I’ve been thinking about mentorship a lot lately. Mentorship, coaching: it comes up a lot when I talk to people as a critical way to advance your goals.
Vinh Giang has a really great story that he uses to frame a lesson on storytelling, but the story itself — about how he found an effective mentor — was really revelatory for me:
I think Vinh was successful here because he was able to break down what he wanted to accomplish into a very clear set of goals. The core goal — hit the bullseye — is literally the concrete manifestation of a metaphor that folks use every day.
For me, though, I have a few snapshots of where I want to go to be a more clear communicator, to share the lessons I’ve learned the hard way with more people, and to generally build more cool stuff, but none of those problems are really something I can break down into, like, an OKR or something.
Likewise, on the other side of the fence, there’s not really any one person who has done exactly what I want to be doing. For the few verticals where I do have an idea of folks who I look up to, for the most part, I simply do not want to bother them to ask for them to spend time helping me out.
In retrospect, this seems very obvious, but: when you’re building your coaching Voltron, not all of those people even have to know that you exist.
Asa Park’s recent video about Damon Albarn was clearly an instance of someone finding someone else that they look up to, and figuring out how to learn from them. Asa says:
I’m really obsessed with Damon Albarn. I’ve listened to all his interviews. I’ve read all these biographies, I’ve played all the music he’s ever created. And I think I might have found his secret.
I sat down to make my list of folks to learn from this morning. One of the people on that list is Rivers Cuomo, because I recalled hearing over a decade ago about a similar experiment he did. From Weezerpedia:
The Encyclopedia o’ Pop is a three-ring binder filled with charts and experiments created by Rivers Cuomo in 1999. It documents and dissects every song written by Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, as well as songs by Oasis and Green Day, in a mathematical manner. According to Todd Sullivan, Weezer’s A&R man, “(Rivers) figured if he could home in on Kurt’s formula, he’d figure out his own formula. That way, he would be a never-ending supply of songs.”
Yes! How cool is that?
Nearly at the top of my list is Aaron Swartz. So, this morning, I spent some more time with his blog and found exactly the message I needed to hear right now. From “What is going on here?” (July 2006):
In his 1959 classic, The Sociological Imagination, the great sociologist C. Wright Mills told students of the discipline:
As a social scientist, you have to … capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman. But how can you do this? One answer is: you must set up a blog…
[…]
Actually, he called it a “file” instead of a blog, but the point remains the same: becoming a scientific thinker requires practice and writing is a powerful aid to reflection.
[…]
So that’s what this blog is. I write here about thoughts I have, things I’m working on, stuff I’ve read, experiences I’ve had, and so on. Whenever a thought crystalizes in my head, I type it up and post it here. I don’t read over it, I don’t show it to anyone, and I don’t edit it — I just post it.
I don’t consider this writing, I consider this thinking. I like sharing my thoughts and I like hearing yours and I like practicing expressing ideas, but fundamentally this blog is not for you, it’s for me. I hope that you enjoy it anyway.
That’s exactly what I needed to hear. It’s pretty rare that I’ll get an idea and have it validated immediately.
I’m going to model a new form of apprenticeship to my heroes; I’m making space in my mental modal of people to check in with, making sure a survey of the available literature gets equal weight.
