#mentoring

Grasshopper has learned well.

I meet with my mentor as and when he’s available. He manages my family’s money and he’s very good at what he does - his firm manages about $5 billion, and I have great conversations with him. 

I don’t want to talk too much about him, but he came from a lower middle class background and today is wealthy beyond comprehension. He could buy a plane or two in the middle of the night if he wanted. 

Today we focused a lot of personal growth in my career. 

He gave me two books - The Inheritors by Sonu Bhasin and Fortune’s Children by Arthur Vanderbilt.

Here are some brief takeaways: 

Work backwards from the outcome you want. 

Define the outcome of where you want to be and plan it backwards to your current position. 

2. Eliminate, eliminate, eliminate. 

Life is all about elimination. Don’t focus  on your weaknesses, focus on your strengths. Eliminate all the things you know you’re not good at, you have no interest in and that make you depressed. 

3. Intellectual honesty. 

Be honest with yourself about things you are good at and are not.  The easiest person to fool is yourself. 

4. Read one business biography a week. 

Everything you’re going in life, there’s a 99% chance someone else has gone through it and come out of it victorious. He also mentioned this article.

5. Outline 3 strengths and 3 weaknesses.

6. (In business/ corporate careers) You’re either primarily an investor (you’d rather fund companies and start ups than start them), an operator (you’d rather build something hands on), or a manager (you’d rather periodically manage something hands off. Like for instance you could have your own franchise bakery chain where you don’t need to exercise minute control over every franchise but you still ensure that there’s some managing done from your part). 

7. Do not have extreme ideologies at this age. 

Not when it comes to religion, politics, etc. 

8. Emotions, money and your time are something you need to be ruthless about. Absolutely ruthless. 

At nearly every turn in the ballad of songbirds and snakes you see all capitol born citizens get personally involved with them. And when they inevitably lose them they all become different. It changes who they were. Each of them gets a little more convinced that their kid isn't district. Snow even pushes the idea that Lucy Gray is practically capitol. Within the mentoring they all view their tribute as the exception. The one that doesn't belong to a district. Their tribute is always better or smarter or kinder than the rest. A few of them even get saved by their tribute. The tribute didn't have to do it but they did. So to them they can't possibly be from a district.

Making the victors mentor the children from their own district is fucked in a lot of ways. Every year they are forced to get close to another kid, knowing their families back home are depending on them to do their best to bring them back. They try their damnedest to save them but the odds aren't always in their favor. It takes away the opportunity for their capitol citizens to humanize them while making them isolated on all sides. They don't want the capitol citizens getting too close because if they do then they'll realize these are people. They allow the winners to go home while being the richest in the district. In twelve, we see that everyone is starving while Haymitch is fine. This helps isolate the victors even more.

Who would want to look at their winner when people are dying and they are doing perfectly fine? Who would want to look at the person that didn't bring your child home? They may know the capitol is to blame but the mentor always shares that responsibility in their mind.

It's part of the punishment for the victors too. It's not enough to force them into prostitution and sex slavery. You need more than bodily control over them to keep them broken and beaten down.

The capitol does such a good job at isolating and punishing victors. You're forced to mentor a child every year that you may or may not know. Half of them are already dying or too weak to fight back and yet you are their only chance of survival. You have to be willing to forgive your fellow mentors for the actions of their tributes because they are the only ones who will ever truly know the hell of losing everything. They are the ones that understand the hate from all sides. The victors are hated by the president, their own districts (outside of the career districts but they have their own fucked problems) and by the kids they have to shepard to death.

Snow's games is designed to make them view the other districts as the enemy and for the most part it works. They want the victors to hate each other but by having control over everything else all they are left with is each other. Even if they wanted to hate each other there would be no point. They have no one else. Their games change them. No one back home is able to pick up their pieces.

They were mostly a MtG family so we looked at my spindown d20s, but I discontinued my +/- d6s last year so only had one minus die left. I offered it to the older kid who was asking most of the questions and he politely declined, because apparently I’d given him a free pair last year (what can I say, I love kids who ask good questions).

A few minutes later before the family left, the mom and younger kid came back and the mom asked if the offer for the free die was still open, because the younger kid had been too shy to say he would love it. So of course he instantly got the d6, but I was having feelings as a fairly shy person myself, so I also pulled out a spindown that wasn’t on display because it has a visible patch on the base where it had a void. I handed it to him and said something about how I hoped he would like it, and it could be a reminder that you don’t have to do everything perfectly to make art, that’s it’s okay to learn and experiment. He smiled and took his dice and they left.

And then the show ended and I packed up and went home and that was that.

Until this evening when I got an email from him thanking me for his dice and sharing that he made his very own die out of wood today.

I do mock interviews every summer with the students from my graduate certificate program. I love it, and I find it's a great way to give back. Here are some of the best questions students have asked me:

Should I cover my tattoos? Answer: Can Looking Weird at Work Be Good for Your Career? 

How is a Zoom interview different? Answer: Ask the Bitches: How Do I Prepare for a Job Interview on Zoom? 

Can you look at my resume and give me some quick feedback?

What are the biggest red flags you see in interviewee?

What immediately endears you to an interviewee?

What was your biggest blunder when you were interviewing for jobs?

What questions should I ask my interviewer at a real job interview?

If you were in my shoes, what would you currently be looking for in an employer?

If you were hiring for a real job, what would immediately intrigue you about a candidate?

What in a job application makes you want to call somebody in for an interview?

Don't be afraid to ask them for feedback after only a couple of questions! First impressions are lasting, and they might be able to give you important advice after only a couple of minutes. Here's more advice:

MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about Getting a Job, Raise, or Promotion