When Someone Needs What You Already Have

It’s easy to underestimate the value of something that comes easily to you.

Over 30 years ago, a young Polish woman boarded a bus that took her across Europe to a small village in the Highlands of Scotland.

She was excited to have a hospitality job lined up in a local hotel. But when she arrived the owner told her she couldn’t stay. He told her that her English wasn’t strong enough and that he felt she wouldn’t manage the role. So, he offered her one night’s accommodation before she had to get on a bus back to Poland.

That night could have been the end of her story in Scotland.

But life has a way of placing people in the right place at the right time.

When she was in the village shop buying some food she bumped into the minister she had met on the bus. She explained what had happened and asked if he knew anyone who could help.

He told her he did.

That’s how she ended up at my parents’ house. The minister was a friend of theirs. He explained her situation, and my parents didn’t hesitate. They offered her a place to stay, at no charge, until she could find work.

They didn’t just give her bed and board. They mentored her.

And they introduced her to potential employers, spoke on her behalf, and gave her the time and space to improve her English. Within a few months, she was confident enough to apply for better jobs.

She went on to work for a wealthy landowner, travelling the world with them.

Eventually, she married and settled in Canada with her family. Decades later, she still keeps in touch.

When I think about everything that happened afterwards, it’s extraordinary to think that it can all be traced back to one evening in a small Highland village. She asked for help, a minister knew who to ask, and my parents said yes.

None of them could possibly have known where that yes would lead.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve always found this story so fascinating. My parents had no idea that they were doing something that would alter the course of another person’s life. They simply helped because they could.

It also changed the way I think about mentoring.

These days, mentoring has become something of an industry. We tend to associate it with coaching programmes or formal arrangements where one person agrees to guide another. There’s nothing wrong with that, but some of the best mentoring happens without anyone giving it a name.

Over the years, I’ve learned a great deal from people who probably had no idea they were mentoring me. I remember a random chat that completely changed my mind on a project. Another time, hearing about someone else's disaster with a product helped me dodge a costly mistake. Amazing people have come into my life who I never would have crossed paths with otherwise, all thanks to a simple introduction.

I’m sure most of us can think of people who have done the same for us.

What I find interesting is that we usually measure our own knowledge by looking at the people ahead of us. It’s easy to feel inexperienced when someone else has been doing something for twice as long or has achieved far more.

We rarely turn around and look at how far we’ve already come.

If you’ve been running an online business for several years, think about what you know now that you didn’t know during your first few months. Some of it was probably learned the hard way. You probably made mistakes and wasted money along the way. And I’m sure, like me, you’ll have followed advice that turned out to be utterly useless.

To someone starting today, that experience could be invaluable.

That doesn’t mean I’m suggesting everyone should suddenly become a mentor. I just think that if you’ve learned something along the way that could save someone else a lot of time or trouble, why wouldn’t you pass it on?

You only need to know something that would be useful to them.

There’s another person in my parents’ story who deserves some credit too.

The young woman asked for help.

It sounds like such a small part of what happened, but none of the rest would have happened if she hadn’t.

I’m not sure I would have been that brave at her age. She was in a strange country, her English wasn’t great and she’d just been told that the job she’d travelled all that way for was no longer hers.

I think we can sometimes be reluctant to ask for help in business. Maybe we think we should know the answer ourselves. I know I’ve spent hours trying to work something out before finally asking someone and wondering why on earth I didn’t do that in the first place.

There’s certainly no shortage of information online, but that doesn’t mean it’s always the information you need.

If I’m considering doing something that another person tried two years ago, I want to know what happened. Particularly if it was a disaster! I want to know about the bits they hadn’t expected and the things they wish they’d known beforehand. That could save me from making exactly the same mistakes.

Of course, there’s a right and wrong way to ask.

I’m not suggesting firing off messages to successful people asking if you can “pick their brain”. I’ve never particularly liked that expression anyway. Nor should asking for advice mean expecting somebody else to devote hours to solving your problem.

A specific question is different. Most people are surprisingly willing to share something they know when the request is reasonable.

There’s also no guarantee that the person you ask will have the answer. The minister didn’t. But he knew somebody who might be able to help.

That’s something I think we sometimes overlook when it comes to networking.

We spend a lot of time being told to grow our networks, but I’m not sure collecting hundreds or thousands of connections is particularly useful in itself. I’d rather actually know something about the people I’m connected to. That’s just me.

I’ve made plenty of introductions myself. Someone will mention a problem or something they’re trying to do and I’ll suddenly think of a person they should talk to.

Sometimes nothing comes of it. Other times it does. You just never know.

We’re usually thinking about who we should meet or who might be able to help us. But there are probably people we already know who could help each other and simply haven’t met yet.

You don’t have to be an expert to make that introduction.

More than 30 years ago, a minister in a small Highland village knew a young woman needed help and thought of my parents.

I doubt he gave it much more thought than that.

Yet all these years later, she’s living in Canada with her family and still keeps in touch.

I think that’s why I still love this story so much.