You don't need a personal mentor (I usually don't have one at least), but a good source of good experience, like HN. Now if you are talking about making friends to talk personally, then I'd suggest for you to read the book "how to make friends and influence people" and try it out out in "the field".

Go to events. Cold email entrepreneurs you want to know. Last night I went to an event by Alex Berman in NYC. I met a ton of wonderful people. I run a marketing consulting business and I got to meet a ton of other people who ran similar businesses. I find by going out and being around other freelancers and agency owners you can learn a lot.

I'd say look into communities on Slack is a solid option for most industries. You can also look into platforms like Codementor.io (for programming) if you're open to paying someone to mentor you, though not sure if something like that exists for other fields.

I would recommend the #freelance community on Slack. It's not free, but I find it well worth the subscription price ($49/yr) http://freelance.chat

It's been helpful for me, and paid for itself. I've gotten to meet other freelancers, and bounce ideas off of, and talk about jobs and such. I've gotten 3 gigs from there, so far.

Good luck, my friend!

If you can't find a mentor, you can learn how to learn on your own. Wrote up some suggestions here: https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/04/17/learning-without-a-m...

guess I should clarify I'm not just looking for advice for learning, but also on career advice like whether I should take a job or not and how to deal with office politics etc.

I would suggest trying a relevant local meetup event. At in India, there is a general body - NASSCOM - which organises events and conferences where one would find a mentor or someone to look up to and learn from them.