When I started law school, I forgot about the above commitment and began focusing all of my attention on finding the right woman for me. My mentor told me, essentially, that I had my priorities out of order and was putting the cart before the horse. I ignored my mentor and the difficulty I had in law school and with the Bar Exam were direct results of having changed my priorities and my goal-oriented behavior.

I had great mentors. If only I had listened to their advice, I would have been much better off.

You said above,

“Remember that the mentors are not there to help you achieve your goals. They are to ensure that you remain on the right track.”

This isn’t quite true, in my experience. The ONLY purpose of mentors if for them to help you to achieve your goals, and for you to give back to your mentors and your community in return.

Unless you are a good listener, a mentor cannot “ensure that you remain on track”. What a mentor can do is point out the right track and encourage you to follow it, based on their own experience in the industry (and even workplace) where you want to be successful.

A key quality in a mentor is that s/he knows where the human, financial and employment resources are and can give you direction, suggestions, and a leg up in accessing those resources, if only by telling you that they exist. But as you said above, a mentor can guide a student to water, or point them toward it, but a mentor can’t make the student drink.

A mentor should be someone who has achieved what you want to achieve or is three or four steps ahead of you; someone who perceives YOUR commitment and YOUR intellect and therefore sees the value in spending their precious and scarce time helping you to get ahead.

You should think about what you can give back to your mentor before you approach them asking for their help. If the mentor is a teacher, maybe you can help on a research project and get face time where you get the guidance you need.

If your mentor has graduated from college, from graduate school and is working in a high-visibility post in the profession, maybe you can help them to organize their next professional conference (and thereby meet the sharpest other professionals in the field where you want to excel).

Realize your mentor’s time and energy are scarce and get ready to give something back in exchange for the crucial career-making guidance you’re about to receive.

And, for the love of God, don’t ask anyone for anything if you’re not willing to immediately e-mail them and thank them effusively for helping you along your path. Thanking people is the minimum you can do to you show them you appreciate the help (or attempt at help) that you have received. Thanking them keeps the conversation alive.