Throughout my university journey, I was fortunate to receive professional and personal advice from many alumni, upper-years, and industry professionals. Most of them had no idea who I was before I reached out. This did not prevent them from still taking the time to speak with me and, in some cases, putting their name on the line to recommend me for positions. Because of these extremely positive experiences I had as a mentee, I have always proactively sought opportunities where I could mentor others.
A theme that I have repeatedly discussed in previous posts is that given this is my internship gap year, I want to utilize the mental capacity I have freed from recruiting to achieve personal goals. One of which is dedicating more time to being a good mentor and positively influencing younger students in my communities. Since the summer, some of the mentorship initiatives I have worked on include running recruiting workshops, volunteering my time for coffee chats and mock interviews, as well as leading the development program of first-year students in my investment club. Many of my friends commented on how passionate I was at pursuing these initiatives — for a few months, even my Facebook description was my Calendly link so that people could easily book me for mock interviews/coffee chats. For most of September and October, I would easily spend over 2 hours per day on calls with different HBA1 students, helping them prepare for their upcoming interviews.
Judging by how this article has been developing, you probably think that I will next talk about how I realized the more time I spend mentoring others, the more I learn about myself, or some generic line of how being a mentor has taught me many valuable lessons. The truth is, I want to use this article to explore the “dark side” of mentorship. Make no mistake, I am still grateful for the great mentors I have had and strongly believe in the importance of myself mentoring others, but reflecting on my experiences both as a mentor and mentee has made me realize that the act of mentorship is a double-edged sword.
Why do I dedicate so much of my time to mentorship?
If you had asked me this question two months ago, I would have given you the following three reasons:
- I am a community-driven person. Whenever I am interested in an endeavour, I am not only concerned with whether I can succeed at it, but also whether the community of people that shares a common goal can succeed as well;
- I am friends with a lot of people who are younger than me. As such, a lot of my time is naturally spent mentoring because I care about whether my friends can succeed;
- Every internship offer I have received has depended on mentors vouching for me; it seems only right to continue this virtuous cycle.
As I have alluded to in my first post, something I have been trying to do more this year is to re-examine my motives and personal paradigms to better understand what makes me happy. This has included meditating on subjects such as my motivations behind pursuing finance, my interests in strength training and Chinese literature, and lately, bartending as well. Throughout this entire process, I have never placed my mentorship involvements under scrutiny, even though in the past few months I have spent more time mentoring others than any of my other hobbies. There simply does not seem to be anything worth examining: it is a generous act, and for me, it was hard to imagine anything remotely self-deceptive or egoistical — as the title of this post would suggest — behind the time I spend on it.
The first moment I began pondering this issue was in late-October when I reconnected with an old friend with whom I have not caught up in over a year. One thing he was always previously concerned about was how much mental capacity I was spending on my career goals and how little I was allocating to other aspects of my life, and he asked if this was still the case. I triumphantly showed him my Medium posts and talked about all the new things that I have been doing. As I began explaining my mentorship initiatives, he stopped me.
“If all you are doing is helping people prepare for interviews and encouraging them to pursue the finance industry,” he said. “You are not really doing anything new with your life. I feel like it’s just a way to prove to yourself that you are successful now.”
This was a comment that caught me off guard and quite frankly, I was insulted. I very quickly changed the topic of conversation and brushed this part off the table. That night, however, as I meditated over what had happened that day, my mind began to ponder on two things: the first, the validity behind what he had said; the second and perhaps more important, why I reacted the way I did — with indignation instead of intellectual curiosity, seeking to change the conversation out of a hurt ego rather than elaborating upon the subject.
Something became very clear to me as I meditated that night. Ego was involved here — and the more I thought about it the more sense it made. Being a mentor feels great. There is something about the idea of having someone barely younger than you nodding along at everything you say, treating it as gospel; seeing them place their faith and respect in you in something extremely important, and then succeeding because of what you said. Whether I liked it or not, I realized my passion for mentorship is a form of attention-seeking.
Throughout the past few years, I have always thought that I dislike the act of flaunting accomplishments. I poke fun at people for their “LinkedIn flex”, and roll my eyes if someone begins to talk too much about their employment status in casual conversation. But during all of this time, I have deep down shared the same desires. My passion for mentorship, ultimately, is a different way for me to tell people I am an “incoming investment banking summer analyst”; it is just more socially acceptable than an elaborate update post on LinkedIn.
(You can argue that this post was also written out of a desire to flaunt and that under the guise of a self-improvement blog post, I am also using it to “flex” my career success, sense of introspection, and emotional maturity.)
Let me now go back to the three initial reasons that I thought were what sparked my interest in mentorship.
From the past three years of constantly preparing for interviews, I have noticed that I developed a very bad, bad tendency of always trying to provide logical explanations for my actions and thoughts. In interview settings, you are constantly pelted with questions on your personal life and judged by how well-put your justifications are. This is something I excel at in an interview setting, but the habit is unconstructive when it comes to my innate search for authenticity. The authentic reasons behind your actions, most of the time, do not have to make any sense, and trying to provide logical explanations can lead to self-deception. In my case, it was evident that instead of seeing ego as my primary motivator — which not only makes less sense but also is unpleasant to admit — I simply “created’’ three logical reasons and convinced myself that they must be my underlying motivators.
In reality, those three reasons probably do play a role behind my passion for mentorship, but it is undeniable that their importance was elevated for sensibility instead of the less reasonable but more authentic explanation.
