The Colleague Who Taught Me Without Being Asked

When I started my first real job I did not know what I was doing.

Not in the normal way of being new. In the specific way of having been hired for something I had partially invented experience in and then having to quietly figure out how to actually do it before anyone noticed. I was twenty-four. I was very good at looking like I knew what I was doing. I was not always good at knowing what I was doing.

There was a woman named Claudette who sat two desks away.

She was ten years into her career. She was not my manager, not my mentor in any official capacity, not anyone who had been asked to help me or paid to help me or given any reason at all to spend time on me. She just noticed that I was struggling and she started talking to me.

Not in a formal way. In the way of stopping by my desk with a cup of coffee and saying: you are going to make a call like this on Thursday and here is what you actually need to know before that happens. And then she would tell me and leave.

She did this for two years. Small corrections, delivered before I needed them. Context I did not know I was missing. The occasional warning that saved me from a mistake I could not have known to anticipate.

I left that job after four years. I went somewhere better, largely because she had taught me how to be someone who could.

I gave her a gift when I left and it was not enough. It was a bottle of wine and a card that said the usual things.

Five years later I went back.

I wrote her a letter. Two pages, specific. Not general gratitude but the real accounting: what she had done, what it had given me, what my career looked like now because of the two years she had spent talking to me.

I brought the letter and a first edition of a book she had recommended to me in year one and that I had never found until I actually looked. She had mentioned it once, in passing, as the book that had changed how she thought about the work we did.

She held the book and looked at me.

She said: you found this.

I said: I had been looking for a while.

She said: why are you here.

I said: because I did not thank you properly when it mattered and I have been meaning to fix that ever since.

She said: you did not owe me anything.

I said: that is what makes it worth giving.

Go back for people who helped you. It is almost never too late.