Find the greatest subject matter expert available for a given discipline. Tap their knowledge.
The greatest people I have worked with have taken the same approach. Experts are incredibly willing to share. You may have to work around their schedule, but they will share. Just ask.
Give me an example. I have literally never had anyone show me anything unless I demonstrated proficiency on par with their own and they felt the need to impress me. That, or paying them lots and lots of money for personal lessons, which generally tend to be crap anyway.
I am baffled by the amount of people who espouse mentorship like it's actually a thing.
So, part of getting advice depends upon seeming to be the kind of person worth sharing with.
This can be competency in a different discipline, or being young and full of potential, or being personally interesting, etc.
In my experience experts will routinely and freely share their knowledge. People love talking about themselves.
If this has basically never happened to you, it's worth some self-examination. Do you make friends easily? Do you manage relationships well? Do you often find yourself in arguments? Do you have some recognized expertise or usefulness in some area?
There are many hints in your language. The "tend to be crap" anyways is a tell that you might have a sour attitude on life that turns people away. The "baffled by" indicates a lack of empathy and low ability to examine why your situation may differ from theirs. "Give me an example" is demanding. "Felt the need to impress me" views others' motives in a mercenary and petty way.
You're free to ignore this. But, consider that if you figure out why people aren't mentoring you specifically, it may also solve a bunch of related issues caused by a common thread.
(The thoughts above are based on little data, so don't take any of them personally if they're off base. The one big data point is never receiving advice - that is a sign of a problem.
And, since you did want an example, when I entered business I cold emailed someone in my field how they did online work. They gave me a detailed and helpful answer, and we later became business partners. I have many stories like that.)
It seems to me that is less likely. Certainly there would be some unusual situations where people are unfairly oppressed to a point where they cannot take advantage of this, BUT for the most part... people are people.
As a sister posts echos, finding a mentor can be a blue moon event. I looked for one my whole career, I've had 2 over the last 10+ years. The first was the lead sysadmin I was working under at my first datacenter job. We always joked that he's the sort you keep far away from customers, but he also had hands down the broadest and deepest knowledge base of any sysop I've ever worked with, as well as 0 hesitance to dive as deep as needed (patches to ZFS/The kernel? sure.) to fix whatever was going on. My second is a dev lead on my current team. The mentorship is less "official" and more than I've learned more in the last 2 years than in the 4 prior, simply because of the massive amount of experience/best practices he's figured out that I was slowly learning via trial by fire.
In both cases, it was largely a factor of WHY I chose to work there, to work with someone who blew me away this much. That's the one type of mentorship I've found to "work for me," and while it's perhaps not what you're looking for/what is often trumpeted, (e.g. we never had a "formal mentor relationship") they've certainly boosted me into a far better all around engineer than I would have ever become on my own.
Da Vinci wasn't looking for mentorship from Messer Fazio, Brera Friar, Giannino the Bombardier, Benedetto Potinari, Maestro Antonio, master of hydraulics or Maestro Giovanni Francese.
For each one he had a very specific topic on which he wanted to download their expertise: "how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lombard manner", "the means by which the tower of Ferrara is walled without loopholes" etc
That's what I've seen in practice. Find the expert. Be respectful of their time. Be specific. Do the same when it's your turn.
Starting out as a software engineer, I showed more interest in the product lifecycle and production behavior, I caught the attention of the tech lead.
What followed were two years of discussions, insights, actions and results that have stayed with me ever since. I grew more as a software engineer and as an... employee, than I did in any period of my life. Ever since I left that company, I have yet to find another person willing to share so much and to discuss topics at length.
Try mentoring someone yourself, now that you have some knowledge to share (presumably). You will probably enjoy the relationship just as much as the original one.
Of course I am more than willing to share any knowledge I might have and do it with every person in my team that might want to discuss anything. Uunfortunately, I don't feel at the same level of insight as my mentor. Maybe one day.
People like that I find are less good than they think they are. Personally i've found people who are really great at things are more than willing to help someone learn if they're interested, try and capable of learning. I've had more than a few people help me in life like that, sometimes, from what I could tell, with no real benefits to themselves.
