The #1 Mentorship Mistake I Made Which Held Back My Growth

And how you can avoid it with the template I created

📣 Build Your App The Right Way (Sponsor)

If you’re building a B2B SaaS app, WorkOS is for you. WorkOS makes selling to enterprises possible in minutes rather than months. They provide SSO, SCIM provisioning, user management, and more out of the box.

They also power the hottest companies like Perplexity, Vercel, and Plaid.

---

📝 Today’s Article

This week’s article is my guest post on the “A Life Engineered” newsletter, run by ex-Amazon Principal Engineer, Steve Huynh.

You’ll learn the biggest mistake I made with my ~15 mentors and how you can avoid it. As I’ve grown to be a mentor to many, I now see others who make the same mistake.

See the full article here:

The #1 Mistake You're Making with Your Mentor (And How You Can Avoid It)

📖 TL;DR and Takeaways

I’ll always provide the TLDR and takeaways for you, so you know the exact, actionable advice to walk away with. So here it is.

Key lesson: For your manager and mentor 1:1s, pre-plan your agenda. Take 10 minutes to write what you want to talk about, then send them the agenda in advance.

When you do this, here are the results you’ll see:

1. Your manager and mentor value your meeting more highly. In my case, they said, “This was a great use of time,” and “This meeting was super productive.”

2. Faster growth for you. You’ll ask more thoughtful questions that lead to faster learning and better relationships.

3. Fewer meeting cancellations at the last minute. When both of you know there’s an agenda, you make the time to meet.

Only having a mentor isn’t enough for your growth. You need to proactively take action to learn from them in every (or almost every) meeting.

A common blocker to pre-planning your agenda is knowing what to talk about. That’s why I created this “Priming Doc” you can use. Use it to think about what would be most valuable to chat about.

🤖 AI Workshop Recap

If you missed the AI Agent Workshop with me and the Headstarter Fellowship, you can view the recording here. Thanks again to Headstarter for hosting an awesome workshop. I learned a ton about building AI agents. If you want to see some resume reviews, jump to 1:18:00.

🎉 75k Subscribers!!! We made it

We reached 75k subscribers this week! Thank you so much. I never could have imagined when we started a year and a half ago we’d be here.

Whenever I reach a milestone like this, it makes me remember how many of you this newsletter helps, and I feel even more connected with you.

So here’s a little collage of some recent personal life pictures:

• Top left: Bernie, action shot outside

• Bottom left: Kaki, action shot inside

• Right: Me at Chicago this week, trying to pretend I’m not scared on the Skydeck

Thank you for all your support since starting this ride of a lifetime ❤️

This milestone isn’t possible without you. I appreciate you so freaking much 🙏

📚 Upcoming Articles: What To Expect

After the Month of Collabs, I sent a poll here asking if you wanted the guest posts to continue. 70% of you wanted more of them, so I’m delivering!

Next week, we’ll have an ex-Meta Senior Manager who has conducted nearly 2,000 interviews giving you all the tips you need to ace your interviews. You’ll get a look into exactly what hiring managers are thinking.

In the following weeks, we’ll feature a Director at Google, two industry-expert Staff Engineers, and more. Stay tuned and see you there! It’s going to be 🔥