Why mentorship for career success matters more than ever

We don’t talk enough about how lonely this gets.

You might be surrounded by people—your team, your investors, your LinkedIn inbox full of generic "let’s connect!" pings. But the minute you hit a real inflection point—your first big hire, a failed launch, a funding conversation gone sideways—suddenly, all that noise goes quiet. And you're left with that sinking voice in your head asking: Am I doing this right?

I’ve seen it play out a hundred different ways. A solo founder stuck on a product that isn’t converting. A second-time operator who’s afraid to admit they still feel like an impostor. A technical cofounder who realizes she’s become the bottleneck. In every one of those stories, the real breakthrough didn’t come from another dashboard or another podcast. It came from someone who told them the truth before they could admit it to themselves.

That’s mentorship. But not the shiny, filtered kind. Not the Instagrammed coffee meetings with “my amazing mentor” hashtags. The real kind. The one that’s messy and blunt and sometimes hard to hear. And if you’re building anything right now—in Malaysia, in Saudi, in Singapore, or wherever you are—here’s what I want to tell you: mentorship is no longer optional. It’s survival infrastructure. Let me explain.

When I was a first-time founder, I thought mentorship was about proximity to success. I chased the most impressive names I could find. I joined programs, showed up at events, made the pitch to “pick their brain.” Sometimes I got a meeting. Sometimes I got lucky. But here’s what I didn’t see then: not all mentorship is helpful. Some of it is noise wrapped in credibility. Some of it can take you off track faster than no advice at all.

I once built a go-to-market plan entirely based on the frameworks of a mentor who’d scaled in enterprise SaaS. I was running a consumer startup with a completely different CAC model and a wildly different customer. But hey—he was successful, so he had to be right, right? Wrong. I burned three months of cash and six months of confidence on a growth model that wasn’t mine to follow. Not because he was a bad mentor. But because I didn’t know how to mentor myself first.

The mentors who changed me the most never gave me the answers. They asked the questions that made me realize I already knew the answer—but was too scared to trust it. One looked me in the eye and said, “Your team doesn’t trust your vision because you don’t trust yourself.” Another told me, “You think you're building a product, but you’re actually building a coping mechanism for your own fear of being irrelevant.”

That one took me weeks to digest. But it was right. Mentorship isn’t about hand-holding. It’s about mirror-holding. And the best mentors aren’t always the most famous, the most published, or the most followed. They’re the ones who care enough to sit with you when you're unraveling—and still believe in the version of you that hasn't arrived yet.

We’re in a weird era. Careers no longer follow straight lines. Founding a company isn’t a path—it’s a minefield. The world of work is shifting faster than most institutions can catch up. And for a lot of us—especially women, especially in Southeast Asia and the Gulf—we’re doing things our mothers and grandmothers were never allowed to imagine.

That’s exciting. But it’s also exhausting. And without mentorship, it’s dangerously isolating.

I see this all the time in the founders I mentor now. They’re smart. They’re scrappy. They know their market. But they’re tired. Not because they lack skill—but because they’re carrying every decision alone. They don’t know who they can actually be honest with. That’s where mentorship becomes more than advice. It becomes emotional oxygen.

Let’s get practical. Because this isn’t a fairytale, and not everyone has access to fancy accelerators or founder networks. Here’s what I’ve learned (the hard way) about how to find, build, and keep real mentorship in your life—especially when you’re early-stage or underrepresented.

1. Stop Looking for One Perfect Mentor

Your career isn’t linear, so why would your mentorship be?

You don’t need a guru. You need a bench. A mix of people who challenge different parts of you. Find one person who makes you better at hiring. One who pushes your thinking on money. One who tells you when you’re being emotionally immature as a leader. Expecting one person to do all of that is like expecting a cofounder to also be your therapist, CTO, and chief babysitter. It’s too much. And it’s unfair.

2. Show Up Ready, Not Needy

This one’s tough, especially when you’re struggling. But mentors don’t want to fix you. They want to walk with you while you figure it out. So come to the conversation with clarity: What are you wrestling with? What decision are you stuck on? What have you already tried? The best way to build trust is to show you’ve done the first round of thinking. That you’re not looking for shortcuts—you’re looking for real dialogue.

3. Respect the Gift

Mentorship is not transactional—but it is valuable. And busy people don’t owe you their time.

So if someone shows up for you? Show up for them. With updates. With gratitude. With action. I once mentored a founder who followed up every conversation with a short Loom video walking me through what she applied and what shifted. I didn’t ask her to. She just did. And you better believe I kept saying yes when she asked for time.

4. Build It Before You Need It

If you wait until you’re burning out to look for mentorship, it’s already too late. Build those relationships when things are steady. When you're growing. When you're not desperate for help. That’s when real trust grows. That’s when mentors can see who you are—not just the panic in your eyes.

Let’s go deeper. In Southeast Asia and KSA, mentorship isn’t just about knowledge—it’s about context. About who understands your constraints. Your family pressures. Your faith. Your unspoken rules.

I’ve seen brilliant founders—especially women—dismiss their instincts because the only mentorship they had came from men who’d never navigated the same cultural expectations. Who didn’t get why fundraising was harder when your investors didn’t take you seriously at first glance. Who didn’t understand what it meant to juggle your startup with caring for aging parents—or raising children without the infrastructure others take for granted.

That’s not to say cross-gender or cross-context mentorship doesn’t work. But if it lacks cultural fluency, it can miss the mark. And the damage is subtle: you start to think maybe it’s just me. It’s not. Find mentors who speak your language—not just your industry jargon. People who can name the invisible labor you’re doing. People who validate your reality while still pushing you to rise beyond it.

Here’s the twist: You’re not just a mentee. You’re also a mentor—right now. You might not feel like it. But someone’s watching you navigate that tough customer call, that product relaunch, that cofounder tension—and learning from how you carry it.

Mentorship isn’t age-based. It’s experience-based. And if you’ve been through something and come out the other side, you have something to give. So pay it forward. Even if it’s just a DM. A coffee. A comment on someone’s idea that makes them feel seen. The mentorship loop only works if we stop waiting to feel ready—and start showing up anyway.

Let me leave you with this. The most powerful mentor you’ll ever build is the one in your own head. The inner voice that gets sharper and kinder and more precise every time you let someone show you how to think better—not just what to do. Mentorship isn’t about dependency. It’s about pattern recognition. It teaches you how to think in frameworks. How to ask better questions. How to hold yourself accountable, even when nobody else is watching.

If you find one person who helps you do that, honor them. If you become that person for someone else, don’t underestimate the power of your presence. And if you’re somewhere in the middle—still learning, still leading, still making it up as you go—you’re in exactly the right place. That’s where mentorship lives. Not in the perfect answer, but in the imperfect, brave attempt to grow—together.