Per­son­ally and pro­fes­sion­ally I always thrive to learn. Nine months ago I moved from pro­gram­ming into systems/business analy­sis: I knew what the job entailed and knew I could do it well. I still asked for a mentor.

Specif­i­cally, I asked that my men­tor be the per­son in our organ­i­sa­tion who is always lauded as being the most knowl­edge­able. Being a mentee is not easy.

Six Habits of Highly Effec­tive Mentees is an arti­cle writ­ten by Ben Cas­nocha (author of My Start-Up Life) and has renewed my life as a mentee after flag­ging lately. The habits are:

  1. It’s all about the ques­tions you ask
  2. Have strong beliefs, weakly held
  3. Have a long term perspective
  4. Be open to top­ics not on your short-term agenda
  5. Fol­low up by show­ing inter­est in them (at least four times a year)
  6. Don’t make the men­tor do the work

The Power of Men­tors is an excerpt from Ben’s book. I rec­om­mend read­ing it and the oth­ers that are avail­able on the book’s site.