I come from a tiny industry town, the kind of place that photographs better than it commutes. Beautiful, scenic, hours from anywhere, and most of the towns you pass on the drive in saw their best decade a while ago. When people ask where I learned to do what I do, they usually expect a company name or a city. The honest answer starts on a street where the mill decided everything, including who got to leave.
The same town, everywhere
Here’s the thing I never expected when I left: I keep arriving back in that town. I’ve found it on Prince Edward Island and in northern Ontario, in Pennsylvania, Maine, Louisiana, and all through the southwest of England. Different accents, same main street. And in every one of them, somebody is sitting at a kitchen table trying to take a first step toward building the next Angry Birds or the next Facebook.
Will they build it? Probably not, almost nobody does, and that’s just as true for the kid whose desk sits upstairs from a YouTube studio in a city with fibre internet. The difference is what happens after the first stumble. The city kid gets to fail forward. She has meetups, mentors, a neighbour who’s shipped software. The kid at the kitchen table has a question and nobody to ask it. Talent shows up everywhere in equal measure. A person willing to answer a question is much rarer, and that gap decides more futures than talent does.
What mentoring looks like from my desk
So I answer. It’s one of the pillars my practice stands on, written down, not a mood. Every engagement I take includes teaching, which means when I build something for a client, somebody on their team learns how it works and why it was built that way. And when a person who is just starting out asks me a question, they get a real answer, at whatever hour the question found me.
I gave a WordCamp talk years ago called Make a Living Giving It Away, and I’ve spent the years since testing the premise. It holds. The more you give to your community without keeping score, the more comes back without you ever chasing it. I’d love to tell you I mentor out of pure nobility, but the honest ledger says generosity has been the best business development I’ve ever done, and it cost me nothing but time I was glad to spend anyway.
Some weeks the giving looks like an answered email. Other weeks it looks stranger: I recently spent a stretch of days fixing problems in nine WordPress plugins I don’t own and was never paid to touch, because somebody somewhere is relying on each of them, and because the version of this industry I want to work in is the one where that’s normal. The teaching side of my practice runs on the same fuel.
The question I’m still working on
This is also the question at the centre of my master’s research: how do people in communities that only see fresh produce a few times a week help shape this remarkable moment? I don’t have the whole answer yet. I know it involves access, and I know access usually arrives looking like one person willing to answer.
So if you’re starting from a town like mine, here’s the whole instruction: ask. Find someone doing the thing you want to do and ask the question you’re worried is too basic. Most of us remember our own kitchen table, and answering is how we pay the toll for having gotten out.
And if you’re reading this from the hiring side, a school board leader or a business owner choosing a vendor, here’s the transferable version: ask the people you hire what they plan to teach your team while they work. The vendors worth keeping will have an answer ready, because teaching is how good ones stay hired long after the contract could have ended.
Leave a Reply