Estimated reading time: 19 minutes

I realized I need a mentor for life, and a mentor for my career. I have a career coach and a therapist, but it turns out they’re not the same thing as a mentor. But I’ve never had one! Where do I find a mentor, how do I know I run that relationship? I’m stuck, and this is ramblings about that.

THIS GOTTA GO ELSEWHERE, DUMP IT HERE BECAUSE I NEED TO CLEAN IT UP A BIT. ALSO, THERE’S TWO PIECES IN HERE. POSSIBLE TO COMBINE THEM???

DO I NEED A MENTORSHIP BLOG FOR THESE THINGS TO GO INTO?

I want to learn networking tips and techniques, but I also want to focus on the mental aspect of it, since I don’t have a mentor myself. This is actually something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I envy people that have mentees. Connections from them and set them in the right direction. Because I’ve never had a mentee. And mentor—never had a mentor. That is an employee of a Swedish Corporation. So? I have not had the help that these people get for free. I’ve had a therapist and coaches, of course, but they’re different. In that they don’t know you. And they can’t set up meetings and commissions and give you condition‑specific advice, directions, guidance, and so forth? So, the used to understand how I… Okay, mentor somewhere, I don’t know, somewhere. And get help from them. It’s not just one mentor.

I could do with a couple of mentors. I would have a mentor for my career: how to prepare for new jobs, how to play politically in the workplace. I have a mentor who could help me generate new opportunities or think a hard problem. I could have a mentor that, you know, just guides me casually and gives me wisdom in their specific domain or sub‑domain. That would be cool.

How to get there? I have given networking tips to my mentees in more recent times. And sometimes it feels like they’re getting further than I am. They’re reaching out to people in their organization or the rest of the organization. The first call is always a “getting to know you” kind of fun situation where I understand, get off, get the feel of a person, to set a future agenda. I don’t have the fervor of this sort that I can just reach out to network. I had to work. I am a bit stuck at a senior in a place that reaching out to people for casual networking as a software engineer is challenging. And I’m low enough that none of it is going to be networking for meetings and new and exciting initiatives. In the middle level, yeah. I think that the people I do not have done well, my mentees have done, is reach out to any people, a bunch of random people, and set out time for understanding what their prospects are like and if there’s any opportunities to collab.

I don’t know what possible situation I could find things in that situation. But considering I keep talking about community building and networking, I imagine there should be an increasingly large number of opportunities. Particularly around a working committee that comes up with ideas, the potential things to do. So, it could be like, “Hey, are you interested in doing this? If you are, reach out to us. Let’s collaborate on this.” That could be something useful and interesting. It’s not like I have collaborated with people recently professionally, outside of work anyway. Opening of opportunities, networking. And I haven’t been able to open a lot of opportunities for myself after my company and core job. If I had been doing that, I would have had a group of people I wouldn’t mind reaching out to. I began looking for new opportunities. And now, desperately looking for new opportunities, it’s not like those connections are going to fall into my lap. The fact of the matter is good networking skills here. Now, reaching out to people and collaborating with them is essential if you want to grow as a person or as a professional. But I haven’t cared as much in working my professional career. I’ve always focused on getting out of the immediate scenario. And that’s taken.

So, one thing I can think of right now is that the mentors and the networking people don’t necessarily need to be people ahead of me in any career. They can just be people in an industry or a hobby that I’m interested in. Just reaching out to them and hanging out is a good idea now. Sometimes it doesn’t need to be too much of a big issue. It can just be, “What’s up?” and so forth. And even if those conversations go somewhere, that goes somewhere. I could talk to Ava Sheikh, for example, on becoming a project manager. I could talk to somebody else who works in a different industry on what their job is like. The more I talk about it, the more I realize, besides my core group of friends, I should be talking to people more about their jobs. What they do, how they do it, what the problems are, what needs to be done to be solved, and what they need of a capable or competent person in that industry is.

