As many of you know, I’ve done a lot of mentoring — probably with north of eighty people at this point. Though I am no longer mentoring, something I’ve noticed is that almost all of the things I tell my mentees are a serious surprise to them. By this, I mean that, without fail, they all remark that they’ve never heard my advice before. Real quotes abound, like: “no one has ever told me the truth about my work, not even the other mentors I’ve talked to,” “I’ve never heard this about the industry before,” “I now have a better understanding of how design works at companies, my mentors didn’t talk about this,” “I didn’t know that interviewing worked like that, my bootcamp mentors haven’t mentioned this,” “all the other mentors said my work was fine,” and so on.