Some of my most influential mentors have never met me. They have no idea who I am.
Still, I know them through their words and their work, and they’ve shaped the leader I’m becoming.
Say the word “mentor,” and most people picture someone in their personal circle, a seasoned colleague or former boss who knows your name, is generous with their time, and chooses to invest in your growth and development. Those relationships are a gift. I wrote about them in Mentors – The Accelerators Who Ignite Your Potential, and I stand by every word.
Here’s my confession. Mentors like that were scarce in my career, and that’s on me. I didn’t seek them out the way I should’ve, or the way I encouraged the people in my span of care to do. Hands up. Guilty as charged.
The irony isn’t lost on me. I’ve invested in others for years, and several of them were generous enough to describe what they gained in Mentorship – In Their Own Words. Asking someone for that same investment in me never came as naturally.
I did have one experience with a mentor late in my career, and it was a powerful one. Even so, I found most of my mentors another way.
Mentors You’ve Never Met Still Count
In that earlier post, I offered a simple way to find a mentor: “Read their works, attend their talks or simply observe their leadership styles.” Looking back, that sentence describes most of my mentors.
You don’t have to know a mentor to benefit from their wisdom. Knowing them certainly helps, but it isn’t required. What’s required is the part nobody can do for you: applying the lesson.
With a little help from AI (the bot, not me), I even seated four of the people below at a virtual round table when I chose my word for 2025. None of them RSVP’d. They showed up anyway, through the ideas and insights they’d already put into the world.
This isn’t an exhaustive list. Each person here produced seminal work on a subject I needed to learn, and each handed me a keystone lesson I still carry.
Together, they’ve pushed me to be better today than I was yesterday. And I continue to learn from these remarkable people.
Simon Sinek: Start with Why
In 2009, I watched Simon Sinek deliver his TED talk, “How great leaders inspire action,” which now has more than 71 million plays on TED.com and growing.
His Golden Circle changed how I looked at communications, and it nudged me to discover my own WHY. One line from that talk has never left me: “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”
Sinek’s circle moves from WHY to HOW to WHAT. Over time, I realized I’d set up camp in that middle ring. It became the heart of Lead with Light™. How we do what we do — how we lead — is as important as what we achieve.
Sinek gave me the starting point. Looking back on my career, I can see that the HOW has become a significant part of my life’s work.
Keystone lesson: When your why is clear, people can trust where you’re leading them.
James Clear: Small Votes Add Up
Atomic Habits, by James Clear, rests on a simple premise. Tiny improvements, repeated daily, compound over time. I’ve written before about his idea of getting one percent better, and it still anchors how I approach my personal and professional growth.
Two lines from Clear stick with me. First, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” He also writes, “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”
That second line reads like a working definition of virtue-driven action. Character gets built one vote at a time, often in ordinary moments no one applauds. Patience counts as a vote. So does kindness under pressure, and so does telling the truth when a softer version would be easier.
Keystone lesson: Small, repeated actions decide who you become.
Stephen Covey: Begin with the End in Mind
When I call myself a principle-centered leader, I’m borrowing language from Stephen Covey. His book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People first appeared in 1989, and it still reads like it was written for Monday morning.
Habit 2, Begin with the End in Mind, includes an exercise that sounds morbid at first. Covey asks you to imagine your own funeral and consider what you’d want the people in your life to say about you. Then you work backward. What would you need to do, starting today, to earn those words?
FranklinCovey describes the personal mission statement that grows out of this habit as “living by design rather than default.” I’ve leaned on Covey elsewhere, too, including his advice on scheduling priorities, which I shared in Ruthless Prioritization.
Keystone lesson: Decide what you stand for before circumstances decide for you.
Tony Robbins: Your Decisions Shape Your Destiny
In 1991, Tony Robbins published Awaken the Giant Within, and an updated anniversary edition arrived this year. It runs 544 pages. Robbins is eloquent, and no one has ever accused him of brevity.
Even so, the core lesson fits on a sticky note. In his words: “It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.”
That idea puts the steering wheel back in your hands. Circumstances matter, of course. Yet the decisions you make, and the standards you refuse to lower, bend your life in one direction or another. Robbins pairs that with a commitment he calls CANI, short for Constant And Never-ending Improvement.
I first found Robbins in the early 1990s, when his book was released. His larger-than-life persona was captivating. I studied his personal growth strategies as well as his ability to communicate an idea and connect with an audience.
