A few years ago, one of the most profound and influential pieces of advice that I’ve heard is the following:
Do for one what you wish you could do for everyone.
The thing about hearing things like this is that it always lands in different places with different people. Like I said, for me, it’s ended up being something that’s profoundly influenced certain things in my life; however, for others, statements like that don’t land anywhere near a point of significance.
And that’s okay – if we were all influenced and persuaded by the same things, we’d all be doing the same things and that’d make for a boring world.
But for those of you who have been following this blog, read some of my other contributing articles, or seeing what we’re currently working on at 8BIT you know that education is a big interest, and is important to me.
So in my second post on Medium, I attempt to explain something that I’m currently working on that jives with the statement above.
Do For One
The subtitle of the article is Why Online Code Schools Aren’t a Threat To Mentors. To some degree, this goes back to a post I wrote a few months ago on Why Everyone Should Learn To Code (Whatever That Means).
In the article, I share that I’ve begun mentoring a local young man who’s currently interested in building a business of his own. Not only that, he’s interested in learning about how to build web sites and applications.
How neat is that?
But here’s the tension: For whatever reason, there’s something that’s attractive about speaking to group of people for once or twice a week in order to help them learn to do the same, but there’s something far more rewarding than walking through this process for a couple of years with a young person who has an insatiable desire to learn.
I discuss this more in the article on Medium, but the basis for my decision for doing this is that when I was young, I had often wished that I had someone older than me to walk me through much of what I was learning (after all, it’s no secret that I’m a fan of the apprentice-journeyman-craftsman model for software development).
Now that I’m at a place in my life and have the opportunity to do for one what I wish I could do for everyone (and what I wish I had someone to do for me).
Isn’t This Narcissistic?
If so, I certainly don’t mean it to me, but one of the primary critiques that bloggers and others involved in social media have is that it’s all an exercise in narcism.
I don’t agree (and I’ve venture to say many of you don’t either), but I digress.
Of course, for those of us who are involved, we know that the purpose of all of this is rarely for ourselves, but for others.
And so to that end, I challenge you guys to see if there’s anyone in your neighborhood, community, or even online that’s in need of a mentor and see if you can’t help ’em out.
You obviously don’t have to know everything – but just enough to help guide them in a direction that helps bring them up to where you are and to help continue to cater to the interest they have.
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