When Our Founder At First Couldn’t Get The Tech Stuff, She Discovered This About Your Creator Business

My shoulders were tense and I was starting to feel really nervous. And staying up for most of the nights over the previous several weeks, drinking copious amounts of coffee at Eat N Park with friends, hoping that I could just learn computer science by osmosis wasn’t helping my situation. 

This time, though, I was actually trying. Hours of working through things on paper and in the computer lab weren’t helping. I wasn’t getting anywhere. I just didn’t think this way, and I felt utterly desperate. There were no assignments that could up my grade. My only option was to pass the final or not pass the class.

I was getting a writing degree at a highly ranked nerd school, and I needed to pass a computer science class to graduate. And while I was actually interested in Pascal, theoretically speaking, my creative brain was pretty confused by it. The frustration was thick as mud.

We were all sitting there together, all kinds of non-technical majors - the humanities folks, the musicians, the dramats - all with similar blank stares. It had been a whole semester of kinda getting it, but not really. And then as I was piecing things together for the final, I was feeling more and more lost. How did we get from these class examples to this practice final? I couldn’t even correlate how these examples related to the working program example.

The final was days away and I had no idea where to turn. I’d already gone to my section’s office hours and I still felt like I couldn’t get my head wrapped around this stuff.

I still felt frustrated because I wasn’t getting it, but at least I no longer felt alone. And I still can’t believe how patient Mike was with me. It was the first time I needed real help that couldn’t be learned from a book or teacher showing examples. It was a complete shift in thinking, and one that could really only be explained by someone who had experienced my same kind of confusion, who knew exactly where I was coming from. 

Mike was another humanities friend, but somehow he got this computer stuff and the procedural nature of it. I just happened to mention my dilemma in passing while a few of us were hanging out, and he’d offered to help. In the end, he walked me through the example final showing me exactly how one file related to the others and how they all worked together. It was clear enough for me to memorize, even where I wasn’t 100% certain in the logic.

I was terrified for the final, sweating as I turned on the computer. I stepped through the separate files, just as Mike and I had done, and when I got to the end I couldn’t believe I’d completed it so quickly. I looked around and thought, “that was it?” It only took 20 minutes, and I was the second person finished. I stood up, almost afraid I’d missed something. But a computer program either works or it doesn’t, so I knew I had passed. 

It ended up being only a few years later that I taught myself website development, out of a super thick book night after night, so I could quit my admin job and get hired as the first-ever user interface developer that the State Street financial services company had ever hired.

It made me really think for the first time about mentorship.

I had been a go-it-alone person. But Mike’s ability to help me see how a creative mind can also think procedurally opened up a whole new world for me. It was his mentorship that became the catalyst for me to burn the candle at both ends to do exactly what I needed to so I could become a developer - which meant a much higher salary and career opportunities because I had both the creative and technical backgrounds that most people don’t have.

I learned that mentorship not only helps people in the moment, but it fuels passion for where you can go and the opportunities you can have.

Several mentors have come into my life, almost perfectly placed when I’ve needed them. I’ve also learned that I’ve needed to be open to them and willing to do the work to really gain the most I could. But when those pieces have clicked, my experiences and success have skyrocketed.

I can wholeheartedly say that I would not be the person I am today had it not been for some pretty amazing mentors. And that’s why mentorship is so important to me. After getting even a glimpse of what it could do for me, I found myself mentoring others - and that’s where greatness really happens. Sometimes I feel like I learn more from the people I mentor than they do from me, and that’s because of the fresh perspectives and ideas entrepreneurs show up with.

Think about what mentorship could do for you.

You’re an expert at what you do. But you’re not an expert at everything, nor are you expected to be! But with the right mentor who understands where you’re coming from and where you’re trying to go, just think about how much further you can get, and how much faster?

I never needed studies to prove the effects of mentorship. But just in case you’re curious: 70% of entrepreneurs who receive mentoring survive for five years or more, which is double the survival rate compared to those who don't have a mentor. That's some serious impact! But it's not just about surviving - with mentorship, you can thrive and reach your full potential as an entrepreneur.

In my experience, mentorship provides the help that’s most needed when you don’t know where to go next. And so, if you’ve dipped your toes into the creator world and found that you could really use some hands-on, real world help, then the mentorship we provide at Sidkik can be just the thing you need next.

If you’re interested in mentorship, we provide it for FREE as part of our Sidkik Creator Platform. Why? Because mentorship has been life changing for us, and we want you to have the same experience.

We’re passionate about mentorship, so we make it a regular part of our Sidkik Creator Platform.