Mentor Mondays 🙋🏽‍♂️

Micro-dose of life & career advice to start your week

Jul 07, 2020

Hey friends,

Hope you’re well and staying safe. We’ve interacted in the past through my courses and workshops, but I wanted to engage with you further through a weekly newsletter that I’ve been thinking about for quite some time.

I wanted to introduce you to Mentor Mondays, my newsletter where I’m hoping to share a micro-dose of life & career advice straight to your inbox. It will include general advice on life, tips and strategies to improve in your career, exclusive interviews with industry leaders, and just generally interesting things I’ve found on the internet that week.

Let’s begin! 🤗

Life on the Rocketship

These are super uncertain times and a lot of my mentees and friends are feeling under-motivated and deflated, especially in their careers. Recently I had a call with a friend of mine who felt lost, as if he had missed a couple of great opportunities in his life and couldn’t see success on the horizon. As if he was just floating away in space with no destination…

I thought about this a lot after the call and here’s a text that I sent him:

The thing with life is, imagine yourself as a rocket, you just left earth, and your goal is to get to the moon. You won’t be able to change the speed of this rocket, that’s the momentum of life and it will keep pushing you forward, all you got to do is do your best at keeping the rocket pointed towards the moon. Now, there is a very high chance you’ll miss the moon and ricochet away…no worries! Realign, but now, aim for Mars, and keep going. Opportunities will keep coming, and one day, your rocket will perfectly align to get into orbit with your dream opportunity. That will be a beautiful day 😊

To expand on this a little, the speed of life is not something we can dictate. It has too many variables and characters and it’s impossible to control it. Thing will happen, that’s just how life is. Secondly, when those things happen is also a variable you can’t control. Good and bad opportunities and experiences will come without notice.

The best thing you can do is focus on your health, mind and body, and keep doing everything in your power to make sure you’re on track and prepared to get in-orbit with the next best opportunity. Now, the journey between these opportunities can be long and lonely, that’s where I’d recommend you have the right people around you to keep you motivated and focused. Lastly, never look back. All those missed-moons and planets, you can’t go back to them, you got to always be looking forward and onwards.

So, how do you feel in your journey so far? If this is similar to how you’re feeling in your life and career, do yourself a favor and write down one milestone or opportunity that you’re looking forward to. Something that you’d really want to achieve in your life. Then, align yourself with that trajectory and stay on it. Laser-focused.

Personally, as I start my own writing journey, I want to one day be able to mentor one million students. Here we go!

Sherjan

Share Mentor Mondays

My Personal Mentor 🎙

This is my weekly podcast where I provide life & career advice and invite mentees of mine who have amazing journeys and life stories that we can all learn from. If you enjoy these emails, you’ll hopefully like that too. You can listen here on Apple Podcast or any other podcasting app, just search for ‘My Personal Mentor’.

Great Attitude Wins the Game (listen here)

On this episode we talk about why having a great attitude is the best way to be successful in competitive industries and team environments.

Marko Damnjanovic - Engineering to Morgan Stanley Investment Banking and Building Expertise (listen here)

On this episode of Story Time we have Marko Damnjanovic. Marko's family immigrated to Canada from Serbia and he went to undergrad at the University of Toronto where he studied Industrial Engineering. After joining investment clubs and seeing what drove him, he started pursuing internships within finance and after graduating with a near 4.0 GPA, he joined Morgan Stanley's investment banking team. Marko believes in building expertise and bridging geographies through his experience and his story is just beginning. Tune in, it's Story Time!

❤️ This Week

Podcast: My First Million - The Man Who Gamed Uber - I’ve been listening to these guys (Shaan) for a while and they make my daily 5-mile runs so much better. A lot of times while I am listening to this podcast I go into this mental rabbit hole thinking about my own ideas. This episode is their latest and there is a ton of gold in their previous episodes, have a listen!
Video: Ali Abdaal - How I Manage My Time - sometimes you meet people in life who are just a cut above, that’s Ali for me. I’ve been watching him do his thing for almost a year now and he is just amazing. If you’re looking to become productive in your life and get inspiration from someone who crushes it consistently, then he’s your guy. I’m hoping to follow his footsteps in many ways, he is an inspiration to me.
Article: Lee Fixel - The Most Interesting Investor - when I was at CapitalG, I had a brief moment of working with Lee on a couple of deals. In my eyes, he is the best and hardest-working investor I’ve ever met. When you’re at dinner with your family or watching the newest show on Netflix, Lee is out there finding the next unicorn and meeting with their customers. Check out this article that gives you an insight into how the best do it, and he is the very best.