When I was running 5GuysTech, we had a real office, real staff, and a real pitch: the internet is where commerce is going, and your business needs to be there before your competitors arrive. We would sit across from small business owners, walk them through what a website could do for them, and wait for the moment they understood why it mattered.

Most of them heard us out. Almost none of them signed.

The objection that stuck with me was not hostile. It was calm and accurate. "My customers know where I am. They come in through the door. This is expensive." That was not denial. That was an honest description of how those businesses had operated for the entire length of their existence. The idea that someone would find a business through a search engine, hand credit card information to a server they had never met, then wait several days for something they could pick up that afternoon. That assumed a customer psychology most brick-and-mortar operators were not yet working with. Their current customers were not those customers.

They were right about the present. They were wrong about the direction.

I started working for PowerSurge Technologies, inc. in the 1995-1996 school year. I was in high school. The next year I left and got my GED, and was invited to become the CEO. I advertised JMac's CGI Archive and JMacLabs.com in my high school yearbook. It was a different time.

My flight is delayed. I'm in the Plaza Premium Lounge at Mactan-Cebu International Airport, Terminal 2, corner window seat, claimed the moment I walked in. Windrose is blasting in my ears: "Diggy Diggy Hole," if you're curious. There's a gin and tonic on the armrest. Through the floor-to-ceiling glass, an Eva Air A330 in full Sanrio livery sits directly in front of me, pastels and cartoon characters in the equatorial light. The Hello Kitty section is hidden behind a jetway. Beside me, a DHL Air Hong Kong A330, its tail an almost absurd yellow.

I've been in the Philippines for three weeks, and the wifi has been, without exaggeration, the worst I've encountered in recent memory.

I have spent enough time in leadership to know the standard story.

In that version, you start technical. You move into management. You become strategic. If all goes well, you eventually stop touching the technical work except at a safe rhetorical distance. Your value is supposed to migrate upward into vision, people, budgets, and influence.

When people talk about mentorship, they usually focus on what the mentee gets: advice, support, perspective, encouragement, access.

All of that matters. But it's only half the story.