Flexing the mentor muscle
Constantly learning is an integral part of the tech industry. Things change so often and so deeply that anyone involved in technology needs to always be on guard the next thing that will reshape the tools they use everyday.
My career has benefitted in large part from some awesome mentors. I’m a miserable S.O.B. when I’m forced to learn on my own. Some people claim to gain a host of new skills through sheer will power and a never-ending queue of Google searches. I suspect those people are either lying or immune to soul-crushing inefficiencies.
It would probably take me about five times longer to learn something new without a mentor. That said, it actually takes an infinite amount of time, because the process always eventually derails.
Learning a completely new skill on your own just kind of sucks.
Recently, I’ve found some opportunities at the day job to reciprocate some mentorship. I figured I should stop being a selfish dick-bag and help those around me, like so many of my non-dick-bag colleagues have done for me in the past.
In doing so, a few things surprised me:
It takes a lot of your time & focus
Yeah. Helping someone takes your time. A lot of it. Don’t be surprised when you look up after a couple weeks and realize you’ve basically got nothing done because you’ve been helping John Doe learn a new framework. That’s the price you pay, and in the long run it’s totally worth it.
Know when to back off
Everyone has their own way they learn best. Gleaning how well your counterpart is catching on is an invaluable skill to grow as a mentor. That way, you’re able to back off when they’re getting it, and let them take over. Conversely, you can slow it down and backtrack when you catch a glazed-over look in their eye after a perfunctory “Uh-huh” escapes the side of their mouth.
Mentor others for selfish reasons
There’s a ton of ways I benefit from teaching others.
Making your world better
The most immediate, and perhaps most frivolous, is that it feels great to share your knowledge with someone. On some primal level, teaching can just feel like your making your immediate world a better place, which feels totally awesome.
Learn along the way
You learn while you teach. When you have to articulate the “how” and the “why” of some piece of technology, it really tests your knowledge of that thing. You get complex or sometimes stupefyingly-simple questions fired back at you.
Mentorship makes you think through things in a totally different way in order to package things into cohesive, articulate instruction. Simply knowing how things work is no longer good enough. You really need to know why they work they way they do in order to relate that understanding to someone else.
Piggy-baking on that idea, once you mentor someone about something, you inevitably repeat those lessons to someone else. Unsurprisingly, this repetition serves to further solidify your understanding and your ability to teach others, as a mentor of mine said:
It’s similar to reciting lines: When I teach you guys a new technology, I’m reiterating the same thing over and over to each one of you. Every time that I do that, I solidify my own understanding and nuances of the technology that I’m teaching.
Specifically, you all have different questions, which shine light into the darker corners that aren’t always visible. Oftentimes, those fringe questions may prompt me to Google something while I’m teaching, and that provides a learning opportunity for both of us.
- Killian Louis Grant, Director of Engineering @ SpireMedia
What have you been surprised by as you mentor others? Holla @glen_elkins.