It can be anybody. It can be a content writer. It can be a technical writer. It can be a product manager. It can be a marketing manager. It could be a project manager. It could be a director. It could be an engineer. It could be a salesperson. It could be a marketing person. I just need to understand what they’re up to and how they work and what the problems in the industry are and what they feel the right approach to solving it is. The idea is not necessarily network and Machiavellian to conquer the Earth. It’s just to have a broader understanding of a field or many fields and have people to reach out to and ask questions when you need them. If the needs or, it’s to make professional friends, basically, except you talk more about professional things than personal things. It’s not a big deal, and it’s too silly that it’s taken all this time. As a mentor telling other people to figure this out, it’s a bit unfortunate. Or something. I have to say myself, it’s a silly situation to find myself.

The point of ‘having a purpose’

I have been trying to get my mentees to define a ‘purpose’ for themselves recently. The goal is to help them succeed and get ahead in their career. I want them to have a vision of what they want, so I can help them align their career and progress with their vision.

But do people really need a purpose? It’s really hard to find a purpose if you’re young? And what do you even do when you have a purpose? Can you change your ‘purpose’? What’s the point of a purpose if it’s changing all the time?

What to do once you have a purpose but you don’t have control over your life, and no realistic way to fulfill that purpose?

Let’s start with, do young people even need a purpose? Is that a pointless exercise? Perhaps people in their late 20s and early 30s would do better with a purpose because they understand themselves better and they know what they want better. Does it make sense to ask a 22 or 23 year old to come up with a purpose for their life?

It helps to verbalize and externalize the immediate goals and wants, because on a day-to-day basis your priorities are changing regularly. Your projects are changing. Your personal relationships are involved. With so much confusion, you tend to forget to anchor yourself in something you care about. Often, the only reason for not coming back to what you care about is simply not remembering it. One might argue if you really cared about something you would remember, but the issue is not of motivation but of human fallibility and technology. A lack of ability to hold consistent long-term goals.

A clearly defined purpose that is shared with others is a technology, a spiritual technology, to align yourself into more longer term projects. Framed that way, the question, “Does it matter if you have a purpose if your purpose keeps on changing?” makes more sense. Yes, it does. It makes sense to have a purpose, even if it keeps on changing, because your future direction can be decided much faster, easier, and clearly if you had a good idea of where you were currently intending on going. You can maybe find a shortcut to your future direction. You can maybe only slightly change your trajectory instead of running around all confused towards your new direction. So, yeah, even for young people, it does make sense.

The other question I raised was, if you have very little to no control over your day-to-day activities, does having a purpose—your long-term goal—even make sense? Is it a waste of time and emotional energy?

It’s not a waste of emotional energy, and it still matters. Because it still anchors you and grounds your everyday actions. So that if ever you find yourself at the right time at the right place, you are a lot more prepared to take action on it. You are even likelier to be closer to the final goal if you keep reminding yourself where you want to be, even if you don’t eventually end up reaching your final goal. So, yeah, you might not be able to get to the moon, but maybe reminding yourself often that your goal is your purpose to reach the moon will help you. It may help you to be an architect or become a mountain climber, or perhaps an animator or an artist. That is what grounds you and reminds you. Instead of rediscovering the passion over and over after getting distracted, a purpose helps you ground it in the long term. It’s always your friend, even if you otherwise have forgotten it.

What I think we need to start with is some very basic rules. You can define your purpose however you want. The easiest way to ask is by asking people what they value in life the most. What is something that you really, really care about and wish to improve, or dedicate yourself to improving or working on? If it’s just for yourself, if it’s to make a lot of money, that’s fine; it’s a purpose. It’s a simple, clear purpose, so probably a lot easier to identify and achieve.

Sometimes, other purposes are less clear. And there can be conflicting purposes. Maybe you want an awesome career, but you also want to take care of your family. But your career won’t let you do that, but you still want an awesome career and don’t want to compromise. In that case, you don’t have to make a choice, or you have to find something that collaborates on both. And you can combine them both. Thinking explicitly about things instead of just going off vibes is better because you know how to think about it better.

