Tribe Of Mentors

Tribe of Mentors is a collection of over 100 mini-interviews, where some of the world’s most successful people share their ideas around habits, learning, money, relationships, failure, success, and life.

Rick Rubin is a legend in the music business. The producer has worked with artists from every genre under the sun, ranging from Linkin Park to Johnny Cash, Shakira and Eminem. After dozens of award-winning albums, Rubin has learned one thing: you can’t control the audience. Great records might flop, mediocre ones can take off. All you can do is set yourself the highest standard possible and stick to it.

Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art, likes to use failure as an inflection point. If you continue to strike out, maybe it’s time to change the plan and work on a new aspect of your craft. Having been rejected by publishers for 15 years, Steve decided to toss it all for a while, move to Hollywood and learn screenwriting, which later helped him a lot in writing novels.

Another valuable lecture about failure happened upon the Beastie Boys, when their second album tanked: it gives you artistic freedom. Once you’ve hit rock bottom, you’re free to be as creative and bold as you want, because no one expects great things from you anyway.

To sum up, with each failure come three great opportunities:

Learn to see what you control. Figure out where you need to improve. Freely express your ideas.

The more you penetrate your field and establish yourself as an authority, the more people will clamor for your attention. It is usually right when exponential growth is about to kick in and thinking becomes more important, that the world will fight hard to keep you from it. We all know what the solution to this dilemma is – saying no – but it’s very hard to actually practice. One way to consistently keep your commitments in check is to find new ways to say no in order to be more aware and let less yeses slip through the cracks. Here are some Tim’s idols suggested: Hire someone to manage your mail and appointments and train them to say no to 99% of all incoming requests. If you can’t afford staff, pretend you’re the security professional and screen your mail as if you had to protect yourself. Ask yourself whether you’re only thinking about agreeing because you feel guilty or afraid. Those aren’t good reasons. Imagine the event happens early the next morning and you’d be in a huge rush to go. Would you still want to? No is a powerful world, but there’s another side to this story: Gary Vaynerchuk, digital marketing genius, says he still reserves…