Review: Tribe of Mentors

Tribe of Mentors by Timothy Ferriss
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a long book. Ferriss decides that the way to efficiently ask a large number of people that he respects and would consider worthy of being called a mentor is to come up with a short set of common questions and ask them through email and hope for responses. He gets a number of responses answering some of the questions, which he shares in this volume, and a few gracious declines that he also shares.

You learn a few things here. One is that Ferriss’ idea of a good mentor isn’t just business superstars. Here, there are authors, scientists, and an outsized group of fitness experts and specialty athletes. You sense that Ferriss built this list working on his “The Four Hour Body”. You also learn that on certain topics people think alike. There are plenty of mentions of Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” as the book recommended to learn from. And many people relate similar experiences as failures they have learned from – it got a bit repetitive. I was also surprised at the length of most of the answers – there was a lot of effort put into responding by the “tribe”. Most of the answers were very personal, which helped to tell the story. My favorite bit, most related to my work, was Temple Grandin’s explanation of a failure that set her up for success. Her anecdote involved fixing a hog moving problem with technology, only to find it was a management problem. So many people want the “shiny new thing”, but really need to fix the way they do business. (And I’ll remember her vivid description of hogs sitting on a conveyor belt and flipping over backwards when it runs.)

I took my time reading through this, and it took a few weeks. This is one of those books that you get more out of when consumed a bit at a time, with the side effect that it doesn’t feel as repetitive. In my mind the best answers had to do with suggested reading material. The author compiles this “reading list” on his website for reference. The length really was detrimental to my enjoyment, though, as was the mix of mentors. These were not who I would have asked – these were more “mentors who were willing to reply” to Ferriss. I liked the concept.


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