I try to do something in every meeting, and until recently I didn’t have a name for it.
I’m looking for the one thing the person across from me does well. The thing worth stealing. Somebody is talking through a plan I don’t love, on a technology I like even less, and part of my brain has quietly wandered off to a different question. What is this person good at? What do they have that I don’t?
I’ve done this for years. I just never knew what to call it.
The habit
It’s not complicated. I try to spend some mental cycles to ask a few questions about the people I’m engaged with.
- Are they particularly driven? Where does that come from?
- Do they keep a good outlook even when the technology is genuinely bad? How?
- Is there a work ethic there I should be a little embarrassed by?
- Do they have a personality trait I’d like to cultivate in myself?
- Overall, are they exceptional at something that I’d like to emulate?
Almost nobody is good at everything. But almost everybody is good at something. The person who drives you up the wall in a planning meeting might be the most patient teacher you’ve ever seen when a junior engineer is stuck. The quiet one who never talks might write the clearest design docs on the team. The lesson is there. You just have to be the kind of person who’s looking for it.
Why I wouldn’t call it mentorship
The easy thing would be to call this mentorship. Lots of people do. “Everyone is your mentor.” I’ve never been comfortable with that, and now I can say why.
Mentorship is a relationship. It’s sustained. It’s two-way. It costs the mentor something real: their time, their attention, their honest feedback when you don’t want to hear it. I’ve had a few true mentors. People who taught me how to do my job, who showed me the kind of engineer I wanted to become. That word means something specific, and I don’t want to cheapen it.
What I’m describing isn’t that. The person doesn’t have to know they’re teaching me anything. There’s no relationship to maintain. I’m not asking for their time. So calling it mentorship always felt like borrowing a word that belonged to something bigger.
So call it noticing
That’s the word. Noticing.
It’s lighter than mentorship, and that’s the point. Real mentors are a gift, and they’re rare. Noticing is just a habit, and it’s available everywhere, all the time, from everyone. The two aren’t in competition. You keep your real mentors close and you thank them. And in the meantime, you keep noticing.
Once I had the word, I could see how different it really is. Mentorship is something you receive. Noticing is something you do. One depends on another person showing up for you. The other only depends on you paying attention.
The selfish part
I’ll be honest about why I do this. It’s a little selfish.
When I walk into a meeting looking for what I can learn, I’m a different person than when I walk in just trying to get through it. I’m more curious. I’m more present. I’m paying closer attention to the people in the room, because now they’re interesting to me. They have something I might want.
That’s the real payoff. This habit changes how I show up today. It turns a boring meeting into a slightly less boring one. It keeps me engaged in work that could easily put me on autopilot. I’m not doing it because I’m noble. I’m doing it because it makes my work better and my days more interesting. The fact that it also might make me a more generous colleague is a nice side effect, but not the primary goal.
I should be clear that I’m not very good at this all the time. This is the way I hope to show up, not the way I always do. Plenty of meetings I just check out like everyone else. Some people I work with, I have to really dig to find the thing, and when I come up empty that’s usually about me, not them. It’s a default I’m aiming for, and I miss it more than I’d like. But it’s a better thing to miss than not to aim at.
None of this is new
It turns out I’m being novel here.
The first book of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is basically a list. He goes person by person through his life and names the one thing he learned from each of them. His grandfather taught him to keep his temper. His teacher Rusticus taught him to read carefully and not settle for a superficial understanding of a book. Page after page, just credit for small, specific lessons taken from the people around him. That was almost two thousand years ago.
So no, I didn’t invent this. I just finally found a word for a thing I’d been doing for a long time. He was noticing too. He just had better penmanship.
The takeaway
You don’t need a mentorship program. You don’t need to wait for the next great mentor to show up. Most of your education is going to come from ordinary coworkers who have no idea they’re teaching you anything. The lessons are already in the room.
Try it in your next bad meeting. Pick one person. Find the one thing they do well. You’ll be surprised how much it changes the meeting, and you.