My Mentors (SIM #85)
A few random updates. I'm thinking about rebranding these musings to Scar Tissue Club or Same Team. As a casual user of X/Twitter and Instagram, I'm trying to move most of my "social media" time over to Substack. I think it's a net benefit that I'm not paying attention to as many quick dopamine or anger-inducing sound bites. X in particular plays into our natural predisposition to make things binary, amplifying an already polarized audience with the loudest voices (Binary Trap by Koenfucius is an essay I enjoyed on this topic).
I’m sure the same algorithmic-driven attention economics are behind Substack’s push to move beyond being a newsletter host, yet I find Substack to be more growth/learning oriented. If you are interested, I’d encourage you to give Substack’s Notes a try.
Scar tissue has become a core part of my daily vocabulary as a proxy for wisdom learned the hard way. Turning to the title of this musing, one of my closest group of friends is comprised of former division 3 basketball players, all of whom played at Grinnell College. I was fortunate enough to attach myself to them just after graduating college, begging and bribing my way (often with burritos) into their social circle and on to their Chicago rec-league hoops team. The group is now heavily dispersed and every few years we get together for a Mancation.
In the summer of 2023, a group of about ten of us were lucky enough to hang out in a mountain cabin outside Telluride. It's an intellectually curious and honest group of men that's generally willing to be vulnerable (and not only after the truth serum of alcohol). One evening, the open-ended question of "who have been your mentors?" was asked and we spent a good hour plus going around the room highlighting mentors. I've always appreciated how impactful mentors are, yet in the moment, I realized I had only considered this question with respect to specific topics, as opposed to mentorship in a more holistic sense.
As an aside, at some point, it would be worth writing about this particular group of Grinnell mens’ bond and their collective professional success; it’s impressive. As a group, they have helped shape me and would qualify as among my mentors.
I listened to seven or eight others highlight their coaches, teachers and role models, while reflecting on the question for myself, not knowing exactly what I would say or even if I would say anything. I've learned so much from others and can think of many mini-mentors, including former colleagues, coaches, friends and teachers; I’ve been fortunate with great mentors in specific domains, but nobody was coming to mind as a top dog mentor. And then it hit me like a ton of bricks. The opportunity came to speak up and I had a hard time talking through my tears as I described how my parents collectively are my mentor, all four of them.
Seeing how I was struggling to get the words out in the moment, one of my friends leaned over and thankfully said, "you need to tell them", which, because it’s in the realm of expressing feelings verbally, is not something that comes naturally to me.
I've never had a role model in the traditional sense and I left Wall Street in part because I didn't look at my very highly compensated bosses with any desire to be like them. I feel like I've serendipitously stumbled through life based upon my curiosity and the opportunities that presented themselves, basically pursuing whatever made the most sense to me at the time. I thoroughly enjoy the puzzle of adding value in business, and in particular, working on business challenges with peers. When I reflect on what anchors me day-to-day, it's the core values instilled in me by my parents and how they manage their own journeys with an underlying conscientiousness/kindness, work ethic, curiosity, integrity and sense of justice/fairness. My professional life has taken a very different direction than theirs, none of whom have spent much time working within traditional business, and despite these differences, I remain inspired by how each of them lives their values.
Interestingly, this was all before my therapist-led self-diagnosis of being on the autism spectrum last summer (SIM #78 - Relentlessly Honest); I hadn't previously connected this mentor epiphany and my neurodivergence. Outside of my parents, and it’s not like I think they’re perfect, I don’t have traditional role models. The fact that I couldn't immediately identify my parents as mentors might be a reflection of how spoiled I've been with four parents that loved and supported me, while giving me tremendous freedoms and encouragement – even if they colluded and manipulated me to play soccer instead of football. My professional choices and politics are different from my parents, yet at core, I’ve never doubted their acceptance and support of how I live my life.
When coupled with such consistent support, perhaps the fact I split time between two houses every few days for most of my childhood made it that much easier for my neurodivergence to go unnoticed. As far as I can remember, I was always quiet, obedient, book smart and good at sports, which makes for an easy glide path to fitting in. Looking back, my brain’s default is operating in some form of an observer mode, almost always able to navigate my surroundings because I mirror so well (to a fault) and generally believe, perhaps naïvely, that most people mean well. This has bit me in the ass a few times in the business world and I’ve shed some of these tendencies as I’ve matured. I've learned to lead more intentionally, most often to fill a void that I'm noticing, yet my instinct still defaults to wanting to blend in as a quiet, valuable contributor, solving problems, optimizing and peacemaking as part of a group effort. Ultimately, I take great pride in the manner in which my mentors’ influence shows up in my personal and professional life.
This musing became somewhat self indulgent. I think we frequently forget just how important mentors are with respect to our perspective on the world. Thinking of it in reverse, mentors are often the catalyst for the positive learning experiences that we have determined to be most impactful, thus the reason we consider them mentors. As I look around, I see a lot of misplaced idolatry as the Internet has made the world much smaller and accessible. I think most would be well served to think about the mentors they’ve had in their life and reflect upon why they’ve been mentors.
Josh