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Hey everyone! I hope you had a great week! Another scrambling together of a blog this week. Turns out that when people visit you on the weekends while you are traveling (which is typically the time I write the most), you tend to get behind on writing.
If you’re a recent grad like me, you probably didn’t have a very enjoyable time this past week filing (or attempting to file) taxes for the first time. Going through this process hit home on two points for me:
I am officially in “the real world”
The tax process is so unnecessarily complicated (especially for people who use crypto)
If any of y’all were like me and tried to use TurboTax, you probably got excited seeing the countdown clock challenging you to get your taxes done in under 20 minutes thinking everything would be a piece of cake just to still be churning away at the process an hour and a half later.
Speaking of TurboTax and the fact that it is tax season, I want to send a reminder (or show you for the first time) on how all Americans can have a simple and easy way to pay taxes if it wasn’t for companies like TurboTax and H&R lobbying Congress. Every year, I am reminded of this fact during the NBA playoffs commercials and this is how I think of Intuit & TurboTax:
Anyways, enough getting mad about something we can’t control and time to move on to something that is in your control: staying in touch with your mentors!
The Importance of Staying in Touch with Mentors
For anyone starting their young career (like myself), few things are as important as finding the right people to help guide you along the way through mentorship. Now, I know that statement is probably quite ironic given that I have just started my career and thus, have no way of knowing the importance (or lack thereof) of mentorship. Thus, here is a quote regarding the topic from someone who knows a thing or two:
"I think mentors are important and I don't think anybody makes it in the world without some form of mentorship. Nobody makes it alone. Nobody has made it alone. And we are all mentors to people even when we don't know it."
~ Oprah Winfrey
You may think that some famous gurus in their field were able to do it themselves, but even they had mentors (and usually some pretty good ones) Here are a few examples:
Steven Jobs & Mark Zuckerberg
Christian Dior & Yves Saint-Laurent
Steven Spielberg & J.J. Abrams
Socrates & Plato (and eventually) Plato & Aristotle
Maya Angelou & Oprah Winfrey (fitting)
So now that you understand that mentors are important, let’s look at why mentors are important. However, since I have not had enough time to interact and learn from my mentors to provide a reasonable and knowledgeable take on the matter (and also not a lot of time to write this blog), I am resorting to the best consultant I could ever ask for, Chat GPT, to explain. Here are some key points:
Continued Guidance: Mentors are a valuable source of guidance and advice. By staying in touch with them, you can continue to receive valuable insights, feedback, and support as you progress in your personal or professional journey.
Networking Opportunities: Mentors often have extensive networks in their respective fields or industries. By maintaining regular contact, you can tap into their network and potentially gain access to new opportunities, such as introductions to other professionals or job openings.
Personal and Professional Growth: Mentors can provide ongoing mentorship and help you develop new skills, knowledge, and perspectives. By staying in touch with them, you can continue to learn and grow both personally and professionally.
Accountability and Motivation: Mentors can serve as accountability partners, helping you stay on track with your goals and aspirations. Regular communication with mentors can provide motivation, encouragement, and a sense of responsibility to work toward your goals.
What To Avoid When Staying in Touch
In order to receive all the benefits of having a mentor, it is important to stay in touch with them. However, what is equally important to maintaining contact with them is how you keep in contact. Like the last point, since I am fairly new to this whole mentor thing, I am still learning how to appropriately approach this. Thus, as Bernie Sanders put it:
Inconsistent communication: It's important to maintain regular contact with your mentors and not go long periods without reaching out. Inconsistency in communication may give the impression that you are not serious about the mentorship relationship and can lead to a breakdown in communication.
Being too demanding: It's essential to respect your mentors' time and boundaries. Avoid being too demanding of their time, attention, or resources. Understand that mentors have their own commitments and responsibilities, and being overly demanding may strain the relationship.
Neglecting reciprocity: Mentorship is a two-way street. It's important to offer value and show appreciation for your mentors' time and guidance. Neglecting to reciprocate by offering assistance, sharing resources, or expressing gratitude can make the relationship one-sided and less fulfilling for both parties.
Failing to follow up: Mentors provide advice, feedback, and suggestions to help you grow. Failing to follow up on their guidance or not taking action on their recommendations can convey a lack of commitment and initiative on your part. Be proactive in implementing their feedback and keeping them updated on your progress.
From one of the best mentor-mentee relationships in movie history (yes, I’m a Marvel fan…who isn’t), the goal is to find that grey area in between that represents the perfect balance of not being too pushy while not being a complete stranger.
The Solution: A Personal Quarterly Report
As I tried to find this grey area to operate in, I tried to think of creative ways I could accomplish this. This idea would need to maintain continuous and consistent contact without constantly clobbering them with communications (yes, I used that many C’s just cause). The idea would also need to provide my mentors with some value that also expresses my gratitude for their help by showing them how I’ve executed on their advice. While randomly talking finance with my temporary roommate in Charlotte who works in IB (shoutout Kendel), the lightbulb went off in my head: write a personal quarterly report.
I believe this idea works for a few reasons. A quarterly report allows consistent, but not constant contact. Writing one report every three months to your mentors will regularly keep them in the loop with your life and its events without barraging their email inbox or text messages. It also gives you a great opportunity to show how you’ve acted on your mentors' advice and reciprocate value back to your mentors by providing them with a fun and unique reading that also may provide them with some valuable insights (from me, it was mainly the best restaurants to go to in each city, but hey, you got to start somewhere).
Since I am writing this exclusively to mentors of mine, I don’t want to show everything I wrote in the report. However, if you are interested in possibly doing something similar, here are the different topics I covered that could be beneficial for you to use (but don’t be afraid to make it your own as well):
Personal Highlights (Ex: my travels around the country)
Professional Highlights (Ex: my new job at the NEAR Foundation)
Goals & Progress (Ex: Publishing blog posts)
Challenges & Roadblocks (Ex: finding a consistent routine)
Advice from Mentors (Ex: advice you’ve acted on)
Future Plans (Ex: where I am traveling next)
Response from Mentors?
Since this is my first time doing this, the jury is still out on whether or not this will be a fruitful and worthwhile idea. However, I’ve received some pretty positive responses so far. Here are just a few:
From writing this report, I am getting intros to my mentors’ network (which is much bigger than mine obviously), getting the chance to meet up with them in person, and more. Don’t get it confused, however; these quarterly updates won’t be the only time I connect with my mentors all year. I still plan on reaching out to them to catch up or get some advice on when I may need it as one of my mentors wisely said,
“What’s the point of having a great network if you don’t use it every once in a while.”
Conclusion
Although I do believe the reasons why this quarterly report is a good idea for anyone looking to improve their relationship with their mentors, it is still just a random idea from a recent college grad who’s never done anything similar to this previously. So, to use what almost all of my mentors have told me about most of the advice they’ve given, “take this with a grain of salt.” However, if you want to do something similar and are looking for inspiration, PLEASE LET ME KNOW! I WILL SEND OVER MY REPORT RIGHT AWAY! Feel free to either completely copy it (which I’m fine with) or turn it into something new.
Thanks for reading! Sorry for posting on Friday again. I have more free time this weekend, so I should be resuming the Wednesday blogs next week while in Austin, TX. To reiterate what I posted on LinkedIn, please let me know if you’re in town and would like to meet up, regardless if you are going to the Consensus conference or not. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll be writing for next week’s blog yet, so stay tuned!