You know, Jeff Bezos is in the news nowadays for a lot of reasons, and not always ones that look very savory to the world at large. But he is also famous for a

You know, Jeff Bezos is in the news nowadays for a lot of reasons, and not always ones that look very savory to the world at large. But he is also famous for a couple of conceptual and organizational frameworks at Amazon that I think are applicable to questions this blog post tries to answer: 1) Regret minimization framework - Make decisions based on what will minimize the total regret you have at the end of your life (I find this effective because it's easier for me to accumulate evidence of things I definitely don't like than things I will always like). 2) Prefer mechanisms over good intentions - Hope is not a strategy; a process where every step makes sense which is applied consistently over time will eat hope for lunch any day of the week. With that said, I think this post is absolute trash. No treatment is given to the reader's individual goals and distastes; no concrete mechanisms and strategies are given over hope and good intentions that ultimately don't fare any better than a coin flip. The author doesn't share their own experiences and how that would inform this post; nor do they give you any context on the expected audience. And yet, for some reason, the author feels qualified to give advice about what is and is not responsible for career success across differing roles, seniorities and industries that very well may have nothing in common. I think this kind of writing is irresponsible. As one of my mentors told me, skill acquisition can only take you so far. You may reach a certain point in your career where for the purposes of your own growth, you'll have to run your own P/L line. You have to start taking risks, you have to start doing things that can fail. Getting one of these off of the ground is error prone and often ends in complete failure. That's fine. You'll just have to try again. As many times as it takes, depending on how bad you want it. And sometimes, in between, you have to do things more safer and established to set you up for success the next time you want to try to pull something off on your own. Why doesn't the post talk about this? My guess is because the author of it doesn't really know as much about mentoring as they think. I have worked with and for people who have the same mentality of the author of this post, and I will just say that if you asked their reports, mentors or colleagues what they thought about this person's ability to develop and mentor well, it is not as rosy as that person's self conception.