I've tried to be like that with people i've helped learn and you really do get a good feeling seeing someone improving at something because of skills you taught them and for me personally, I find teaching others helps cement knowledge in your own mind and helps give you some concious practice at things you have likely been doing by muscle memory for a while.
The list shows both Leonardo's dilettantism in Latin and mathematics, and how printing changed the way we learn. Even in 1490, to learn "how to square a triangle", you did not have to get the master of arithmetic to show you. You could find a copy of Euclid's Elements and skim it up to Proposition II.14 [1]. The first printed edition of Elements (in Latin) was published in 1482 [2].
I mean Leonardo himself knew he was horrible in both Latin and math. He had access to various books in both subjects during his lifetime (thanks in part to the printing press) but his lack of foundational knowledge made it hard for him to learn geometry when he lacked skills in arithmetic and algebra.
Secondly, it's a bit funny that you say the book could have shown him how to square a circle, seeing as it's an impossible problem.
If you're looking for more of Da Vinci, I can't recommend Walter Isaacson's biography enough. I just wrapped it up, and it gave me huge respect for a figure I knew only passingly before. Particularly the conclusion, which is one of the better summaries on lessons learned from a text that I've seen.
I see that several people commented on Leonardo's curiosity. When I was about 18 or therabouts I came across a book about Leonardo. That book made a big deal about how curiosity was the driving force in Leonardo's life. I was so impressed that I started to believe curiosity was the defining characteristic of humans. And I became curious about everything around me. I chose the study of how this world works as my mission in life. I chose not to make money. I only worked to make enough money to pay the rent. The rest of the time I was in the library. But there is a downsize to this. I now believe that it's better not to be curious. It's better to concentrate on building a business and make money. Because in this world money allows you to build new things and make new discoveries. Bezos can build his own rocket and go to the moon if he wants to. Google can and does change the world. They are not doing what they are doing for curiosity's sake. So I would not advise a youngster who is starting in life to be curious like Leonardo. I would advise to make lots of money so that he/she can achieve big things. I think the era of curious and solitary researcher is over.
> I would advise to make lots of money so that he/she can achieve big things.
Just because one wants to make lots of money, does not mean one will. For every Bezos or Elon Musk, there's fifty thousand failed company founders. So, if your path to happiness has "Get Rich" as step 1, that sets you up for high likelihood of failure from the start.
I think a better path is "be curious, and look for ways to make money with the things you learn".
Nearly anyone can be a cog in the corporate machine or a code monkey - there's an infinite amount of grunt work to be done, and always will be. In my experience, people who seem to enjoy their work are those who work at intersections of disciplines and find unexpected uses for their domain knowledge.
I'm left-handed and years later I found I had written things on my grandma's (outside, stone) wall with chalk in mirror script. This dated from when I just started writing, so on an anecdotal level, this seems to be a natural way to write if you're left handed.
I started taking some of my whiteboard notes in mirror script after reading it assisted in neuroplasticity, and it really didn't take long to get the hang of. I haven't done it in a while though, can you still do it like muscle memory?
I took it as he literally wrote like that, from this line,
> You can see a page of Da Vinci’s notebook above but be warned. Even if you are conversant in 16th century Italian, Da Vinci wrote everything in mirror script.
There's evidence that he was left-handed, or at least did a lot of his work with the left hand. He may have found it more convenient to write in that direction so as not to smudge the ink, especially if he wrote quickly.
People today are not as curious as Leonardo was. For him learning was an everyday occupation. Most people today seek entertainment and distraction. Maybe its the advent of so many cool technologies that did not exist back then to capture our time. But I imagine Leonardo would have read Hacker News for sure.
"Draw Milan"..pretty ambitious task. Obviously DaVinci didn't consider breaking down the tasks into smaller pieces. The GTD method involves this concept directly in its flow. In today's world, the breaking up of tasks is especially valuable. Here's an article about GTD from our blog: https://zenkit.com/en/blog/a-beginners-guide-to-getting-thin...
The greatest people I have worked with have taken the same approach. Experts are incredibly willing to share. You may have to work around their schedule, but they will share. Just ask.