Where is your Mentor?

Back in the days when I had my lack of experience as an excuse to explain my mistakes I was sometimes wondering: “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a mentor?”

What I didn’t realize until a couple months ago was that my mentors were all around me all the time.

• My cousin who introduced me to computers
• A coworker who pointed out the limitations of VB to me
• A coworker in California who tought me lots and lots of things about Oracle databases and how to have fun.
• My boss(es) nudging me more or less toward project management
• A coworker making it very clear to me that there are alternatives to project management
• Another coworker who taught me even more about databases
• Dozens, no hundreds of people writing blogs for me to read, questions to be answered or answered questions written by me in various forums.

Its just that I never realized they were my mentors (nor did they in many cases). By not realizing this I missed out on some greate opportunities to learn much much more, much much faster than I actually did.

So let me be your mentor for a second and give you a little task:

Think for a moment: Who in your vicinity is where you want to be in a couple of years? Who can help you getting there? Whom are you learning from? Whom could you learn from?