Why the Best Mentor Is One Who Has Actually Failed

If you are looking for a mentor or a speaker who understands business failure, ask one question before anything else. Have you ever actually failed?

Most will go quiet. The mentoring world is full of people who teach success they read about, not success they earned, and certainly not failure they survived. I am the opposite of that, and I want to explain why it matters for you.

Anyone Can Teach the Wins

When things go well, advice is easy. Everyone sounds clever in a bull market. The real test of a mentor is not what they tell you when you are winning. It is whether they have stood where you are standing on your worst day.

I built a global property company from nothing. Then another of my businesses collapsed, the bank took my properties, my business partner of twenty years walked away, and I had a complete nervous breakdown. I sold my own possessions to cover the losses. I know exactly what the bottom feels like, because I lived there.

That is not a sob story. It is the entire reason my guidance is worth anything.

Failure Teaches What Success Cannot

Success hides your weaknesses. Failure exposes every single one of them. I learned more in the collapse than in all the good years combined, and I wrote about what losing everything taught me because those lessons only come one way.

A mentor who has only ever won will tell you to push harder. A mentor who has lost everything and rebuilt will tell you something far more useful. When to push, when to cut, how to protect yourself, and how to keep your head when it is all falling apart. You cannot get that from theory. You earn it in the fire.

What You Actually Get From Me

I am not interested in slide decks or recycled frameworks. I work on the real problem, which in my experience is rarely the one you first describe.

Scaling a business beyond yourself. Leading under pressure when you are struggling too. The hard conversations nobody else will have with you, including about your own wellbeing. I have been in every one of those rooms, usually as the person sitting where you are now. If that is the kind of straight talk you need, that is what I offer when you work with me.

Find Someone Who Has Been There

Whatever you are facing, find a guide who has walked the road, not just read the map. Someone who can tell you what a repossession letter feels like in your hand, and what it costs your family when you get it wrong, and how you come back anyway.

That is the difference between advice and wisdom. One is cheap. The other is paid for in scars.

If you want a mentor who has genuinely been to the bottom and built again, get in touch. And if you want the full story first, it is all in Fail Your Way to Success.

To your success.

Tahar
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Read the full story of my journey in my book, Fail Your Way to Success.