I Never Looked for a Mentor. And Yet.

I never made any real effort to find a mentor. No methodical search, no LinkedIn message sent to someone I admired, no paid coaching program. None of the things you usually read about on the topic.

And yet, looking back, I had several.

I was lucky enough to grow up with successful entrepreneurs in my immediate family. That's not an achievement, it's an accident of birth. But that accident has an effect we tend to underestimate: my social circle naturally filled up with people who run businesses. Not because I sought them out. Because it was already there, around me, before I even understood what it meant.

Not everyone around you mentors

I want to be precise on one point, because this is where a lot of articles on mentorship move too fast. Being surrounded by entrepreneurs doesn't mean being surrounded by mentors.

Some people in my circle, despite their success, share almost nothing. Not their knowledge, not their failures, not the real mechanics behind their results. Success can be visible without ever being transmitted. That's not a judgment, not everyone wants or has the time to teach what they know.

Others do it without even thinking about it. It's not a mentor persona they put on. It's just become a reflex, almost a way of talking.

The real ingredient isn't the title. It's the conversation that naturally drifts.

What mattered most in my journey was never a structured session with an agenda. It's the family dinner where the conversation drifts, without anyone deciding it should, toward a business decision someone just made. It's drinks with friends that never stay just catching up, because entrepreneurship is part of everyone's daily life at that table, so it always finds its way into the conversation.

Small confession here: when I was younger, whenever the older generation's conversations drifted toward business, I'd sigh inside, and sometimes out loud. Ugh, here we go, they're going to talk shop again! Today it's the exact opposite. I no longer rank everyday conversation and the ones that drift toward business on two different levels, one lighter, one more serious. Talking about your day, a meal, a movie can be just as valuable, sometimes just as inspiring, as a professional conversation. What I actually appreciate is simply the moment when the discussion shifts toward something else, unplanned. And it's not even always business, honestly. It's everything that naturally flows from it: failures, fears you don't admit to anyone else, wins you downplay in public, mental health, hardships you eventually got through. Apparently, you don't get to choose the age at which you become that insufferable person who steers the conversation back to "work."

Nobody calls it mentorship in the moment. It's just a conversation. But the accumulation of those conversations, year after year, mattered just as much to me as a structured coaching program could have. Both have their place, it's not one against the other.

And I want to be clear, because it would be a shame to stop there: none of this is exclusive to entrepreneurship. Whether you're running a company, climbing the ranks in an organization, working a salaried job, or considering a career change, the same mechanism applies. A more experienced coworker who shares without thinking twice, a manager who explains the why behind a decision instead of just the what, a friend in a completely different field who asks the right question at the right moment. Mentorship doesn't check for a professional ID at the door.

What this means for you, if you didn't get that same luck

I'm not telling this story to say traditional mentorship is useless, or to downplay what others build by actively seeking out a mentor. That works too, differently.

But if the people around you never talk about what's actually on your mind professionally, the question might not be "how do I find THE right mentor," like searching for a perfect match. It's more: how do I get closer to places where these conversations happen naturally, so the learning becomes ambient instead of occasional. Whether your path is entrepreneurial, salaried, or somewhere in transition.

That might mean joining a community where your field is the default topic, not the exception.

It might mean having more informal exchanges instead of waiting for THE encounter that changes everything.

The most powerful mentorship is often not the one you formalize. It's the one that settles in because you kept ending up, again and again, surrounded by people for whom what you're trying to build is simply a given.

I never went looking for any of it. But I came to understand that what I received without ever naming it, others have to build on purpose. And that's completely fine too.

Follow Beyond Business by M for more reflections like this one, on leadership, entrepreneurship, and everything that gets built around us as much as within us.