The mentor told me to stop trying to be good at everything. This was bad advice. I was 23, I was trying to build a career, and "stop trying to be good at everything" is not useful guidance for someone who doesn't yet know what they're good at.
But it landed at exactly the right moment. I was in the middle of a period where I was spreading myself across six different skill sets, none of them developing fast enough to be useful, all of them demanding time I didn't have. The advice was wrong in theory and right in practice. I needed to hear something that gave me permission to stop.
The girl next up community has been talking about mentorship lately and I keep wanting to add this: the best advice I've received has often been technically incorrect. Not because the mentors were bad at their jobs — they weren't — but because advice is always context-dependent and the context is always partially invisible to the person giving it.
What the mentor saw was someone scattered. What she didn't see was that the scattering was how I learned — I needed to try six things to figure out which two I actually wanted to do. Her advice to focus was right for her. It was wrong for me. But the effect of hearing it was right: I stopped trying to do everything at once, not because I took the advice literally, but because the advice made me think about what I actually wanted.
I've been reading some stuff on creative community about how advice works — the research on this is interesting. The finding is that advice is most useful not when it's correct but when it's specific enough to be wrong. Vague advice ("follow your passion," "work hard") is useless because it can't be wrong. Specific advice can be wrong, and being wrong in a specific way is more useful than being right in a vague way.
The mentor who told me to stop trying to be good at everything was wrong in a specific way. I could push back against it. I could figure out why it was wrong for me. That process of figuring out why the advice was wrong taught me more than the advice itself would have if it had been right.
There's more on this at risen today — a piece about the limits of mentorship that's honest about what mentors can and can't see. And the josephcalitoy.com team has been writing about the difference between advice and guidance that connects to this.
The mentor, for what it's worth, was right about one thing: I was scattered. I just needed to be scattered for a while longer before I could focus. The advice came at the right time even though it was the wrong advice. That's a weird thing to be grateful for, but I am.