Having a mentor is the No. 1 factor in increasing the steepness of your personal learning curve. So says my oldest, Garik, a Park Scholar at North Carolina State University (class of 2012), during a discussion he recently had with the incoming Park Scholar class of 2019.

To accept the value of mentoring first requires one to understand the centrality and importance of the learning curve. Garik asked the students to imagine plotting the characteristics of two people on a simple X-Y axis. Person A comes to the game with only a moderate amount of resources at his disposal, but importantly, also a relatively steep learning curve, such that a plot of his capabilities has him crossing the Y-axis at an intercept of 1 and with a slope of one-half. Person B, in contrast, has much greater resources at her current disposal: time, talent, smarts, money, education, experience, but for whatever reason has a shallower learning curve, such that her plot on the graph intercepts higher up the Y-axis at 2 but with a shallower slope of only one-quarter.

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