship. They have to have some office hours or something—basically, it’s handed to you. So one thing your peers who are going through the college system are not learning is how you actually go and find mentors in the real world. Because I guarantee you, the people you want to be learning from in your business, they don’t have office hours. And they don’t have the little course book that says where you can sign up to take their course.

So that’s actually a real skill that your peers are not learning in school, and that you are going to have to learn if you want to be successful: how to go and find these mentors that are going to take you under their wing, and persuade them to mentor you.

That’s what we’re going to be talking about tonight. I’m going to be giving you some real practical tips on how you can go about finding these mentors. We’re going to do some exercises also.

So how do you find these mentors, these advisors, these people who are going to help you?

Next: The Secret of Finding Great Mentors and Teachers, Revealed

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Local teachers banned from ‘friending’ students on Facebook

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By Margo Rutledge Kissell,

Staff Writer

Updated 8:09 AM Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Employees in the Dayton Public School District are no longer allowed to “friend” students on Facebook.

Teachers aren’t permitted to instant message or text their students either, or “respond to student-initiated attempts at conversation through nondistrict approved media, whether personal or professional accounts.”

Many area districts, including Kettering and Northmont, have Internet safety policies, but nothing specific to online relationships between teachers and students on Facebook.

DPS spokeswoman Jill Moberley said the policy sets parameters for use on social networks.

Dayton Public took direction from the Ohio School Boards Association, which is seeing more interest from school districts on the issue.

Kettering City Schools launched a district Facebook page this summer. Spokeswoman Kari Basson said “we do not have anything specific to Facebook and ‘friending,’ but that may be something that will evolve.”

Other districts such as Beaver
creek, Hamilton, Lakota and Middletown prohibit staff members from accessing social network sites during school hours and on district equipment.

Hollie Reedy, chief legal counsel for the OSBA, said school districts cannot ignore the use of social media as a tool of communication, but “as with any medium of communication, it can be misused.”

In Missouri, lawmakers banned teachers from having private conversations with students over Internet sites after 87 Missouri teachers had lost their licenses between 2001 and 2005 because of sexual misconduct, some of which involved exchanging explicit online messages with students.

Missouri’s governor wants lawmakers to repeal the controversial law after a judge, concerned about the impact on free speech rights, issued a preliminary injunction blocking it from taking effect.

Many teachers there are protesting the new restrictions, complaining the law will hurt their ability to keep in touch with students.

But here in Dayton, the teachers’ union president welcomes the district’s updated social media policy.

“I think in this age of all this media out there, that’s probably a safe thing for our teachers,” said David Romick, president of the Dayton Education Association. “We hear stories all the time about kids who, for various reasons, (retaliate) against teachers on social media.”

OSBA’s updated sample policy has four sections that districts can choose to adopt or customize, but nothing is mandatory. Suggested language includes:

• District staff who have a presence on social networking websites are prohibited from posting data, documents, photographs or inappropriate information on any website that might result in a disruption of classroom activity. The superintendent/desginee has full discretion in determining when a disruption of classroom activity has occurred.

• District staff is prohibited from providing personal social networking website passwords to students.

• Fraternization between district staff and students via the Internet, personal email accounts, personal social networking websites and other modes of virtual technology is also prohibited.

• Access of personal social networking websites during school hours is prohibited.

The policy further states that violation of the listed prohibitions will result in staff and/or student discipline and that nothing in the policy prohibits district staff and students from using education websites and/or social networking websites created for curricular, cocurricular or extracurricular purposes.

Reedy said OSBA offers options in its policy to allow access through district-sponsored or district-created websites.

For instance, a coach may use it to announce that practice has been canceled.

“Sometimes that’s a one-way communication where the teacher is saying ‘Hey, do chapter 4 for tomorrow.’ It can be two-way, but what it’s doing is separating personal” from business, she said. “It protects the district, it protects the teacher and it protects the students.”

Beavercreek City Schools Superintendent Nick Verhoff said the district’s updated policy includes defining social media as Internet-based applications such as Facebook and Twitter that turn communication into interactive dialogue between users.

“The board authorizes the instructional staff to access social media from the district’s network, provided such access has an educational purpose for which the staff members has received the prior approval from the principal.

“However, personal access and use of social media, blogs, or chat rooms from the district’s network is expressly prohibited and shall subject students and staff members to discipline in accordance with board policy,” Verhoff said.

Patrick Gallaway, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Education, said there is a professional behavior code that teachers are to adhere to, and part of the code states “using technology to intentionally host or post improper or inappropriate material that could reasonably be accessed by the school community.”

“While it doesn’t express that you can’t do this or say this,” Gallaway said, “people should use common sense. … You’re not friends in the classroom. You’re instructors. Your one purpose as an educator is to provide quality instruction for students.”

Staff writers Jill Kelley and Steven Matthews and The Associated Press contributed to this report. Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2094 or mkissell@DaytonDailyNews.com.

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