The Corporate World
If you have ever walked the stretch of Broad Street, Lagos Island, on a workday, then you probably have a first-hand experience of navigating the corporate world.
It is chaotic and loud.
Despite the seeming lack of order, everyone is most certainly headed in the general direction of the opportunity.
The next opportunity.
And they are all lunging forward, arms outstretched, reaching out to grab it at all cost, knowing but not caring that the next person wants the same thing. The same opportunity. In fact, everyone knows that everyone else wants the same opportunity, but are hell-bent on ensuring that no one else comes close to seeing it let alone touch it.
Now imagine dropping a complete stranger into that stretch of road. No map. No sense of which building houses the bank and which houses the shipping firm. No knowledge of which okada man will get you there in ten minutes and which one will take you round in circles until your fare has tripled. No idea that the unassuming door beside the suya stand leads to the fourth floor office where the real decisions are made, while the glass-fronted building next to it is mostly for show.
That stranger will still get somewhere. People always do. But they will arrive late, exhausted, and poorer for the journey — having paid, in time and dignity, for lessons that someone who knew the terrain could have handed them for free.
That stranger is every young professional who walks into the corporate world without a mentor.
The Cost of Learning Alone
There is a peculiar kind of pride that convinces bright, capable people that they should be able to figure it all out on their own. That asking for direction is an admission of weakness. That the office politics, the unwritten rules, the quiet signals of who is rising and who is being quietly managed out — all of it should be self-evident to anyone sharp enough to deserve to be there.
It is not self-evident. It was never meant to be.
Every person currently sitting comfortably at the top of that Broad Street high-rise once stood exactly where the new intern stands now — unsure which meetings actually matter, unsure why a perfectly good idea died in a room they weren't invited to, unsure why the promotion went to the colleague who did less but was seen by the right people at the right time. The difference is not that they were smarter. Often, they were not. The difference is that somewhere along the way, someone pulled them aside and said: not that way, this way.
Without that voice, talent burns itself out chasing the wrong things. Ambitious people spend five years mastering a skill nobody upstairs values, while a mentored colleague spends the same five years being quietly positioned for the role that opens up in year six. Both worked hard. Only one worked wisely.
What a Mentor Actually Gives You
A mentor is not a shortcut to success, and anyone who sells it to you that way is lying. What a mentor gives you is something more valuable than a shortcut — they give you sight.
They have already walked the stretch you are walking. They know which okada man to trust. They can tell you, before you waste a year finding out yourself, that the department you are so eager to join is a graveyard for careers, or that the manager everyone avoids is actually the best teacher on the floor if you can survive their bluntness. They will read a draft of the email you are about to send and tell you it will get you nowhere, then show you the version that will.
More than information, a mentor gives you honesty you cannot buy anywhere else in the corporate world — a place otherwise governed by performance, positioning, and the careful management of appearances. Your mentor has no stake in flattering you. They have every stake in your growth. That distinction, once you notice it, is rare enough to be precious.
And perhaps most quietly important of all: a mentor gives you proof. Proof, simply by their own presence, that someone who started where you are standing did, in fact, make it through. On the days the street feels most chaotic and most loud, that proof is sometimes the only thing that keeps you walking forward instead of turning back.
Finding Your Guide
Nobody hands you a mentor. There is no office on the fourth floor that dispenses them, no form to fill and submit. The mentors worth having are usually too busy to notice you unless you give them a reason to.
Give them a reason. Show up prepared. Ask questions that prove you already did the thinking, not questions that ask them to do it for you. Be the kind of person whose growth is satisfying to watch, because most people who become mentors do it not out of obligation but because watching someone rise, and knowing they had a hand in it, is its own quiet reward.
It rarely announces itself with a title. More often, it is a habit that forms slowly — the senior colleague whose door you started knocking on more than most, the manager who began correcting you more carefully than they corrected others because they saw something worth the effort. Mentorship, in the corporate world, is rarely declared. It is simply practiced, one honest conversation at a time, until one day you realize you have not been walking Broad Street alone for a while now.
Paying It Forward
And one day, if you are patient and deliberate about your own growth, you will find yourself standing exactly where your mentor once stood — no longer the stranger dropped into the chaos, but someone who knows which door leads to the fourth floor.
Someone new will be standing at the edge of that same crowded street, arms not yet outstretched, still trying to work out which direction the opportunity is coming from.
That will be your turn to be the voice that says: not that way. This way.
The corporate world will still be chaotic. It will still be loud. It will still be full of people lunging for the same next opportunity, hell-bent on getting there first. That will never change.
But whether a person arrives at that opportunity broken and late, or grounded and on time, will depend — as it always has — on whether somewhere along the way, someone reached back to walk the stretch with them.