Mentoring

Question 1

What Do the Best Mentors Do?

Answer 1

They do everything they can to imprint their “goodness” onto others in ways that make others feel like fuller versions of themselves. (Harvard Business Review)

Question 2

What Else Do the Best Mentors Do?

Answer 2

Put another way, the best leaders practice a form of leadership that is less about creating followers and more about creating other leaders. (HBR)

Question 3

What are Four Things the Best Mentors Do?

Answer 3

1. Put the relationship before the mentorship.
2. Focus on character rather than competency.
3. Shout loudly with your optimism, and keep quiet with your cynicism.
4. Be more loyal to your mentee than you are to numeric goals.

Question 4

At its highest level, mentorship is about…

Answer 4

…being “good people” and having the right “good people” around us — individuals committed to helping others become fuller versions of who they are.

Question 5

I use the Feynman Technique

Sprouts: Feynman’s Learning Technique

Answer 5

The Feynman Learning Technique is effective for learning something new, deepening your understanding of what you already know, or helping you study for an exam.

1. The first step is to pick a topic you want to understand and start studying it.
2. Once you know what it is about, take a piece of paper and write about it as if you’re teaching the idea to someone else. Ideally, write and speak at the same time, just as a teacher does it at the blackboard.
3. This makes you realize which parts you understand and where you still have gaps. Whenever you get stuck, go back to study and repeat that process until you have explained the whole topic from start to end.
4. When you’re done, repeat the process from the beginning, but this time, simplify your language or use a graphic analogy to make a point. If your explanation ends up wordy or confusing, you probably have not understood it well enough. So you should start again.
5. Thinking about an idea by explaining it makes this learning method very effective. Once you can explain an idea in simple language, you have deeply understood it and will remember it for a long time.

Richard Fineman was a leading theoretical physicist who received a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics. He was notorious for asking his fellow mathematicians to explain concepts in simple language to test their understanding.