The Mentor Who Saw It Before I Did

There is a particular kind of person in a career who sees what you are capable of before you believe it yourself.

Mine was a woman named Patricia. She was my manager for two years early in my career, in the years when I was still performing competence rather than actually having it, and she could tell the difference. She did not pretend otherwise. She pushed me into rooms I was not ready for and then made sure I was ready before I walked in. She was precise and demanding and completely in my corner in a way that took me a long time to understand.

I left that job for a better one. Then another. Then another. Patricia's influence was in every version of me that showed up to those opportunities, and I carried her in my head at every difficult moment, the way she would have handled it, what she would have said, the standard she had quietly installed in me.

Five years after I stopped working for her I reached a milestone I had wanted for a long time. I thought about her immediately.

I wanted to tell her. Not with an email. With something real.

I thought about what she loved. She had a thing for maps. Old ones. She had a reproduction of an antique map in her office that I had looked at in a hundred meetings without ever really asking about it. I remembered it clearly enough to find something close.

I found an antique-style map print of the city where she had built her career. The place where she had done the work. I had it framed and I sent it with a letter, two pages, that said what I had never said directly: you are in every good decision I have ever made at work. I wanted you to know that while you can still hear it.

She called me the day it arrived.

She said she had been having a hard week and the letter arrived on the worst day and she sat in her office and read it twice.

You do not need an occasion. You just need to say it before too much time passes.