Jeff of All Trades

Over the years I’ve been fortunate to be put in positions to help train, develop, and mentor. Why fortunate? Simply put, I enjoy helping others succeed.

My first taxable job was while I was still in college. An individual I shared a class with mentioned an opening at the company he worked for. I applied. And that same individual ended up being my boss.

My boss was quite simply the best mentor I’ve had to date. Much of how I treat people and how I desire to be treated stems from his early teachings. I’ve spent the many years since paying it forward by continuing to at least try to be as great a mentor as he was to me.

So, why would I be in search of a mentor again? One might think it sounds like I already hit peek mentorship levels. Two reasons really:

1. I am currently not in a role of responsibility for any one person. I’m generally free of my duties as a mentor. This doesn’t prevent me from at least attempting to pass along some bits of “wisdom” from time to time with the team I’m on. I hope to get back into a position to continue helping others but I recognize the obvious opportunity to work on myself instead.
2. While my first boss, the many leadership classes/articles/seminars, and general first hand experiences I’ve had have done much to set the pace for my leadership style, I recognize that there is always room to learn more from those that have done so before me.

So, naturally, upon seeing a link from Brent Ozar‘s newsletter that mentioned Paul Randal (the CEO of sqlskills.com) is taking on individuals to mentor, it peaked my interests. His exact reasoning for why he’s mentoring folks for free? “I just like doing it.” Now there’s something I can identify with.

I would like to accomplish one or many of the following:

1. Figure out what direction I need to take my career in order to someday earn that CEO title at a company of my own. Preferably one where I’m able to enrich and empower individuals and pass along what I’ve learned along the way.
2. Get an idea of what I can do with my fortunate yet unfortunate mixed bag of technical experiences. As a technical-can-get-running-on-something-new-in-very-little-time expert, I was shifted around a bit the last 5 years. While it allowed me to have a wide variety of skills, the years of experience for any one skill isn’t conducive to landing a job when most companies are hiring SMEs instead of doers.
3. And last but hardly least: managing my work/life balance. I took a pay cut to move positions to gain back a big part of my life and to further isolate work to the 4 walls of the office of the company I’m working for. I think my kids deserve to have their dad around. This supplements 1 and 2 in that I’m hoping to get another slice of cake and eat it too by improving salary and balance all at the same time.

That’s the long “long and short of it”. I’m a dab better at helping others than figuring out myself unfortunately. So maybe all three of those points could be replaced with: how to help myself, help myself.

For Paul: I hope to hear from you but if not I certainly understand. There are many folks out there that have not reaped the benefits of having a great mentor like I already have. While I see this as a tremendous opportunity for me if selected, I certainly won’t begrudge anyone else having an opportunity to better themselves. I’d celebrate it even.

For anyone else that happens to have gotten this far, I’d like to extend my hand and offer for you to follow my (very new) blog here and learn from some of my experiences and reach out with any questions you have. If you use the comments or contact pages I’ll be more than happy to provide solicited feedback when I’m able or arrange to chat one on one. Like Paul, I just like helping folks.

Last but not least, enjoy a random photo of my cat and I goofing about back near the end of quarantine.