We built a mentorship program on instinct. Then Ericsson told me why it worked.

A while back, a couple of us sat down and built an engineering mentorship program under the Hubtel Pledge, our slice of the global Pledge 1% commitment, where companies give some of their time and knowledge back to the community. The idea was simple, and a little selfish on behalf of my country: give young Ghanaian engineers a way to climb and help them tell the signal from the noise in a field that's full of both. We actually found the standard 1% of our time wasn't enough to mentor properly, so for engineering we raised our own commitment to 2.5%.

We designed how it runs without any grand theory behind it. It just felt right. Then just when I completed Anders Ericsson's Peak, the book behind the whole "deliberate practice" idea, the epiphany (or aha moment) hit. The authors were describing, principle by principle, the thing we'd already built. We hadn't applied the science. We'd stumbled into it.

Here's how ours works. After successful onboarding, we release study materials with practice assignments, because Ericsson's core point is that expertise is about what you can do, not what you can know or recite. Mentees work through them at their own pace. When they feel ready, they request an interview and that word matters: they pull, we don't push. Two mentors, all practicing Hubtel engineers, sit with them for about half an hour. It's less an exam than a discussion, a check on whether they've truly gripped the material or just skimmed it. Clear the bar, move to the next module. Fall short, and you go back to the notes, redo the work and request another sitting when you're ready. Attempt, feedback, refine, repeat. That loop is the entire engine of deliberate practice and we ran it without ever having called it that.

The modules themselves mirror our internal competency matrix, so the ladder these mentee engineers are climbing isn't invented for the program. It's the real one.

But the part I'm proudest of is the part Ericsson insists on most: a good coach. He argues you can't shortcut your way to mastery alone; you need someone who already knows the road, patient but firm, to show you what good looks like and close the gap between where you are and where you're trying to get. That's exactly what those thirty-minute sessions are. For a stretch of time, a mentee engineer in Ghana gets to "sit at the feet" of people (albeit a virtual meeting) who do this at a serious level and pull out the nuggets that live in experience and never make it into a tutorial. That access is normally the preserve of the lucky and the well-connected. We give it away.

We're careful about one thing: we promise no jobs, no internships, no placements. They're welcome to apply if we're hiring, like anyone else, but the mentorship isn't a side door. The gift is the practice and the access, not a favour. I think that keeps it honest, and it keeps the motivation where Ericsson says it belongs: on getting better, not on getting picked.

What I keep taking from all this is humbling. We didn't need the book to build the thing. But the book told me why it works and that's worth a lot, because now we can sharpen it deliberately instead of by feel. The instinct got us started. The science tells us where to push next.