Once a month, I’ll be sharing a curated collection of ideas I keep returning to: concepts that are surfacing in my work, questions I’m wrestling with, patterns I’m noticing. These posts are my way of thinking out loud and sparking some interesting conversations along the way.
This series is part of an ongoing experiment in exploring how to most meaningfully share what I know while connecting with others who care about similar ideas. (See also: my weekly office hours.)
This post is the second instalment in the series. You can read February’s post here.
1) Mentorship probably won’t look the way you thought it would.
Very few of the experiences I’ve learned and grown from over the years would have materialized were it not for the people who guided, supported, questioned, and encouraged me along the way. Because of this, I’m a big believer in the value of mentorship: I seek it out wherever possible, and I’ve maintained a regular availability for serving as a mentor to others for the past 8 years.
As a result, I’m also always eager to learn more about how other people experience mentorship. I was struck, in a recent reading of Gary Stevenson’s The Trading Game, by how he described an exchange with a more senior trader shortly after he started interning at Citibank:
“This started him on a long monologue about trading and his journey within it, of which I did not understand much. He showed me graphs and told me many stories. I looked into Johnny’s eyes, I looked at the graphs. I looked into the middle distance, and thought. Or at least, I narrowed my eyes to give the sense of thinking. I wondered if he could tell that I didn’t understand.
I cannot emphasize enough how much of my early experience of trading consisted of this. Of listening to traders, of nodding along sagely, of pulling the faces of a boy thinking deeply, and of understanding nothing at all.”
In my experience, those who have been dissatisfied with their experiences of mentorship have expected something a bit more substantive than this. They’ve expected, for example, that…
Continue reading here.
——
2) The calvary isn’t coming.
Writer, director, and actor Mark Duplass gave a 2015 keynote at SXSW where he debunked the concept of what he calls ‘the cavalry.’ The cavalry is any person, group, or company that you think will miraculously happen to notice your tremendous ability, your amazing work, your untapped potential — and, from there, pluck you out of obscurity into success.
As he explains it,
“We’ve all heard these amazing tales of how that 21-year-old kid had a script, and his cousin worked in the mail room at Warner Brothers, and he gave it to him, and the script got up to the head of Warner Brothers. They loved it, and they bought it for a million dollars, and got it made.
That’s an exciting story, but a super dangerous one, because I don’t know anyone that’s…”
Continue reading here.
——
3) It (mostly) happens on email.
There’s a post about email management in the workplace that tends to get a fair amount of traction on social media each time it makes the rounds. It’s something along the lines of “you can be good at [job title], or you can be good at email.”
In my experience, the reality has been closer to “you can be good at [job title] if you can be good at email.”
I say this, in part, because many of the best and most impactful opportunities that have come my way have either originated in my inbox or have had some critical portion take place over email.
Some recent examples:
- A recruiter from a FAANG company reached out to me over email about a full-time position they thought I’d be a great fit for. Their message ended up…
Continue reading here.
——
Recommended reading
- “American letters 5: Swim to shore,” by Alexander Chee
- “Tracing the thoughts of a large language model”
- “Stoop coffee: How a simple idea transformed my neighborhood,” by Patty Smith
- “Marseille,” by Ayşegül Savaş
- The trading game: A confession, by Gary Stevenson
——
Thanks for being here. 👋 If you enjoyed reading this post, stay tuned for the next instalment in this series at the end of April.
Jana M. Perkins is a computational social scientist. An award-winning scholar, her research has been federally funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada since 2019. She is the founder of Women of Letters, a longform interview series celebrating women’s paths to professional success. Together with Miranda Dunham-Hickman, she is co-authoring a book that will be published by Routledge.
To learn more about Perkins and her latest work, visit jcontd.com or follow her on Bluesky.