Kill Your Mentor

6FPS V1#10


Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS. As I write this, it's mid-March, and I'm wondering where the time has gone. Actually, I know exactly where it's gone, it just seems to be happening faster than I think it should. For the first time since 2011, California is not in a drought state. The reservoirs are full, the snow packs are heavy, and the skiing is awesome, except when the winter storms shut down the highways and the winds shut down the lists.

That said, we can't really relax, because it's unclear if the last almost decade of dry years is the outlier, or if this super wet year is. With climate change happening, we're in many ways heading into "we don't know, the history trends have failed" territory, where it's hard to depend on what "ought" to occur. One thing the climate deniers want to ignore is that the warming we're seeing across the globe doesn't just make things hotter -- it intensifies and accelerates weather extremes, both hot and cold. That's part of why we're seeing these rains in California and more, larger hurricanes on the East Coast as well.

What really bothers me about the debate and our relatively poor action as a species to combat this is we're leaving all of this for the next generations to deal with. As someone who early in my life chose to stay childless, in part because of feeling like we were creating a raw deal for future generations, I'm sad to say my worst worries seem to be coming true, and I feel terrible for those of you with kids who have to explain to them what we've stuck them with.

That's not intended to sound as a criticism of those that do choose to have kids, but I do hope you prepare them, and perhaps aim that at thinking about ways to get involved and minimize the impact of the changes we're failing to deal with today. I was incredibly heartened to see the demonstrations put on around the globe recently, and I'm hoping to see more of -- and will support as I can -- the younger generations banding together to tell us old farts they're tired of us screwing up their future.

Which is the one thing right now that gives me some hope for them.

Birding on the refuges

My Merced trip for Santa Clara Valley Audubon went wonderfully with a new record (for me) of 56 species, which I and a group of seven enjoyed immensely, including tens of thousands of geese and thousands of sandhill cranes. A good time was had by all.

Upcoming Birding Events

It's time for Santa Clara Valley Audubon's annual birdathon, which is one of the organizations biggest fundraising events. As chair of the birdathon committee again this year, I really want to see it do well, so I'm encouraging everyone to find an outing that interests them and join us! You can get all of the details about the Birdathon on the SCVAS web site. The Birdathon kicks off March 30 with a dinner at McClellan Ranch, and runs to May 5. I'm running 3 big sits for Birdathon, all aimed at casual or beginner birders:

Big sits are where we find a good place to sit and wait for the birds to come to us. Our locations at Shoreline and Coyote Valley have proven to be really good spots, and I'll have some spare binoculars, my spotting scope, and maybe a few snacks for people who wander by. You don't need to be there the entire four hours (I do, though), so you can come by for a bit, chat about birds and see what shows up. I'm also going to be doing at least one solo trip for Birdathon, a big day style photo outing I'm currently planning. Can't get to these events? Consider sponsoring or pledgingbased on the results. Or donate to SCVAS, which I feel is a really good cause that deserves your attention -- not only do we offer resources and events for birders, the organization works with many groups around the county on educational events, habitat restoration and advocacy with local and regional governments on environmental challenges and to help promote bird-safe buildings and environments. Hope to see you join us for one of these outings! (or more, that's legal, too!) ## Other birding outings: I have one other outing planned with SCVAS: for the first time, we're going to do a bird photography photowalk. This will be March 23 from 8AM-noon at Palo Alto Baylands, and it's something I wanted to do for a while to bring the county bird photographers together to explore the area and share their results. I'll be setting up a way for attendees to share images so everyone can see what we find, and it'll be an interesting opportunity to get together and nerd out a bit on cameras and birds at the same time. I'm also working on a special thing for eBird's Global Big Day which is on May 4 2019. I'll talk more about it once I finalize the planning, but plan to go out and bird on that day, and we'll be working to see just what we can all find together in the county that day.

What's New?

Here is what I've written since the last issue:

  • Printing your images — Fine Art printing

  • Chuq’s 2019 Kinda Big Year update (2 months in)

  • Fine art wildlife printing

  • Can you use a 560mm lens as a landscape lens?

  • Review: WD My Passport Wireless Pro

  • Sometimes experiments fail: attaching a laser sight to the camera

Photo: Canvasback



I'm starting to find time to take the now-repaired X-T3 out and do some photography with it and put it through it's paces. What I'm finding is really impressive. This is a shot I grabbed while out wandering a local area I wanted to scout for an upcoming trip I'm leading. It was a pretty cool and heavily overcast day with dim light, but the Fuji was able to to lock in easily. In looking in the raw image, I see really nice detail and no noise. Details: 1/640 at F8, ISO 800.

Kill your Mentor

I've really struggled trying to decide what to write for this issue. It's important to me to to do something original that isn't published elsewhere as a way to thank all of you for subscribing and so I don't turn this into little more than a link list of things, and I've had a bunch of things half-written but none of them really grabbed me, so they need to marinate some more.

And then I was browsing one of the groups I'm a member of -- this one on Slack -- and I found myself skimming through and feeling a bit annoyed, and then that question popped up into my brain:

  • When was the last time anything in this group really taught me anything? When was the last time I contributed something useful to the group?

