I love watching the #DataFam in action, simply because it produces so much fantastic content. It can be blog posts, podcasts, vizzes and even swag being sold to support an intuitive! But every once in a while I get reminded of just how awesome the community is from a learning perspective.
Someone recently tweet that the “didn’t know how to do that yet” and that was their learning mindset. It wasn’t that they couldn’t do it… they just couldn’t do it yet (If this was you, please let me know because I can’t find the tweet!)
I love that! Better yet, they are right!
Later, as I was looking through submissions for Real World Fake Data, I kept seeing shout outs to members of the community for different tips and techniques that they had shares and in turned learned from for this project. It dawned on my the amount of informal mentoring that happens inside the #DataFam is infinite, and this act of sharing is really helping people reach their “Yet”.
That’s truly what mentoring is; helping people get to “yet”. Whether it’s “I can’t create vizzes like that, yet” or “I don’t have the skills for that job, yet”… whatever it is, mentoring gets mentees to yet! The really cool thing about that, it helps get mentors to “yet” as well… it’s a very symbiotic relationship.
Maybe your “yet” is “I don’t think I can be a mentor, yet” …I bet you you can.
If you are unaware, Mentoring Meetup is an initiative to pair mentors and mentees, and frankly we are in a bind. We have a ton of mentees just waiting to be paired due to a lack of mentors. The mentees are at varying levels, have different needs, and I’d bet that there is a match for you are a mentor. Perhaps it’s “on the job training” for you as a mentor, and that mentee get you to your “Yet”.