The Best Advice a Mentor Gave Me Early in My Career
Probably the best mentor advice was multi-part. “Always question assumptions and the status quo”. This applies to everything from my own personal situation at any moment to business to global politics. Such questioning is a proactive continuous process, and one that requires initiative to not just ask the question but to dig deep.
The next part of the advice: Challenge my own findings, assumptions, and hypotheses that I would develop along the way – not just the initial baseline. This can be really hard to do. Time is always a constraint. Constantly jolt oneself out of the comfort zone that you create for yourself when you learn something new and feel like you’ve got it all figured out. It’s hard to admit that you were wrong – even to yourself!
The third part: Take action with your newfound insight. Often that requires some planning but too much planning means you’re not taking enough action. There’s a balance to learn along the way.
The “always question…” advice was a direct statement put to me. The other parts were built around that, always in the form of questions. For example, I would say to my mentor that I had noticed “x” and hypothesized a solution or response “y”. The questions I received would be like “Why did you notice x? What did you think of a or b or c (which were sometimes totally different issues and not just other options)? If you go with response y, how will that impact z?” Often, my brain would be on fire. I’d be embarrassed about how much I didn’t know or consider – I had thought I was prepared.
Always questioning has helped me to understand that none of us has the complete or perfectly correct answers to anything. Sometimes you learn things you wish you didn’t know. You also realize that there’s always more to question, learn and reframe what you knew. The questioning process is invigorating yet challenging, leads to better understanding (as well as better decisions and actions), provides opportunities and options in life, and can lead to success and happiness – especially if you live by paying it forward and seek the smaller piece of a bigger growing pie.
My mentor added, “The more I learn, the less I realize I know”. Not the first to say it but still a profound point. The challenge is limitless.
Carl Telban
Founder & CEO
WorkSmart Revolution, Inc.
About Carl
Carl Telban is the Founder and CEO of WorkSmart Revolution, Inc. Through its RollingReminder cloud solution, commercial drivers as well as each member of the company team are kept informed (timely) resulting in optimized proactive compliance with renewing driver qualifications and vehicle credentials.
Why care? Besides keeping the roads safer, the driver qualification renewal process is very manual, even when other software is “managing” it.
Compliance problems and tedious manual efforts are expensive and introduce errors, unreliability and inconsistency, especially considering how data and people’s days are never identical from one to the next. There are a bunch of other costly reasons that can really add up too. Those vary from company to company but compliance and productivity are always impacted. We automate much of the tedious effort and help companies avoid or reduce those issues. We just make it easy and take a load off!
