The Mentor

You see potential in people with unusual clarity and you find it almost impossible to leave it alone. You make introductions, you create the opportunity, you say the sentence that changes how someone sees themselves — and you are good enough at it that people credit you years later. You are also genuinely persuasive rather than merely charming, because your read on what someone actually needs is accurate.

The weakness is that you take responsibility for outcomes that were never yours. When someone you invested in makes a choice you think is wrong, you experience it as a failure of yours, and you will keep pushing well past the point where it has become pressure. There is also a slower cost: because you are always the one holding the frame for other people, you have very few relationships where someone is holding it for you. You will not be offered that. You will have to say, to one specific person, that you need it.