The answer to “Will you mentor me?” is no (2010)

This is nice but I like this advice much better:

Ira Glass quote: > Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through. <

You hate it because mentor _is not_ adding the -er suffix to a verb like ment or some such. -er and its opposite -ee suffix are strictly english/germanic in origin (although possibly adapted from Latin at some point, there aren't Latin equivalents)

Mentor is of greek and latin extraction directly, there's no -er suffix added to a verb, it is a noun outright.

It is ... inappropriate to match mentor with mentee because the former doesn't have the -er suffix.

Obviously all words are "made up" but mentor/mentee doesn't follow existing patterns, it was just created by people who don't know or care and has persisted.

In the Odyssey, Mentor was a sort of advisor to Odysseus and that is presumably where the word comes from.

I love that perspective. To add to it, from personal experience: it really helps to be totally, wildly, embarrassingly ignorant of your incompetence at the start. It softens that part where your work disappoints you, because you don't know better. Now, I don't know if this is actually good advice or even actionable, advice, but I've seen it and experienced it many times and it very much enabled me to move past awfulness.

- My first programs (I thought `super` gave you access to the UI component's hierarchical owner)

- My first music videos (wow super cringey teen stuff)

- My first 3D animations (oh so you're supposed to use "textures"?)

- Why I never got good at guitar (constantly focused on how my whole family had to suffer how awful I was)

All formative experiences I may have never dove so deeply into if I was consciously aware of just how far off the mark I was. I can't even look at any of these examples today because I cringe so hard at myself.

The most relatable piece of this article, as a college kid in Bangalore, is this

> For some reason Bangalore is crawling with people who first want to form a community and then start learning/working/whatever. These efforts almost invariably peter out uselessly. First do the work. Then if you feel like "communing" talk to others who are also working hard.

It’s not the same thing. A protege is one person done your are grooming to be your replacement. A mentee is one of many people your are guiding down their own path.