Best Mentors in the World Just For You
Mentors can give you different perspectives, and sometimes that’s all you need.
Have you ever known someone so well that you could predict what their answer to your question would be?
When I was working as a staff engineering manager, my leader was director of engineering. We worked in this setup for four years and went through dozens of cases: simple ones like legal issues with open source libraries, and complex ones like having a project signed but no team to start it. I was able to predict his suggestions and potential questions as I knew him well. Ultimately, I could predict most of his calls based on previous experiences.
We can apply it to mentorship. In this article, we’ll conduct a thought experiment that gives you access to the best mentors on our planet, as long as they share their thoughts publicly.
Mentors
Imagine that you can ask:
Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffet or Charlie Munger for investing advice
Robert C. Martin about your code or Kent Beck about your approach to TDD
Jocko Willink, Simon Sinek or Jim Collins to give you a leadership advice
Paul Graham, Patrick Collison or Tobi Luke on how to start a business
While it's almost impossible to gather these people together for advice in real life, it can be done in our heads.
As with being able to predict what your friend’s advice would be, you need to put in work to learn how these people think. You need to try to consume everything that their brains produce, such as their books, interviews, articles etc. I found interviews in podcasts interesting for exploring more of their personal takes or philosophies.
Get familiar with your mentor’s perspective on the topic you want to get advice on and understand how they operate.
Contact
On one of his podcast appearances, Derek Sivers, a virtual mentor of mine, described his process for contacting his mentors (also virtual mentors):
When he needs advice, Derek starts to write an email to one of his mentors. He lists everything about the case to consult, distilling the context his mentor might need into a short one-pager. Anticipate what they may ask for and fill in all the information gaps. When the email is ready to be sent there is no actual need to send it. In most cases, Derek figured out what his mentor's advice would be while writing the email.
By putting together everything we know about a given situation and describing it extensively to others, we might gain a different perspective and find a solution to the issue.
Board of Advisors
You can try a more complicated thought experiment: Choose a few people you value whose approach to problems you are familiar with and trust. You can refer to them as “The Jedi Council” or any other name, as they work only in your head. You can rotate them out whenever you need a new perspective.
These people can be living, dead or even fictional, it doesn't matter as long as you can consider their perspective. Then, each time you need to make a decision ask your board of advisors:
What do you think?
What would you do?
Make them talk to each other about their perspectives. This exercise gives you different points of view and possible solutions to a problem.
Summary
I don’t want to discount the real relationships between mentors and mentees. Mentorship is valuable for both sides. We can conduct interesting thought experiments but nothing can replace real human connection.
With access to content produced by great minds and great experts, it is valuable to make use of it. I try to imagine the perspectives of my board of advisors whenever I have the spare mental capacity to lead their discussion.
Who would you invite to your personal board of advisors?
Thanks for reading,
— Michał
Post Notes
Discover Weekly — Shoutouts
Articles that might help you explore new perspectives, which I have read recently:
"How Netflix Uses Chaos Engineering to Create Resilience Systems" —
described the concept of Chaos Monkey at Netflix, illustrating how they achieve a resilient platform."The impossible task of engineering managers" —
wrote about important leadership dichotomies.- reminded us of the importance of criticising generally, not specifically.
"How to Communicate With Impact as a Software Engineer" — In a guest post for
‘s : shared practical advice for everyone who communicates, optimised for influence with a strong focus on your audience.