The average Fortune 500 CEO receives upwards of 50 unsolicited LinkedIn requests for "mentorship" every single week. Most of these messages contain some variation of the phrase "pick your brain," a request for a 15-minute coffee chat that rarely results in anything more than a polite decline or a generic referral to a corporate HR portal. In the United Kingdom, the mentorship industry has ballooned into a multi-million pound consultancy sector, yet a 2023 study by the Harvard Business Review found that formal mentorship programs often fail to correlate with long-term salary increases or executive promotion. We have become obsessed with finding a professional guardian angel, a benevolent figure to hand us a map of the terrain. It is a comforting pursuit, but it is fundamentally flawed.

The reality of the marketplace is far less nurturing than a mentorship circle. While you are waiting for a mentor to validate your business plan, your direct competitor is actively working to render it obsolete. In my four decades covering the London Stock Exchange and the tech hubs of Silicon Valley, I have observed that the most resilient entrepreneurs do not spend their time seeking approval from those above them. Instead, they spend their time obsessing over the people who are trying to put them out of business. They study their enemies.