Mentors are essential for growth. Let multi-billionaire Robert Smith tell you how he found his mentors.

One of crucial things you can learn from multi-billionaire Robert Smith is how to create mentors. Being a mentor was essential to Smith’s rise. A mentor can assist you learn real-world job skills that can assist you rise. When you learn how to encourage someone to mentor you, you learn how to learn. The more you know, the more unstoppable you are. There are few people to learn from higher than Smith.

Smith grew up as a talented engineer, but when he got to Goldman Sachs, he realized the place to be was within the mergers and acquisitions department, also referred to as M&A. That’s where Goldman advised big corporations on how to purchase and acquire other corporations. It was the place to actually get wealthy. But Smith said the talents needed to work in M&A weren’t taught in business school, so he needed to determine how to create a mentor who could help him. So how did he learn how to reach M&A?

Developing a mentor could be easy. Find individuals who are older and more experienced than you and are way ahead of you in your field. Find a approach to construct rapport, then ask them questions that give them a likelihood to share their genius. Many older people like to share their game with younger people, especially when the younger person frames the moment as a one-way conversation based on respect for the older person’s knowledge.

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When Smith needed to study M&A, he created a weekly mentoring program. Every Friday at lunchtime, the M&A program leader would are available and talk over with less experienced team members in regards to the deals they’d done, teaching them how to do M&A. Smith created a mentoring program that allowed experienced people to are available and boost their egos by teaching them the talents. The program seemed generous—it will surely help anyone at his level—but in fact, it was ultimately designed to assist him grow.

By constructing relationships and putting experienced people in positions to tell him what they know, and by boosting their egos, he was in a position to learn how to operate in mergers and acquisitions and grow to be a really tycoon. Your goal may or might not be extreme wealth, but when you can talk over with senior people in your field in a tone of, hey, how would you handle this challenge or how did you do that, you may find that they are honored to show you because from their perspective they are telling you how smart they are, and everybody loves having that conversation.

For more from Robert Smith, watch our highly entertaining “Masters of the Game” conversation on TheGrio Cable Network.