Conference Presentations, a potential for me

I thought of it during KubeCon. There is so much potential for it to expand my opportunities by collaborating with friends and co-workers on this. The prompt is: How might I collaborate with friends? Explore opportunities with co-workers. And gain context from mentees to improve my conference presentation chances.

I was in KubeCon a couple of weeks ago. One of the session presentations was given by two MBA consulting bros from India. It was pretty clear they bullshitted their way through the entire presentation and the original proposal they must have given to the KubeCon people. The fact that they were able to up their profile by just bullshitting their way using ChatGPT, and that such people can get such easy entrance, gave me great excitement around the possibilities of me presenting at similar conferences.

I shared with my team and extended group that we have a potential for presenting in similar conferences on a bunch of various topics. I reached out to Mandari and encouraged her to record her thoughts, ideas, plans, and experiences. So, she has the idea for her presentations. I have also reached out to Bibhuti and other friends such as Agrag, Sandesh, Prabhat, and so forth, and explored possibilities for collaborating on potential conference presentations.

In this recording, I want to ramble on and on about how realistic that is. What the actual possibility might be, what the possible blockers are, and how I might be overcoming the blockers.

I want to start with the blockers. One of the major blockers in wanting to do presentations is the fact that my company needs presentations to be run through their public relations team. So, anything I present with my friends or not has to go through the company. If I come with an interesting concept that I want to present, my company could reject it because I am collaborating with people outside the company. That will be a massive downside. But, it is not impossible for them to approve it if there is genuine synergy and a positive fusion of ideas across different companies. Of course, a large number of topics of interest right now is around AI because that is what everybody is working on.

I have talked to Prabhat to explore any of the work he has done with his clients and other experiences they might be able to share. So he can share with me his consultant experience and I can share my industry experience. I have also reached out to someone on a potential public-private partnership presentation around what the city is doing. Unfortunately, it turns out that it is not his particular department and not in his purview. It does not matter much though, because if he wants to do a presentation, he can do a presentation. But that is something worth looking into with the other folks as well.

I just want to start talking in presentations. There is a lot of cool stuff in the company as well. For example, we have the CloudForge Marketplace, and we have been doing pretty well with teams owning the inner source projects. We have the CFA project, which is pretty massive, and we could look at that further. Then there is the Distilling concept that we have been looking at. Then there was the Helm, Ansible, and CloudFormation deployment pattern that we were using a couple of years ago. We should have really talked about that. It was a crappy pattern, but people have enjoyed hearing about that.

What are the other opportunities? Everybody is trying to optimize on RAG. If our squad can find a neat way to do a full-text search on the terabytes of data we have, people would be very, very excited. I do not know how people do that, but I want to explore that more. Simon Wilson suggests that instead of doing RAGs and chunking, and so forth, it is not a bad idea to let the agent planner generate the queries and run them. That saves embedding costs. That saves the embedding storage costs. That saves the entire embedding pipeline, actually, and all you need to do is store full text. If you want semantic search, you can ask it to do semantic search as well as full search. That would be something so exciting. That should be my next project. That should really, really be my next project. That is probably something I can talk to conferences about. Searching terabytes of textual data without chunking using agentic RAG—RAG in quotes. That pattern could generalize into multiple other projects.

What is the opportunity for me? The interns have not been able to distill at all. If I can go get any kind of distillation going with a good validation set, that would be great. I could identify another topic for talking, undercutting technology. The girls have given me great ones in our lifetime, and I have not really been taking advantage of it. I must put more focus on it. But the agentic RAG part seems really, really, really exciting. And I have got to take a look at it.

What else? Maybe I can work with Mandari on collaborating on a healthcare online project. Or Basuda. I can mentor her and attend her conference. I just need one way in to do the conference situation, and I feel like it will get better. Maybe another way of approaching this is to make a list of all the potential conferences—dozens and dozens of them. Marking out which ones are interesting. And then go from there.

That sounds interesting. Why had I not thought about it? Instead of thinking about what I have to offer, I can start with understanding what they have desired and fulfill that need. Because if this is a bullshit game anyway, I am down to play this. I am so very down to play this. And it is the end of ten minutes now.