Hey all,

I mentioned an injury last time, but that will NOT be the main focus of this post! I will need meniscus surgery to make my right knee 100% better. I’ll be getting it in December.

In the meantime, I’m doing what I can and working around it. I’m following the advice of one of my main mentors, Brian Riskas of RMD Systems:

“Don’t be an idiot and rush back to training until it is taken care of. Ask me how I know.”

Blunt, personally-experienced lessons like these take a certain kind of relationship to be communicated effectively. I’ve heard his hands crackle like a “cement mixer” when he grips a Gi, and I am not keen on having my knee possess those same properties, so I take what he says seriously.

This is one of many times when he’s given me a nugget of wisdom free of charge (well, maybe at the cost of a beer or two 😉). I try to treat talking with Brian as if he were me 10 years from now in an alternate dimension where I was a mechanical engineer and I was sending a message back though a spacetime machine. I’m not saying I agree with 100% of what he says, but let’s just say I put more weight in it than the average “13 Simple Hacks to Change Your Life” listicle.

This is a perfect example of why I want to write in this format. Not knocking Brian’s advice nor delivery, but he and I had a well-understood friendship prior to him giving me his blunt wisdom. You, the reader, and I don’t really have that kind of relationship, at least not yet. This longer format helps develop an understanding for communicating important ideas that they don’t teach you in school.

Inflammation

If I started this post off with something inflammatory such as, “Don’t be an idiot”, and you didn’t know me, you would likely not be open to anything else I had to say and you would immediately browse to your next tab out of the 37 you already have open. You wouldn’t give me a chance to explain how I came to know a particular fact where if I, like Brian, had to personally experience it. I could say something about our current political discourse here, but I won’t.

That’s essentially how “mentorship”, heck, any productive conversation, dare I say, “communication” between two humans works. It takes the work of two people: one with an intention of sending a message through spacetime and the other open to receiving messages (that may or may not be from another dimension). If one doesn’t want to send, nor if the other wants to receive, it doesn’t work.

“Duh”

You may be thinking, “yeah, well duh, Mike, of course that’s how it works”. I’m sorry, but sometimes it’s helpful to spell things out really plainly to see a different perspective. See Rubber Ducky Programming.

There have been many times in my life where I wasn’t open to receiving messages (knowingly and unknowingly), but messages were being sent to me, and vice versa. I was (and still am sometimes) not aware enough to believe that there were messages actually being sent to me. Other times, I send the “correct” or “accurate” message content, but I delivered it in a way that rubbed the person the wrong way, even if it was truthful.

The key, as Jocko says, is “Mind Control” (1). TL;DR: Be more aware of and in control of your thoughts, because they are what make up “you”. How well you control your own thoughts dictates how well you are able to control other people’s thoughts. Uh oh, sounds like Jocko is up to no good, is he?

He says the better you can “detach” yourself from your ego and “get out of your own head” to see the other person’s perspective, the better you can mold the verbalization of your thoughts to achieve the desired outcome of the communication with that person. This helps your thought get transferred in such a way that the other person has the best chance of interpreting that thought as precisely as you understood it when you sent it. Now it is up to the receiving party to take that message, or leave it.

Message Received

I highly recommend everyone to try to find a willing (2) in-person mentor who is someone you look up to and hope to achieve something similar one day, and find a way to provide them value.

As corporate as that sounds, “providing value” could be as simple as treating the person to a coffee, a Jiu-jitsu roll, etc. If this is not possible (make sure you tried the providing value part), reading long form articles and books from people that you want to be like work here as well, but not as effective or as personalized (3). You’ll pick up on soon (if not already) the kind of person I strive to be like.

(Un)fortunately, we live in a society where we don’t have structured apprenticeships where there is a designated “master” and “apprentice”. Because of this, you have to get your mentoring/support from multiple sources. If you are the average of the five people you interact with the most, choose those five “positions” carefully. As carefully as if you’re forming an All-Star basketball team that has to beat the Warriors at home. Yes, that carefully. I will expand on this in another post, but it is very important to spend most of your time with people who have the same goal / same path through life as you.

Thanks to Brian for the advice that prompted this post. Check out his crazy spider robot and drones that he builds!

References

(1) If you couldn’t tell already, I love referencing things. This is going to be a normal thing.

(2) You can’t just “demand” someone be your mentor. They have to be motivated to see you succeed.

(3) Hacker News keeps me up to date with the zeitgeist of the tech world, with many insightful linked articles and comments from other professionals in the industry. This might need its own post.