I do not think using mentorship as a guise for ego boosts is, in itself, a bad thing. At the end of the day, if good information is still being shared, there is a net benefit for everyone involved: the mentor gives up a portion of their time and effort in exchange for the ego boost, and everyone is happy. Where I think the problem lies, however, is if the mentor receiving the ego boost is not self-reflective enough about the answers they are giving.
In a typical coffee chat, I am constantly giving justifications to the decisions I have been making in my life: why I have decided to pursue [insert industry/internship], what I have enjoyed about [insert industry/internship], what I think one should do to get an offer at [insert industry/internship]…note how this leads to the same pattern of thinking as I have discussed before: if I am not careful about what I am saying, I am reinforcing the inauthentic paradigms. Perhaps I did not enjoy a certain aspect of finance, but because I am always highlighting that aspect as one of the factors that people are attracted to finance for, I end up rationalizing that I did enjoy it.
This can lead to very harmful consequences:
- It makes it much harder for me to figure out whether I truly enjoy this industry or not;
- I am feeding inauthentic information to myself and the mentee;
- I am in a negative feedback loop where the more I reinforce these inauthentic paradigms, the more I tie my ego to what I am saying, and the harder it is for me to confront reality.
The following hypothetical exchange can be a good example of what I mean here:
Mentee: So what did you enjoy about your current internship?
Mentor: I really liked how I got to work with a lot of different teams. I really felt that I learned a lot because I was simultaneously working with companies in North America, Europe, and Asia across a variety of different industries. I liked how quantitative the work is. I am constantly working with different Excel models and have become a lot better at analyzing data.
In this hypothetical exchange, the mentor discusses liking the diverse projects, industries, and geographies; the mentor also talks about liking the quantitative nature of the work. In reality, they may be neutral about both aspects of the job — but these highlights of the role just make the most logical sense to bring up since the mentor has not taken the time to reflect on what they have enjoyed doing. Over time, just like my paradigm with my motivations for mentorship, they may grow to actively believe in what they say even though it is untrue.
Since the ego is also involved here, the mentor may have also exaggerated the details within the statement. Perhaps this mentor only worked with only three different teams on three different projects, and only got to work with one type of Excel model; it would certainly sound a lot more impressive given these added details. The mentee would thus leave this exchange with a false notion of what this role entails, and the mentor would leave this exchange with a misrepresented idea of what they have accomplished — if this occurs frequently, the misrepresented idea of their skillset and accomplishments serve to further deepen the tie between ego and mentorship. A negative feedback loop would emerge.
The above ramble is not meant to imply that I will quit being a mentor from here onward — in fact, I will probably continue dedicating just as much time as I have before for the rest of the school year. This is not to say I have learned to detach my ego altogether from my mentorship activities. I still enjoy feeling self-important while running a finance workshop or whenever someone is consulting me for advice, and I do not think it is plausible to change that reality, at least in the short-term.
The build-up of this article would suggest that I have found a solution to this problem. I have to say that I have not. We all wish we could live in a world where no one ever cares about what other people think and everyone just focuses 100% on doing things for themselves. Even someone like Marcus Aurelius, the “perfect philosopher-king”, admitted to struggling with his ego for his whole life. At the moment, I think it is fair to say that my ego-driven enjoyment of mentorship is here to stay.
What I could change, however, is my ability to be more self-reflective and aware of what I am saying while interacting with my mentees. If I cannot accurately represent something that I feel or believe is the truth, I should just not talk about it altogether. The outcome that I think would make everybody happy is if the mentor’s ego is sufficiently inflated, the mentee has received accurate information, and the mentor has been reflective of everything that was said and has ensured no inauthentic paradigm is being formed.
This is also why I have decided to pen all of my thoughts on this subject for this post: I hope everyone who will have me as a mentor can read this post and as such, in our future interactions, I can be held accountable for what I say and do.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts :)
Something related to this post that I want to note as well…
What I did not fully understand until very recently was the importance of NOT suppressing your thoughts during meditation. I was always told that you should just observe thoughts as you meditate but really, what does that even mean? Shouldn’t meditation be all about clearing thoughts out of your head? This is going to sound hilarious, but when I first began to meditate, my procedure was having an active voice screaming in my brain, telling myself to “STOP THINKING STOP THINKING STOP THINKING”. Needless to say, that was never very effective.
I would always leave meditation sessions frustrated, as I never seem to get better at stopping errant thoughts from entering my head. What my realization on mentorship has taught me, however, is that the beauty of meditation is in the thoughts that come into your head. Having errant thoughts is not a bad thing, because you learn to develop the ability to observe your state of mind as a third-party. Hence, when you want to act in a way that does not align with the person that you want to be, your mind can check yourself from taking that further.
Let us go back to the example with the conversation with my friend. There are two layers of thoughts that entered my mind when I meditated that day.
Layer one, the superficial: that was incredibly rude of him to talk to me like that. I am kind of mad.
Layer two, the observer: I notice this angry thought coming in. Why am I angry over this? Was it rude of him or did it actually make sense and I was just too emotional to notice that?
And thereafter came everything else that ultimately changed my paradigm.
I hope that as I get better at doing this, my observer mindset can kick in not only as I meditate, but also during my daily activities. The best-case scenario would have been my observer mindset noticing how I feel right away during the conversation. Perhaps then instead of changing the topic, I would have been rational enough to ask my friend to elaborate, and a great conversation would have ensued.
