I’m always shocked by smart, young, driven people who choose a company because of “mentorship”.
— Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang) February 29, 2020
Yes, it is good to have some guidance, but most driven folks succeed through figuring sh*t out on their own.
Being around smart young people >>> mentors, even for energy alone.
Make yourself extremely stalkable and Googleable (and clearly mark that you're open to emails and random Facebook friend requests from strangers). And also - archive up *all* the interesting things you've gathered up and put them somewhere that's *ultra-accessible*, so that they can easily find them (so that the total sum of your content is a monotonically increasing function of time).
When you're extremely stalkable, some people may find you so interesting that they'll decide that you might "click" with them (plus, they'll learn so much about you that you might not even have to worry that they'll dislike you if they learn more about you). Best of all, you don't even have to spend too much effort in finding the right peers.
You can even introduce them to each other and help form a friend group like What Quora users are members of the largely ex-College Confidential-based social group formed by Alex K. Chen, Jessica Su, and Jennifer Jang?
That's how I found the right peers (all over the Internet).
As one stalker wrote in an email...
Hola, Alex!
You're very welcome for the comment; I should be thanking you instead, for writing that massively long and thought-provoking bio. =P Also, I find the idea of perceiving time more slowly very interesting; never thought of it before (i.e. like most people, I've always been aware of differences in time perception. It's just that I never considered exploiting it.), but I now plan to look into it.
Anyways, I more or less interpreted your linking everything together (plus what you wrote in the e-mail) as an open invite for me to stalk you, so I hope you won't be offended that that's exactly what I did: stalk you. I really have to say--the sheer volume of internet...literature (?) you've generated is shocking.
Really. Like, wow. There's so much of it. Although I'm a pretty well-practiced stalker (eh, let's just say I'm excessively curious. I don't tend to do much with whatever I learn about the person, so no worries), I'm pretty sure I've never found anyone who wrote this much before. Granted, no one has ever been so easily stalk-able either...but still. You're pretty ridiculous. [continues on]
As another one wrote:
Hey Alex Chen,
It's me, jthecanadian or Jeremy from CC. Obviously I've locked my CC
account about a month ago however, I can't help but notice your many
posts on CC, Amazon, AoPs etc. Well so I've noticed, we're very much
in the same boat [continues on]
(lots of other ones too, but locked up in random IMs). But it suffices to say that all of my closest contacts now all started off by stalking me