Mentorship runs both ways

Welcome to Nights & Wknds, a weekly newsletter for ambitious professionals building successful careers and lives.

Honest reflections. Practical frameworks. Lessons learned the hard way, written by someone who's been in the trenches and is still learning.

Whether you're looking for your first mentor or trying to figure out how to be one, this newsletter is here to help you play the long game.

This week…

What you can give a mentor at year one, five and ten, the question that got me off the fence, and one night in November I'd love your help with.

Let's get to it!

Aaron

September 22, 2026. A Tuesday night, my first session as a patron (as in mentor, not the tequila) in the protégé program at Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO). I hadn’t actually been assigned my own protégé (mentee) quite yet, so they dropped me into a breakout room with a handful of first- and second-year professionals.

I'd been avoiding this program for a couple years. I serve on the organization's junior board, I'd spent time recruiting other people in my industry to sign up as mentors, and I kept telling myself I didn't have the time. Then I sat in this May's coin ceremony, the annual night SEO celebrates each new class of mentor pairs, and watched a room full of them. I couldn't make the pitch with a straight face anymore. It didn't feel like I could, in good faith, encourage people to participate if I wasn't going to do it myself. So here we are.

Midway through, one of them asked a question I didn't expect. You're a patron now. But you still have mentors. How do you approach being the protégé?

I gave the honest answer, and it surprised me a little to hear it out loud.

The best mentor relationships I have today are the ones where I'm giving something back.

More than you think, and the answer changes as you go. I want to walk through mine, because I think it can be helpful at nearly any point in the relationship.

In my first few years, I had very little to offer the people mentoring me (so I thought). What I had was good work and my perspective, and I underestimated both. A lot of mentors are trying to understand how the world is changing, and how a new generation is approaching work and life. You're a direct line into that. And if your mentor is inside your own organization, an honest read on how the job actually feels from your seat, or an idea for making the work flow better, is something they can't get from a report. The line to watch is between feedback and complaining, so bring a suggestion with every observation.

Around year five, the job is to show potential. Keep doing the good work, take on the new challenge, and reach for the next thing before it's handed to you. What mentors notice at this stage is maturity: whether you're thinking about the arc of your career as well as the job in front of you. That's when a mentor can start to become a sponsor. For me, that looked like mentors pushing me to apply to business school before I'd convinced myself I should, then writing the letters of recommendation that helped get me there.

Somewhere around year ten, it starts to feel more like two peers. The perspective and the good work still matter, but now I also have experiences and connections that can be useful to my mentors. This spring I moderated a fireside chat at SEO's career summit for a senior leader I've learned a lot from. She'd been wrestling with whether AI makes young people easier to replace. My read, from the time I spend around people early in their careers, was that they know these tools better than many of the people hiring them. She built her remarks around the questions I wrote. The relationship stopped being me showing up with questions and started being two people sharing their unique perspectives. One of my mentors puts it plainly: "We should be trying to help each other put food on the table for our families." I used to hear that as transactional. I don't anymore.

Which brings me back to that Tuesday. I'd been telling people in my industry to become patrons for a couple years, from the comfort of not being one. The honest version of the pitch required me to sit in the room. Giving back runs both ways, up to the people who helped me and down to the people coming up behind me. For me, both lead back to the same organization. More on that at the bottom.

Pick one person who has helped you. Before you ask them for anything else, send them one thing that's useful to them. An article. An introduction. A short note on what happened after you took their advice. Mentors rarely hear how things turned out.

The diagnostic question is simple: when did I last give this person something?

If you can't remember, start there. It's a smaller gift at year one than at year ten. It's still a gift.

I did SEO's career program in 2014, on the investment banking track, without knowing what investment banking was. A friend one year ahead of me told me to go to the info session, and I went because he told me to. If it hadn't been for that program, I would never have thought to look for a job in finance. As cliché as it is to say, it changed my life.

The Soirée raises money for the part of the organization that starts even earlier: SEO Scholars, a free, eight-year program that takes public high school students all the way through college graduation.

In high school, Scholars get 600+ additional hours of English and math, plus mentorship and college guidance that continue through college. SEO reports that 100% of its Scholars are accepted to four-year colleges and 85% graduate.

On Wednesday, November 18, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., SEO's National Leadership Council, the junior board I serve on, is hosting the SEO Soirée at Libera at the Ace Hotel NoMad in New York. If you're in the city, come join us. If you can't make it, a donation of any size goes to the same students.

One of my favorite parts of writing this newsletter is hearing how these ideas show up in real life.

If something from Nights & Wknds helped you make a decision, navigate a challenge, land an opportunity, or simply think differently, I’d love to hear about it. Leave a quick testimonial here ↓