Mentorship and mastery: the middle way to self-development
With pharmaceutical cognitive enhancements on the one side, and delayed or deferred adulthood on the other, is there a better way to develop to your full potential?
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; but in the expert’s, there are few”. − Shunryū Suzuki
A brief history of adolescence
Over the last century in much of the West, adolescence was just a short, neat phase of life demarcated by society for some gentle self-exploration and development. In those days, it was common, and indeed possible, to lead a fairly comfortable life, occupying the same job until you received your watch and pension. Life was pleasantly predictable: technology developed at a slower pace and − more or less − what you put in, you got out. Nowadays, for a variety of reasons, this trend has transformed towards delaying, or even deferring, adulthood entirely; one way being through extending time spent in formal education.
This choice has something going for it; to meet today’s rapid development of new technological breakthroughs, employers expect deeper specialisation from their employees. In fact, one-third of individuals between the ages of 24 and 32 in the US have acquired at least a bachelor’s degree Correspondingly, those who skip tertiary education often pay a higher penalty by generating lower wages. Although the South African context is, understandably, quite different, the rise in the number of youth entering tertiary education is impressive: when comparing the years 2000 and 2011, the number of tertiary graduates produced in the South African education system within a year increased from 65 000 to approximately 105 000 . Tertiary education may no longer be separating the herd. Combine this with the market uncertainty in a post-2008 world, and those entering the labour market have had to develop a wider array of skills, as the now more frequent labour market transitions are not just to new jobs but to entirely new industries. Data from the US shows that millennials are 16% more likely to switch industries for a new job than non-millennials.
The necessary trade-off of potential for expertise
With hindsight, of course, being twenty-twenty, many of us are acutely aware of how much of our young lives we wasted in a state of arrested development. In much the same way that we cannot go back in time (let alone knowing what we know now − as is often the proviso), we cannot both gain expertise and maintain all our potential at a sustainable level. We must trade off the potential to become a renowned concert pianist when we become an accountant, get married and have children. Doing away with the one to have the other/s is a necessary exchange. But, more than this, we need to be aware that there is an expiration date on our potential. From the figure below, it is clear that between the ages of 30 and 40, we begin to lose the ability to develop potential in any meaningful way. Millennials seem to be onto something then, finding good use, more so than generations past, for this peak time in their 20s and 30s to gain vast swaths of knowledge and skill. This gets us to the crux of the matter: what is the best strategy for the development and maintenance of potential? Unsurprisingly, given what we know now, a Canadian study investigating career development in those born after 1980 found that they “were seeking rapid career advancement and the development of new skills, while also ensuring a meaningful and satisfying life outside of work” (emphasis my own) . These are ambitious goals, to say the least, and one must recognise that in venturing to attain them in today’s fast-changing world, new and interesting, and perhaps even risky, methods must be deployed.
https://nicspaull.com/2016/05/03/black-graduates-3-400-in-1986-55-600-in-2011-enough-said/ https://www.benefitspro.com/2017/08/04/millennials-more-likely-to-swap-jobs-industries/?slreturn=20180223063308
Taking the safer − and perhaps indefinite – route, many choose to stay at home longer (or indefinitely) so that they can afford to more thoroughly explore and develop their potential . Conversely, Take Your Pills, a Netflix documentary, details the riskier way: a rising epidemic of those in high-demand jobs taking pharmaceutical drugs such as Adderall to give them a competitive edge. The somewhat terrifying part of this trend is the fact that Adderall, an amphetamine-based substance, is said to produce similar effects to the street drug Crystal Meth. Related trends include microdosing (taking small doses of hallucinogens like LSD or mushrooms) and taking cognitive enhancement supplements − a bustling new industry in Silicon Valley. Although this is clearly excessive, we must keep in mind that financial advisers often advise those young enough to bounce back from setbacks to take an aggressive strategy towards developing their market investments. And, so, a similar logic could be playing out here.
Altogether then − as far as recent memory can recall − the youth of today are under the most immense pressure to become that which young adults have only ever felt. Staying at home longer is not an option for everyone, and even if it were, it is not really a solution in and of itself. It will buy you time, but time with which to do what? The parent-child relationship will probably eventually start to take strain. On the flip side, the risks of taking drugs are well documented and unambiguous. There is, however, a middle way − a balanced fund, if you will.
The middle way: choosing to stay home indefinitely or take potentially addictive drugs aren’t the only options Something we haven’t yet considered is that knowledge and skill must come from somewhere. Although cognitive studies of fluid and crystallised intelligence confirm that while younger adults score relatively higher on measures of fluid intelligence (the ability to solve new and novel problems as well as identify patterns), they also find that crystallised intelligence (the ability to retrieve and use information that has been acquired throughout a lifetime) is on average higher for older adults . More importantly, the decline of crystallised intelligence is said to only occur late in life (in one’s 60s and 70s) and is often just slight. Note that, although intelligence declines only slightly with age, information processing often slows more considerably − mostly because the massive quantities of acquired knowledge require more attentional resources than any physical degradation.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10869-010-9159-4
With unbridled potential on the one hand and distracted expertise on the other, mentorship can potentially bridge the needs of both the developing mentee and the developed mentor.
This relationship is as symbiotic as it gets: for those requiring guidance, collaborating with someone who can scaffold your development in a particular domain and keep you from pitfalls (using 20-20 hindsight) is an invaluable asset. For many entering the middle to later parts of their lives and arriving at one of the last developmental hurdles known as the generativity versus stagnation crisis, becoming a mentor can help navigate this crisis by provoking feelings of connection and involvement.
All of this is particularly pertinent in a country like South Africa, where there is a serious skills shortage amongst the youth. Under circumstances of poor socio-economic conditions that contribute to high levels of home-based toxic stress, responsive and stimulating parenting is often not at a level adequate for positive child development. A long history of underdevelopment in early childhood, coupled with poor policy implementation amongst the lower quintiles of the public school system, leaves much to be desired. In combination, these two factors have and will continue to create a vacuum of hopelessness and demotivation amongst the youth that mentoring could very well curb.
This brings us to the natural solution: have more conversations with those around you. Attempt to find some overlap of interest. Networking events would be the perfect environment for this (where the trend for price discrimination is not such a common issue). However, there are many well-established agencies, NGOs and government programmes that have been developed to fill these gaps in the form of creating mentor-mentee relationships.
Another way to think of this is that it’s not the millennials who are breaking the trend, but rather every other generation of the past hundred or so years. Only since the turn of the nineteenth century have young people been able to afford to move out and start up on their own. Similarly, in the not-too-distant past, far more apprenticeships were available, as artisans and tradesmen passed on valuable knowledge and skills through mentorship-like relationships. This more informal yet enriching system of knowledge transfer has all but been abandoned for a narrower, production-line approach to schooling. History, it seems, is not so much a straight line, but a circle − if you go far back enough.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/000169186790011X
Mentorship programmes in South Africa
Women and girls
https://www.facebook.com/DreamGirls-Academy-105148559520540/
Youth and education
http://www.shineliteracy.org.za/
Business and entrepreneurship
http://www.nyda.gov.za/Volunteer-Business-Mentorship-Programme/Pages/default.aspx