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> Even without that, any good professional will have plenty of failures anyway. That's the main thing to me. Why waste people's time on known dead ends when yo

by tveita 11y ago

> Even without that, any good professional will have plenty of failures anyway. That's the main thing to me. Why waste people's time on known dead ends when you can fail on things that matter, together? It seems self-centered to think that the best way to learn is to make the same mistakes that you did yourself. It also assumes you can predict every problem they'll encounter well enough to precisely ration out additional obstacles.

enraged_camel 11y ago
>>That's the main thing to me. Why waste people's time on known dead ends when you can fail on things that matter, together? People learn differently from experience than they do from being told something. >>It seems self-centered to think that the best way to learn is to make the same mistakes that you did yourself. That's the thing though: people rarely make the same mistakes as you did. They tend to make different mistakes, and fail differently, with different results and consequences. By serving the solution to them on a silver platter, you're robbing them of very valuable learning opportunities. A mentor's job is to use their experience to guide the employee and help them figure out how to avoid mistakes. And if they do make a mistake, then the mentor is there to help them recover. The recovery is followed by by what I call "lesson time", which is a judgment-free session where we discuss why the incident or failure happened and come up with actionable steps to prevent it from happening again. If you find yourself in situations where you absolutely have to tell someone how to do something because failure would be fatal, at that point you should do that thing yourself, and have the employee watch you do it and take notes. That's another type of mentorship that a lot of people are not comfortable with, but it can be extremely valuable.
mattlutze 11y ago
> It seems self-centered to think that the best way to learn is to make the same mistakes that you did yourself This wasn't assumed in the premise, though the mentored may for sure have some experiences that the mentor did. Learning and internalization happen after we synthesize stories and narratives into lessons that we can deeply connect with. If a junior teammate comes to me with a solution and I say "I tried it that way once and it didn't work because xyz," that teammate will change their execution and, from my experience, not really internalize the xyz. This means they'll come back to me in the future with the same problem and we'll go through that again, because they didn't learn. The critical action in both success and failure is reflection. Discovering the lessons through discussion is the way for us both to learn, and to ensure the experience is meaningful and sticks.

by tveita 11y ago

enraged_camel 11y ago

>>That's the main thing to me. Why waste people's time on known dead ends when you can fail on things that matter, together? People learn differently from experience than they do from being told something. >>It seems self-centered to think that the best way to learn is to make the same mistakes that you did yourself. That's the thing though: people rarely make the same mistakes as you did. They tend to make different mistakes, and fail differently, with different results and consequences. By serving the solution to them on a silver platter, you're robbing them of very valuable learning opportunities. A mentor's job is to use their experience to guide the employee and help them figure out how to avoid mistakes. And if they do make a mistake, then the mentor is there to help them recover. The recovery is followed by by what I call "lesson time", which is a judgment-free session where we discuss why the incident or failure happened and come up with actionable steps to prevent it from happening again. If you find yourself in situations where you absolutely have to tell someone how to do something because failure would be fatal, at that point you should do that thing yourself, and have the employee watch you do it and take notes. That's another type of mentorship that a lot of people are not comfortable with, but it can be extremely valuable.

mattlutze 11y ago

> It seems self-centered to think that the best way to learn is to make the same mistakes that you did yourself This wasn't assumed in the premise, though the mentored may for sure have some experiences that the mentor did. Learning and internalization happen after we synthesize stories and narratives into lessons that we can deeply connect with. If a junior teammate comes to me with a solution and I say "I tried it that way once and it didn't work because xyz," that teammate will change their execution and, from my experience, not really internalize the xyz. This means they'll come back to me in the future with the same problem and we'll go through that again, because they didn't learn. The critical action in both success and failure is reflection. Discovering the lessons through discussion is the way for us both to learn, and to ensure the experience is meaningful and sticks.