The Importance of Choosing Your Mentors (For Better Productivity, Organization, Planning, Prioritization, and Habits)

Productivity advice is everywhere. Some of it is great. Some of it quietly wrecks your focus for years.

That's why "choosing your mentors" matters more than most people think.

Because a mentor doesn't just teach you tactics like time blocking or goal setting. A mentor also teaches you:

• what to value
• what to ignore
• what "good work" looks like
• what pace is "normal"
• what tradeoffs you should accept
• what kind of life your productivity system is building toward

And you don't need a personal mentor to be influenced. Your mentors can be:

• creators you watch weekly
• authors you read repeatedly
• founders you study
• managers you work with
• communities you hang around in

If you consume someone's thinking long enough, you start planning like them.

So it's worth being intentional.

1. Your mentor is an input, and inputs shape outputs

Most people try to fix productivity at the "output" level:

• better to-do lists
• better tools
• better routines
• better motivation

But a lot of productivity problems come from the "input" level:

• confusing advice
• misaligned values
• unrealistic expectations
• incentives that reward busywork
• tactics copied from people in totally different situations

If your inputs are wrong, you'll execute perfectly… on the wrong plan.

Mentors are high-leverage inputs.

2. Why mentors matter for planning and prioritization (not just discipline)

Discipline is overrated compared to clarity.

A good mentor helps you answer the questions that decide your week:

• What is actually important right now?
• What should I stop doing?
• What does "enough" look like?
• What should be measured weekly vs monthly vs yearly?
• What am I doing that feels productive but isn't moving anything?

If you get these wrong, you can be extremely organized and still go nowhere.

Mentors are often the difference between:

• "a busy week"
• and "a week that compounds"

3. The hidden danger: copying a mentor's tactics without their context

A classic trap is adopting a mentor's system without their constraints.

Examples:

• A creator with a full team teaches a process that assumes delegation.
• A billionaire teaches a routine that assumes full control of schedule.
• A "grind" influencer teaches a pace that burns normal people out.
• A productivity guru sells a framework that's actually optimized for content production, not real work.

So the goal isn't to copy tactics.

The goal is to extract principles that survive context changes.

4. A practical way to evaluate mentors: the 5 filters

Here's a simple framework you can actually use.

Filter 1: Proof of work (not just good talking)

Do they have real outcomes, real projects, real long-term consistency?

Look for evidence of:

• building something over years
• repeated results, not one lucky hit
• boring consistency (the part people don't post)

Filter 2: Incentive alignment

How do they make money?

This matters because incentives shape advice.

• If someone profits from urgency, they'll push urgency.
• If someone sells courses, they might overcomplicate basics.
• If someone sells "hustle", they'll never prescribe rest.

You don't need to hate the business model. You just need to see it clearly.

Filter 3: Signal-to-noise ratio

Some mentors have 5% gold and 95% entertainment.

That can still be fine, but you must treat it like a diet.

Ask:

• Do I feel clearer after consuming this?
• Or do I feel hyped, anxious, and distracted?

Filter 4: Principles over hacks

Good mentors teach decision-making.

Weak mentors teach tricks.

Planning and prioritization improve when you learn:

• how to choose
• how to say no
• how to think in tradeoffs
• how to avoid obvious failure modes

Filter 5: Values you actually want

This is the most important filter.

A mentor might be "successful" but building a life you don't want.

If you adopt their mindset, you slowly adopt their lifestyle.

So ask:

• Do I want their relationships?
• Their health?
• Their pace?
• Their stress level?
• Their definition of "winning"?

5. A mentor stack beats a single mentor

One mentor rarely covers everything.

A better approach is a "mentor stack", where each mentor is used for a specific domain:

• one for focus and deep work
• one for habits and health
• one for business and decision-making
• one for communication and leadership
• one for calm consistency

This also protects you from becoming a clone.

6. Digital mentors are real mentors (if you treat them correctly)

You can learn from people you'll never meet, but you need a system.

If you don't systematize digital mentorship, it becomes passive scrolling.

