Mentoring is key to our career growth as well as personal development. We all seek advice, guidance, and motivation to better ourselves both personally and professionally. To make this post more fun to read, pick one person that could be your ideal career mentor. This person could be alive or dead, and/or fictional or real.
Allow me to pick one to start. As of lately, I dove into the work of Akira Kurosawa. A famed Japanese filmmaker well known for his elaborated films such as "Seven Samurai", "High and Low", "Yojimbo", and "The Hidden Fortress" (a personal favorite). Many of his interviews highlighted how to think as a filmmaker not from a style standpoint but also, how storytelling drives the narrative in an elevated form. For example, Kurosawa's camerawork only moved when the action moved or he included a jump cut that created a jarring effect. In the film making world, I personally experienced the amount of workload required on and off set. Many productions can be chaotic, exhausting and highly stressful. Kurosawa formed a team of actors and crews he regularly employed because of the effective collaboration. It allowed the team to be in a relaxing environment to perform their work.
After watching his interviews, I learned to be more humble with myself and with others. Collaboration is necessary to forgo creativity to improve my work. Not only I greatly respect Kurosawa's body of work and philosophy, he also encourages me to think economically and boldly express my ideas as a filmmaker/designer.