This weekend I read an article by Angela Duckworth. Her claim was that successful people share one habit: "the willingness to ask for help." In other words, asking for help helps. Max, Seungkwon, and I joke about findings like this. They're almost too obvious to publish. And yet, they're helpful to read. It's like the first month of WHOOP insights when you learn that drinking before bed hurts your sleep – something so apparent but strangely validating. The article similarly validates one of our partnership's most obviously right decisions: asking Gus Tai and David Beisel to become our mentors (and spending meaningful time together). I wanted to build on Duckworth's argument with this point exactly. Mentors are helpful.

One piece illustrates why. Erik Hoel's "where are all the Einsteins?" contends that the digital age has produced fewer geniuses than previous periods. With more people, better technology, broader access to education, nutrition, and faraway people and ideas, shouldn't we have more geniuses?

Hoel argues that while we have democratized education, we've lost the art of aristocratic tutoring. The transformation of education into "a system of mass production" has been a great equalizer, a gift to society and the world. But it may also have made the development of outliers harder because we abandoned the "artisanal process" that cultivates "the most elegant and beautiful minds."

Of course, there's confounding variables here. For much of history, aristocrats were so favored by society that they were often the only individuals sufficiently educated and well-resourced to produce anything great. So one could argue that aristocratic tutoring is more correlative with success than its cause.

But I buy the argument. Modern examples include Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill, Hannah Arendt, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, and Albert Einstein. Many of them were aristocrats tutored by professionals. But many were not; parents and older siblings provided tutoring, too. Intellectually serious adults that introduce advanced concepts early foster unique minds. Even today, Hoel argues, tutored students outperform the conventional classroom by two standard deviations, placing the average tutored student near the top two percent.

"Once you begin looking, tutors pop up like mushrooms around historical geniuses." So, I began looking.

Ben Nowack's dad was a carpenter. Ben loved the mansions he built and expressed interest in building things, too. So "[my dad] bought me a real metal saw and a real metal hammer and all this stuff and gave it to me," Ben said. "I was using a table saw when I was like three or four." He went on to build an X-ray machine, a sputterer, an air-liquefaction machine, a jet boat, rocket engines, and a fusion reactor before graduating high school. After time at SpaceX and Zipline, Ben founded Reflect Orbital, which produces satellites that reflect sunlight onto earth. Ben credits his recent success to his early tinkering. Many of the young mechanical engineers I most admire share this history. A capable adult exposed them early to building.

Paul Jobs was a machinist who rebuilt cars. He introduced his son Steve to the discipline of careful craftsmanship. And then Nolan Bushnell, Steve's first boss in Silicon Valley, helped him understand the interpersonal components of growing a business ("if you pretend to be in control, everybody else will assume that you are"). This pattern of early life tutors and early career mentors appear in other legendary founder biographies, too. Think Michael Dell and Jensen Huang.

Mentors, like tutors, rarely give specific answers. Their value comes from more durable things, like lived experience, relevant models, thought partnership, guidance. Then again, the benefit of mentorship is not new. And it's pretty obvious. The ancient rabbis said simply two millennia ago: "make for yourself a teacher." I'm glad we have.