9 Key Takeaways for my July End

It’s been quite some time since I last updated on this Blog Post. What’s new? I always stand at the cross-road of nothing or a lot.

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But here it is, summary of what comes into my mind right now:

1. I found a community on WordPress where people just blog their thoughts and daily life. It’s not as separate as it seems (at least for my initial thought). It’s an ocean of ideas, voices and many walks of life. It’s beautiful.
2. I joined paid newsletter challenge in AFD and got the time to think through what I have created, written and what I actually should and want to do with my newsletter. My substack newsletter Insights with Norah started with an idea of reflecting my working experience here as a consultant. It was first created in English. I soon realized its best use in Vietnamese and I changed not just the language but topics, to be more down-to-earth, less commercial and a pinch of inspiration. Insights 4 Life! A little of ambition for this newsletter – my journey to become a real narrator with visualization. Fingers crossed.
3. SEA BEAST – a superb movie that reminds me of one thing “BOOKS are written by humans. And so, they can be manipulative as hell”. In fact, it resonates with my thoughts when I wrote WATER and SALT. I was thinking to myself if researching, synthesizing and writing in a good order are good enough for book writing. Then what makes the info we have is the right one? And that is from our good intention. What if book authors want to create something harmful to readers? Well, I don’t have the answer yet. Will update this soon. Otherwise, this is a great movie to watch. Very cute.
4. Podcast Workshop – This was a free learning day from AFD about Podcaster and how it can help you as a means to market your business. Quite interesting things I picked up from this webinar. One remarkable thing is “Like Web Hosting, you need a hosting for your podcast too. And usually people use Anchor as it’s free”. Second point is content for your podcast. From easiest to most challenging can be listed as: read your blog/writing, monologue, interview (dual) with script, and spontaneous interview. Of course, each has different pros and cons. But it’s the way to start. I gave it a try on my Substack, I voice-over one of my newsletter. It was spontaneous, but it was fun.
5. Mentoring program – I have been mentoring for both Content Writing and Freelance Business program in On Writing Daily Mentorship. Besides, I am the Project Manager. In past week, I took the chance to attend Live Q&A of Better Writing and participated in Content Writing program. What gave me best feeling is the after session, I gathered mentors and asked for their feedbacks of the Program Operation, their reflections, and suggestions. It turned out when you know what outcome you want to focus, it’s not that difficult to carry the conversation. Lots of ideas, positive and some mild-negative [meaning we can fix it in no time].
6. Narrative & Report – Last week, I presented my narratives to my colleagues. In fact, they were reporting slides where I squeezed my analysis with charts and tables. It became confusing and challenging to understand to those colleagues due to: too details on the number, unfamiliar with charts reading, unclear message. Having their thoughts on these, I figured it out most people are lazy (well, it’s fact, we don’t want to just spend 30 minutes go through everything we aren’t sure they are interesting enough). The solution: 1 narrative with clear message, “just tell your story” and 1 detailed reporting to those who are hooked from the narrative.
7. Narrative with McKinsey – Very in time, I got inspired by McKinsey’s report. I believe they have more to show, but there were only 5-7 charts with 1 headline for each chart. On the left hand side, you will find a narrative where everything can be explained further. On top of that, footnote was used cleverly, guiding people to answer their own questions. Some summary section was put there but everything was sweet and short, and clear, of course. And I LOVE it !!!
8. Own your project/task – This has come very clear to me lately. This is not a new lesson, but maybe I have not learned it and passed this one. I can come up with quite a lot of ideas to do something and it usually becomes my projects/tasks eventually. Yet, somehow I let it form by itself, with the help of the others, without checking it properly. In the end, it becomes not as the initial plan/expectation. Like Anthony my teacher used to say, for everything, you need to CHECK, CHECK and CHECK. Especially when it’s your project, OWN IT.
9. Take your time to focus, learn and reflect – Most of the time, we rush to do things because we think we are running out of time, with or without people’s interferes. It again goes back to your preparation on one subject. And certainly, your concentration in the moment. There’s always more goods than harms to wrap-up, summarize and deliver some messages. For you, your readers and even people that come after. ALWAYS!

I didn’t think this post could come this far. But when I turned off every distractions such as Post Metrics and so on, just staring at the blank page and start writing, the feeling is quite intuitive. It’s nice. I really encourages blogging. Maybe this should be applied for all my writings moving forwards.

A super nice pic of the week, just want to keep it here.