Trade-offs and Triumphs 24 by @jennykim
Issue 24: Mentors and Mentoring, Mute the World to Unmute Yourself With Impact, Closing Thought: "With Malice Toward None"
👋 Hello, friends! Thank you to my 130 subscribers.
Welcome to issue 24 of Trade-offs and Triumphs - a newsletter of resources and thoughts about how to balance trade-offs in life to find and celebrate the small triumph; every decision point requires thinking through trade-offs and not just immediately aiming for the “solution.”
This week we will hit on:
Mentors and Mentoring
Mute the World and Unmute Yourself With Impact
Closing Thought: “With Malice Toward None”
For a quick oral summary of Issue 24, hit ▶️ below:
🧑🏫 Mentors and Mentoring
January is National Mentoring Month. I ambitiously decided that over the next 30 days, I would write a short essay a day about mentoring. In this YouTube video, I explained why:
But what is a mentor?
The 1913 version of Webster’s Dictionary defines a mentor as a “wise and faithful counselor or monitor.”
I read this definition with askance. I have experienced unwise, indifferent, and ignorant mentors. People who had been assigned the title of “mentor,” but who had no idea what they were supposed to be. Often, they merely checked off “mentor-mentee” meetings as an item on their to-do lists.
There may have been a beginning, but no roadmap existed to define and to grow the relationship.
So what is a mentor?
When I was young, I thought that mentors had all the answers. I believed that if I followed their advice and example, then I would experience the same success that they had. I subconsciously desired certainty, and treated mentors’ advice like an algebra equation. The key variable was that I just had to work hard.
Except that sifting through mentors’ advice is more like trying to solve a calculus equation than an algebraic one.
As you seek mentors, remember that mentors are humans with their own personal body of experiences and biases. At the end of the day, you must understand what you want to achieve with each mentor-mentee relationship where you are the mentee.
AS YOU WORK THROUGH YOUR NETWORKS TO FIND MENTORS, ASK YOURSELF THESE QUESTIONS:
What type of mentor are you seeking?
Knowledge and skill mentor?
Aspirational mentor?
Peer mentor?
Life mentor?
Career mentor?
Perspective mentor?
Have you done your research about your target list of mentors?
What are your expectations of the mentor-mentee relationship?
What can you offer your target mentor?
Wise and faithful counselors are out there for everyone - but you have to do the work to sift through and to find them.
And sometimes, they are right in front of you.
✨What are the trade-offs that you will make about mentors?
✨ Or, are you just settling?
Follow me on Twitter throughout the month of January as I post about #mentors and #mentoring:
🔇 Mute the World to Unmute Yourself With Impact
Last week, I shared Steve Scott’s video, “Unmute Yourself.”
This week, Steve Scott advises us that to unmute ourselves with impact, we may have to Mute the World:
We are built for connection, but we also need solitude. Most of us are starving for stillness, but are too busy to notice.
Schedule time to fast from noise and feast on stillness.
Mute the world.
Explore your inner landscape and tune to your inner voice.
When you unmute, your voice will have more calm and clarity.
Vijay Gupta’s (founder and artistic director of Street Symphony) sharp distinction between isolation and solitude:
Isolation diminishes us, whereas solitude opens us, awakens us to our internal lives.”
✨ Only when you mute the world, do you find the clarity to address trade-offs.
Closing Thought: “With Malice Toward None”
As the first week of 2021 ended, I took a deep breath. I also took a moment to read and re-read President Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address (which I did right after the 2020 election) and focused on this specific quote yet again:
"With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
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Be conscious of your trade-offs. Before settling on any one “solution,” run your fingers through all the trade-offs and decide intentionally and specifically.
And then celebrate your triumphs, no matter how small.
See you next week!