And I realized it was time to kill my mentor.

When I speak of killing a mentor, I'm speaking metaphorically, of course. I do not suggest hunting them down and taking them out of the gene pool, since good things rarely come from acts like that. Or so I hear.

YOU WILL OUTGROW YOUR MENTORS. This is a point I think needs to be made that is rarely talked about. As you move through life, you will find people who can teach you and help you grow, either in skills or as a person. But the reality is, most teachers can teach you a very limited set of skills in one specific area of your life, and when you've learned that, there's little they can do for you: it becomes reinforcement, not teaching. Or more often than not, it turns into a habit that you continue to do because you've been doing it, not because it's helping you grow -- and sometimes that's okay, because we all need some reinforcement to help us continue to build habits around a new thing that we're learning.

But we should always be striving to keep growing, both in our skillsets and as people. And that means we have to always be searching out that next mentor, that next person who can push us in new directions and teach us new things. If we get comfortable in our situation, if we decide the voices we're listening to are the only ones we need, we tend to stagnate and stop growing, stop moving forward and improving.

In photography, I think this happens a lot. The early voices we hook into help us with the technical side, with shutters and apertures and bits and bytes and knob turning and the nerdy details. I think too many photographers these days have decided that's the part of photography that matters, and never grow beyond technical aspects of the craft and take on the challenges of the artistic and philosophical pieces of the photographic puzzle.

I see this online, where there's a strong me-too aspect to what's posted online. You wander through instagram and I see so many photographers trying to make their photos look like everyone else's images, or who are doing endless cycles of new versions of the same subjects rather than exploring original material.

I think the core problem boils down to this: they've latched on to a few mentors who have taught them what they can, and they've settled in and gotten comfortable, and decided that's what they need to know, and so they stop learning and growing.

Know when to move on

I'm using mentor with a fairly wide definition here: not only as an active teacher where you have a one on one relationship, but for those people you find in your life that you decide to commit time and energy into listening to and learning from what they say. Those mentors could be through books, could be through classes, or as we see a lot of today, through things like Youtube channels and podcasts. I think of them as active mentors (who are few and far between and to be cherished) and passive mentors, who have things to teach you, but where you have to interpret and integrate their teachings without active guidance.

The big difference between an active and a passive mentor is that an active mentor will know when they've taught you what they can and toss you out the door to find your next mentor when it's time -- unless, of course, they value your money they get more than your personal growth.

The passive mentor will continue to teach you the things they teach, forever, if you so choose. But is that a good use of your time once you've integrated their teaching into your life?

In 2017, I did a blog post where I listed my favorite Youtube channels, many of which I use as passive mentors. In looking back at that list, less than 18 months later, I find one of the channels has stopped publishing (and I've kvetched at the owner at how I miss it) -- and four others I've dropped and don't follow any more. There are only three from that list that I still consider as people I'd call passive mentors, so that's more than a 60% turnover in the last year or so.

That's not a bad thing. It's not like those creators became incompetent, it's just that I'd gotten as much from them as I could. I've also added two other channels into my mix, I've got two I'm auditioning, and in the last year, I've subscribed to at least a dozen others for some period of time to decide how deeply I wanted to dive into their content.

Always be looking for your next mentor

This is the message I want to push at you: You should always be striving to grow and improve yourself as a person, and with the skills you use in your craft. That means you need to always be out looking for your next mentor, that next person or resource that can push you forward in some what.

Never get comfortable with the status quo.

I don't think any of us ever hit a point in our lives where we can sit back and think "I am great at this, I don't need to get better", but I think often, we fall into that trap without realizing it. Learning and growing takes time, and effort, and the change necessary to implement new skills causes stress, so it's easy to decide to just sit back and let things stay as they are.

Sometimes you need to do that, either because of outside factors imposed on you by life, or because you need to spend some time letting some new thing you've taken on marinate until you're comfortable with it and ready to move forward again.

I think, though, we should all always be trying new things, exploring new teaching voices and exploring outside of our comfort zones. Life is about always moving forward, always searching, always growing. Stagnation is the first step towards falling behind and giving up, and when it happens, it needs to be dug out like a week before it takes over the garden on you.

Lose a mentor -- gain a friend

One last point I want to make. Killing your mentor doesn't necessarily mean kicking them out of your life. It means recognizing that the teacher-student relationship is ending. Sometimes that means the two of you move on because you're often moving in different directions.

But often, what you're doing is replacing this teacher-student type relationship with an even better thing, by replacing it with friendship.

And when that happens, it's even more glorious.

So for your own good, remember: always be looking for your next mentor, and know when it's time to kill a current one and move forward into your next phase of growth.

Forward

For Your Consideration

About 6FPS and Chuq

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (6fsp@chuqui.com).

Coming out about every two weeks, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

See you in a couple of weeks


And with that, I'll see you in a couple of weeks with the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along.

Until then, take care, and have fun.

Chuq

Copyright © 2019 Chuq Von Rospach, All rights reserved.