Cost of waiting too long

If there is one thing I wish for many of my mentees, it is that we started working together earlier.

I have seen the same pattern so many times by now that I can almost recognize it from the first message.

Someone reaches out at the beginning of their journey. They are still full of energy, maybe a bit confused, but also curious and hopeful. They want to move from academia to industry, from analytics to AI, from one data role into something more ambitious. They ask a few good questions, we have a great Find Your Next Step session, and then they disappear. And honestly, I understand why.

At that stage, it feels like there are still so many things you can “just figure out” by yourself. You can rewrite the CV one more time, or take one more course, or watch a few more videos. Ask ChatGPT about the difference between roles. Read LinkedIn posts. Apply to a few positions and see what happens.

Then a few months pass. Sometimes they come back. Usually more tired than before, but still trying. They have already changed their target role several times, applied to jobs that were not really a good fit, collected contradictory advice from various places, and started doubting whether their background is valuable at all.

Then they disappear again.

And then, 6–12 months later, they come back at a completely different energy level: not curious anymore, not excited, just exhausted. By then, the question is no longer: “What is the best way to approach this transition?”

It becomes:

• “Am I even good enough?”

• “Should I just give up and stay where I am?”

This is the part I find hardest to watch, because the problem is almost never a lack of intelligence, discipline, or ambition.

Most of the people I work with have survived far more difficult things than a career transition. They have written theses, defended research, built models, learned programming languages, managed complex projects, moved countries, changed fields, raised children, worked full-time while studying, or kept going through long periods of uncertainty.

But they have spent too long trying to navigate an opaque system alone.

And after a while, even the strongest people start confusing exhaustion with evidence. They begin to read silence from recruiters as a verdict on their talent. They interpret badly written job descriptions as personal failure. They take every rejection, every unanswered application, every vague piece of advice as proof that maybe they were not as capable as they thought.

This is why I want to say something very clearly:

You do not need to figure everything out before you start working with a mentor.

And you do not have to spend months walking in circles just to prove that you have tried hard enough alone. I know that working with a professional mentor or coach can look expensive at first. But the cost of a 6–12 month marathon on your own is often much higher. Not only financially, although lost time and missed opportunities are real. But emotionally: the self-doubt, the random decisions, the endless course-hopping, the feeling that everyone else is moving faster.

A good mentor will not do the work for you, but they can help you stop wasting energy in the wrong places.

And sometimes that makes all the difference!