Learning at work

I don't think you can find a mentor without doing a little bit of a discovery yourself. You need to start reflecting on yourself, knowing what your needs are, knowing what your passions are. It can't be like a generic, oh, another leader that you got or some experienced person that you got. Somebody that can understand your journey.

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There are certain aspects, especially tailored that your needs are, that a mentor needs to look for. Then for example, I need someone, given these growth areas, given where my journey is, where my destination is, you need to then choose almost several mentors and see what pans out, see what relationship sticks.

I think it's important to actually have an outside view. And it's also because what that really disconnects for the mentor is any sort of incentives. The best mentor is incentivized to do good. Whenever they mentor someone, they get that good feeling and that's their reward.

When I'm getting bored, usually it’s a sign. If I do the same things in the same way and I feel that it's not challenging anymore, and I cannot pay that much attention. A good analogy would be, I do Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and that's very easy to see whether you're in comfort zone or not because you have immediate feedback loops and they are not very nice feedback loops! You can tell you're not paying attention, you're going mechanically and you don't have to be alert and you don't have to prepare, and I see that at work if I do the same thing several times. Especially at the end of my technical career, I was like, ‘Yeah, I've done this, created this system 20 times, I'm getting bored. I just do the same thing.’

And I start feeling that I'm not engaged and I don't need to pay much attention to whatever task I'm doing. It's like, ‘Now it's time to change’.

We are all on a journey of learning more about ourselves, why we do what we do, what matters to us, what we are good at, what we'd like to be good at. And I think if you are able to kind of get that sense of yourself, and I think this is, again, part of the self awareness and growth piece, there is the things that you might want to do that you are strong at, and you could choose just to double down on that. And that's okay, right? Again, no judgment on whatever path folk are on. Then you have things that you are not good at, like really not good at, and you're like, "Yeah, I know I'm terrible at this thing. And I'm okay with that." And then there's a big space in the middle of things that you may want to be better at.

I think at the very start of your career, it's quite good to start somewhere structured. So you don't have to necessarily stay there forever. But I think it's really good to build those foundations of professional working in an environment which actually has stability and structure, where you can learn from other people.