Mentorship is dead.

It used to be like you discovered new ideas and with those ideas you found someone experienced to teach you the ways. A mentor-mentee relationship was born. The pursuit was skilled knowledge. Anyone can read a book. Learning under the leadership of a skilled person is a whole another level of learning.

Let me be clear... mentorship is not taking a class on something for a few weeks. It is a longer engagement.

When we are young, our dads are pressured to fill the role of being our mentors. Dads can be dads, they don't necessarily have to be mentors. But mentors they must be.

Colleges provide some opportunities for mentorship but you have to be lucky. You must have the real teachers and the luxury of not worrying about your degree, student loans, and shrinking job markets.

Then we get older and mentorship becomes some jargon in your office's performance plan. And few mentors in an office teach you how to think and do like an expert.

Or you go to a social organization seeking mentorship and end up contributing to a mess of networking events perpetually exchanging business cards with each other.

You could pay a "life coach" to mentor you, help you navigate your life and tell you the best thing to do in their own opinion of course.

My mentors are online. They produce wonderful educational videos and I pay to watch. Our relationship is mostly transactional. They don't live anywhere close. The other side of the pond, actually. So I search in their words for the sparks that I miss in a person-to-person interaction. The one that happens across the workbench. In real time. But I can't reach past my iPad's screen.

Serious and long-term pursuits of ideas/hobbies/skills have been pruned into a five minute DIY video.

And mentorship is dead.