On Mentorship

As the year wraps up, I want to jot down some thoughts on mentorship in general, explain what it is, and perhaps persuade you to bring mentorship into your own life.

What does your mentor do?

I was visiting one of my mentees at his non-profit’s head-quarters — a university in Brazil that provides its space over the weekend. He runs this program with dozens of volunteers for hundreds of adults and kids, where they learn the gamut from computer usage to english to art. It’s really remarkable.

At one point he introduced me to a group of 4–5 volunteers: “Hey folks, this is Dui, my mentor.” — Hi. Hey there. Nice to meet you.

A minute later we were walking down the hall when one of the volunteers comes up running, touches on his shoulder, and asks him:

“But wait — what does your mentor do?”

Curiously, I don’t think my mentee’s answer was very descriptive, hehe — it amounted to “Well, he helps me with everything! Work and life and stuff!”

But what does a mentor do? Here’s my definition:

A mentor is someone who’s been through similar (but not identical) challenges their mentee have been through, and who guides them through those challenges through advice and modeling.

That’s my definition, anyway. Here are the key points:

1. Has been through challenges: Been there done that.
2. Similar (but not identical) challenges: The mentee and mentor share significant context.
3. Guides them through advice: Offers wisdom and suggestions for overcoming challenges.
4. Guides them through modeling: Demonstrates the behavior that a mentee can emulate.

That, I believe, is the essence of mentorship. Other stuff can be helpful too, but I’d call the other things advisory, coaching, teaching, helping, whatever.. not mentorship. Nothing wrong with those.

Mentorship is for all areas of life

A critical aspect of mentorship is that mentorship is for all areas of life. You get a tennis coach, a piano teacher, and a financial advisor, but even if your mentor is an expert in an area, the highest value comes from tying all areas of life together.

That’s why having shared context between mentor and mentee is so crucial (and useful): seeing what a mentor did in an area is fine, but seeing what they did in all areas is how you get real unique value out of mentorship.

All areas of our life are interconnected, like a distributed system. Inputs to your sleep affect your work, your work stress affects your relationships, your relationship strains affect your sleep. They’re all parts of the same whole.

There’s benefit in learning how to improve on each of those areas but a mentor helps you put it all together into a cohesive whole — ideally by modeling what it looks like through their own life.

A coach can be really effective even when they’re not as skilled as their client: Some athletes were mediocre players but outstanding coaches. A mentor, less so: there’s unique value in the “watch me do this” and “let me show you how I did this” of a mentor.

I think trying to coach a more skilled mentee could only take my mentorship so far: At some point, the modeling, the lessons, the sharpness of advice fades away. Even if I was an outstanding coach, I would never have the same level of impact as I could as a mentor.

I think similarly about advisory. I can hear and share my opinion, but no matter how much wisdom and lived experience I have about a particular topic, my impact would never match that of a holistic application of my example to a mentee’s current situation.

In away, I think mentor is a personal growth super-power: A hard to find but highly effective way to navigate all of life’s challenges.

OK, so you’re sold on having a mentor! It sounds great!

But what is in it for the me .. the mentor?

Why I got into mentorship

I’ve mentored a few people temporarily (6–12 meetings over a 3-6 month period), and I have two permanent mentees whom, I hope, I’ll mentor through the rest of my life.

But more important than “How” is “Why” — why did I get into this in the first place?

I became a mentor because I wanted to have the same impact I had within companies, as a leader, outside of the company. And in pursuing that I found so much more.

I didn’t realize it, but as a leader, you are constrained in many ways by things you must do:

• You must do what’s best for the company and its success.
• You must do your job, ideally to a high standard.
• You must follow company policies, processes, and constraints.

Often times the above constraints can stay out of the way of your mentorship, but sometimes they can hinder, or go directly counter, to your mentee’s goals.

On the other hand, here is what you must do, as a mentor:

• Your must do what is best for your mentee.

That’s it. And I never noticed the difference until it was staring me in the face in my first few mentorships.

In the end, as a leader at a company, I have many goals: Company OKRs, Group OKRs, Team OKRs. They’re all intertwined, and I must tend to all of them. Strategy. Prioritization. Trade-offs.

In my personal list of 2025 goals, I only had 2 goals related to my mentorship:

My mentees achieve their yearly goals. (2/2)

That’s it.

So in a way, I pursued mentorship in search of external impact but instead found an augmented freedom in the positive impact I have.

And you see that “(2/2)” there? Well, in a way this post is a celebration:

I’ve achieved all of my goals as a mentor this year. Because my mentees have achieved THEIR goals.

So congratulations, my dear mentees. You are the best, and this post is a celebration to you.