Here's a clean method:

1. Pick 1 to 3 mentors for the next 90 days
2. Define what you want from them (one sentence each)
3. Capture only actionable principles
4. Turn principles into weekly experiments
5. Review what actually improved your results

This turns content into outcomes.

7. Tai Lopez-style takeaway: compress time by borrowing minds

Whether you like him or not, Tai Lopez popularized a useful idea:

Books and long-form learning are a way to "borrow" mentors you'd never access otherwise.

The productivity angle here is simple:

• trial-and-error is slow
• learning from other people's patterns is faster
• reading helps you import tested mental frameworks

The practical move isn't "read more" as a slogan.

It's: read with a purpose.

Use questions like:

• What decision does this help me make better?
• What mistake does this help me avoid?
• What principle can I apply this week?

If you can't answer those, you're collecting information, not building skill.

8. Charlie Munger-style takeaway: avoid stupidity, use mental models, invert problems

Charlie Munger's relevance to productivity is underrated.

He wasn't teaching productivity apps. He was teaching decision quality.

And decision quality is the foundation of prioritization.

Three Munger-aligned principles that translate directly into productivity:

1) "Invert" the problem

Instead of asking:

• "How do I have an amazing week?"

Ask:

• "How do I ruin my week?"

Then avoid those things.

Examples of "week-ruiners":

• starting with notifications
• unclear top priorities
• meetings with no agenda
• too many active projects
• no review rhythm
• sleep debt
• unrealistic planning (fantasy schedules)

Inversion is practical because it's easier to prevent failure than to force success.

2) Build a latticework (don't be a one-framework person)

A lot of productivity advice fails because it's a single lens.

Munger's approach pushes you to collect a small set of mental models from different fields:

• psychology (biases, incentives, habits)
• business (systems, bottlenecks, compounding)
• math (probability, expected value)
• biology (energy, recovery, constraints)

For planning and prioritization, this helps you avoid simplistic rules like:

• "always hustle"
• "always rest"
• "always say yes"
• "always say no"

Reality needs multiple lenses.

3) Respect incentives (including your own)

If your system rewards checking boxes, you'll optimize for checking boxes.

If your system rewards outcomes, you'll optimize for outcomes.

A small productivity shift with huge payoff is to ask:

• What is this task rewarding me for doing?
• What behavior is my workflow encouraging?
• Am I incentivized to finish, or just to start?

9. Turn mentorship into habits: the "Mentor Loop"

Most people consume mentor content and feel inspired.

Then nothing changes.

Use this loop instead:

1. Capture one principle
2. Translate it into a small behavior
3. Schedule the behavior for a specific day
4. Review results weekly
5. Keep, tweak, or delete

Example:

• Principle: "Avoid too many active projects."
• Behavior: "Max 3 active projects per week."
• Schedule: "Pick 3 on Monday."
• Review: "Did this reduce chaos and increase completion?"

That's mentorship becoming output.

10. A simple mentor "diet" that protects your focus

If you care about productivity, your content diet matters.

Try these rules:

• No more than 2 to 3 productivity creators at once
• Prefer long-form (books, deep videos) over daily hot takes
• Unfollow anything that spikes anxiety or urgency
• If you consume it, you must test something from it
• If nothing from it changes your behavior after 30 days, drop it

Your attention is a budget. Spend it like one.

11. How to apply this inside a planning system (weekly, monthly, yearly)

Mentorship works best when it's attached to a review cadence.

Here's a clean setup:

Weekly review

• What did I learn this week that's worth keeping?
• What principle will I test next week?
• What should I stop doing next week?

Monthly review

• Which mentor ideas actually improved outcomes?
• Which ideas increased effort without increasing results?

Quarterly review

• Who are my mentors right now (people, books, channels)?
• Are they shaping me into someone I want to become?
• Do I need to change my mentor stack?

That's how you keep mentorship aligned with your life, not just your feed.

12. Final takeaway

Choosing mentors is not "self-help".

It's strategy.

Because mentors shape:

• what you focus on
• what you consider important
• what you believe is possible
• what you tolerate
• and how you plan your time

Pick mentors the same way you pick projects:

• intentionally
• based on outcomes and values
• with a review process

Your productivity will improve as a side effect.