What is a Mentor?
The Cambridge Dictionary defines a mentor as “a person who gives a younger or less experienced person help and advice over a period of time, especially at work or school.”
If you reread this sentence, you might think that Claude can indeed provide help.
There are countless advantages to using Claude and asking it for advice.
First of all, Claude is always available, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Claude always responds to everything, and its answers are typically thorough. On top of that, compared to older models, there are safeguards, and the model in general seems to hallucinate less.
A Claude Pro subscription costs only 20 dollars per month.
But more than anything, Claude doesn’t judge the way humans do. Right?
So why are we still looking for mentors made of flesh if Claude is so much better?
If you reread the meaning of the word mentor, you’ll notice some subtleties.
The first is that a requirement of the mentor is that they be either older or more experienced.
Experience, according again to the Cambridge Dictionary, is the process of acquiring knowledge through doing, feeling, and seeing things.
In short, what we’re looking for is “flesh,” someone who has already done everything we would like to do and has succeeded and has failed.
Claude has no experience. Claude, at most, is an engine that averages all the experiences that have been reported by human beings. It’s like trying to become a psychiatrist simply by reading and studying the DSM.
But any psychiatrist can tell you that the truly formative years are the years of residency, in which they observe their colleagues, practice themselves, and make and learn from mistakes. And it takes time and energy. So a mentor is someone who has seen a portion of life and passes it on to you, so that ideally you don’t make the same mistakes.
Claude has no bodily experience
Claude cannot give this because Claude has no bodily experience, and never will. It will probably get better at synthesizing and summarizing the average of other people’s reported experiences, but we’re not looking for the average of other people’s experiences. For that, we have Reddit.
Claude never pushes back. Actually, now with the safeguards they have made, Claude pushes back more often. But does it work? Do you feel anything when Claude pushes back? A mentor who has firsthand experience with what you are trying to achieve may tell you that your idea has already been tried, or that your reluctance to launch the product and find a potential customer is stemming from a deep fear of failure, leading you to waste time optimizing something that might not even be needed
Claude will happily help you refine the thing you should abandon. Its goal is to provide a satisfying answer, not to foster your growth. A mentor can say “I have no answer now, but we can work on it and see if this works.”
The second big difference is the concept of Help. A good mentor isn’t just someone who sits on a tower and dispenses words, but someone absolutely invested in the mentee’s career. For example, when mentees ask me to help them with their job search, beyond giving feedback on their CV, I take the trouble to revise it and make suggestions. I have a collection of lesser-known sites where you can find jobs. Periodically, I check with my direct connections to see whether they have open positions, and if I consider the mentee a good fit, I put them forward. For another mentee who contacted me for help with their PhD, I periodically read articles on their research area, or I look at their university’s website and check for bureaucratic matters that I know my mentee hasn’t looked into because, in the meantime, they have a full-time job. Now and then I check in on their mental health, because I’ve been through it myself: switching contexts can be very taxing.
Claude won’t go to sleep thinking about you. Claude has no skin in the game.
The expression “skin in the game” was popularized by Nassim Taleb, and it describes the difference between those who offer advice from a position of safety and those who face the consequences of that advice. It’s really a simple criterion: when things go wrong, who pays the price? In Claude’s case, the answer is no one, or better, you.
But a great mentor puts themselves on the line because their reputation is tied to the people they choose to guide and to their success.
Moreover, those who choose to become mentors are typically people naturally inclined toward empathy and a sense of responsibility. Claude doesn’t have a personality tailored to you, but only information that you may want or not want to share. But remember to refresh its context, because after a while, its performance drops. Have you ever needed to refresh the context and start anew with a human?
It is this exposure that makes their advice more reliable. They do not flatter your ego into making a bad decision, because your failure would—in part—become their own.
Claude has everything to gain by telling you what you want to hear because that’s what drives more engagement, and that’s what burns credits. Claude has nothing to lose if that advice turns out to be wrong.
Your mentor has a different incentive, and this alignment—the fact that their interests are tied to yours—is something no model, however sophisticated, can replicate.
Claude can be useful, in the way that rereading or writing in your own diary can be useful. It’s a magnifying mirror, something that helps with self-reflection. But that’s not what mentors are for. Mentors help you see a path to get outside of yourself. They open and close doors for you. They may challenge you and test you, because you need to step out of your comfort.
Before contacting me, one of my mentees confessed: “I wasted three months of my life talking to Claude all day, and I accomplished nothing; I'm more confused than before. Three months in which I opened and closed projects. The truth is, I partly knew it, but it made me feel productive… After all, my weak side, interacting with people, was the side I needed to work on. But writing code has always been what I was best at. Now I’m fed up; I want to get out of my head.”
If you're still in doubt about whether to use a mentor, remember that: mentors are human beings, and they can fail. If you didn’t have a good experience with a mentor, change them. But if you’re reading this article on this platform, it’s most likely because you already know it.
