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Key Takeaways Mentoring sharpens leadership by forcing founders to explain and refine the “why” behind their decisions, leading to clearer thinking and better judgment.
Investing in young people helped me stay adaptable and people-focused
Entrepreneurs are always looking for leverage. We look for the strategy that unlocks growth, the hire that changes a company’s trajectory, or the system that makes the business run better. Most of us assume the next breakthrough will come from somewhere inside the company.
For a long time, I believed that too. Then one of the most meaningful shifts in my leadership came from outside the business entirely. It came from mentoring young people. I started doing it to give back, not because I thought it would make me a better founder. But it did. It sharpened the way I think, stretched the way I lead and changed how I think about growth itself.
Mentoring forced me to explain ideas I had been carrying on instinct for years. It made me step back from the urgency of the quarter and think harder about how I develop people, not just how I manage output. That is why I think more founders should take mentoring seriously, not as a side commitment, but as a discipline that can make the business stronger.
You learn your business best when you teach it
Founders make hundreds of decisions that eventually become “routine.” That is one of the benefits of years of experience. You see patterns faster and move with more confidence.
But there is a downside to that speed. Over time, instinct can start to replace clarity.
When you mentor someone who is earlier in their journey, you cannot rely on instinct alone. They want to know why a decision made sense, what tradeoffs were and how you knew when to move. You have to slow down and put words to your thinking.
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