For me, the book arrived as I was beginning to understand the power of choice. Perspective influences our mindset, and our decisions shape the trajectory of our lives.
Keystone lesson: Raise your standards, then make the decision that matches them.
Nick Sonnenberg: Decide Where the Work Lives
As founder and CEO of the efficiency firm Leverage, Nick Sonnenberg wrote Come Up for Air for teams drowning in emails, messages and meetings. His CPR framework sorts the chaos into three buckets: communication, planning and resources.
The lesson that hit me hardest as a career communicator comes from his own summary of the book: “Teams should optimize for the retrieval of information, not transfer of information.”
Communicators are trained to focus on what we send. Did the message go out, and did it land? Sonnenberg adds a question that’s easy to skip: when someone needs this next month, can they find it?
He’s also blunt about the inbox: “Email should be used for external communication only.” I’m still a work in progress on that one.
Keystone lesson: Agree on where information lives, then protect that agreement.
Vinh Giang: Play Your Voice Like an Instrument
Before he became a communication coach, Vinh Giang was an award-winning magician in Adelaide, Australia. In his words, “I spent years studying the art of misdirection, sleight of hand, and commanding a room – and then I realised the real magic was communication.”
His core teaching is that your voice is an instrument. He breaks it into five vocal foundations: rate, volume, pitch, tonality and pause. Most of us play a single note. Great communicators use the whole keyboard.
For someone who believes the HOW matters, this felt like confirmation from an unexpected corner. The same words can inspire or deflate, depending on how you deliver them. His first book, Before We Forget How to Connect, is due out this fall from Hay House.
I first discovered Giang watching his YouTube videos, which are brilliant. “Authentic” has become an overused word in leadership. That said, this guy could be the picture next to the word in the dictionary. He shows up consistently, in the spirit of service, to help others become better communicators. I signed up for and completed Stage Academy: eight modules, 120-plus videos and more than 13 hours of practical, entertaining content you can work through at your own pace.
As I prepare for what’s ahead, I intend to return to that training so I’m ready to deliver Lead with Light on stage.
Keystone lesson: How you say it shapes whether people hear it.
The Questions No One Else Will Ask
Here’s the catch. A mentor who knows you helps you see your blind spots, and holds you accountable when you drift. They ask the question you’ve been dodging, then wait patiently for an honest answer. A mentor you’ve never met can’t do that, and a book can’t watch you lead and tell you what it notices.
So the job falls to us. Learning from mentors we’ll never meet takes self-awareness to see where a lesson fits our lives, and the discipline to hold ourselves accountable for applying it long after the book goes back on the shelf.
That means getting comfortable being uncomfortable. It means being honest with ourselves and asking the hard questions a good mentor would ask:
- Which lesson am I admiring instead of applying?
- Where did my actions drift from my words this week?
- What am I avoiding because the honest answer would cost me something?
- If someone I respect watched me lead today, what would they notice?
None of these questions feel comfortable in the moment. That discomfort is usually the sign we’re asking the right ones.
This hit home while I was on sabbatical. As an athlete growing up, I knew the benefits of training regularly. During my career, I had the longstanding intention of hitting the gym at least three times a week and admired those who did. Other things often took priority, and I pushed the goal from one year to the next. When I gained more control of my calendar, excuses vaporized, and I committed to a regular schedule of exercise. I closed the say-do gap, and the benefits reach beyond feeling better physically.
Asking yourself those questions sits at the heart of Lead with Light. Cultivate your character is one of its three interconnected movements, alongside Calibrate your compass and Illuminate the path. It means strengthening what we stand for through deliberate, daily reps, so we hold steady when pressure rises.
Our mentors supply the wisdom. The reps are on us.
Parting Thoughts
We’ve never shared a room, yet their work did what good mentors do. It showed me what I couldn’t yet see, then left the hard part to me.
I’ll offer one caution. Keep seeking mentors who know your name. Don’t wait on them, though.
Mentors you’ve never met are available right now, on a bookshelf or in a short video. Your job is to choose them intentionally and put their lessons to work. Vinh Giang put it well: “Don’t be so attached to who you are in the present that you don’t give the future version of you a chance.”
Pick one mentor you’ve never met. Write down the single lesson you need most right now, then apply it this week, before you start the next book.
Who’s a mentor you’ve never met? Share their name and the lesson they taught you in the comments. If this post helped, pass it along to someone early in their career, and subscribe at alviller.com for more.
Be clear. Be kind. Lead with Light! ✨
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