The Weekly Digest — Feb 5
Welcome to the weekly digest. In here I share a bunch of private thoughts, lessons, tidbits and resources from the week.
First week of February.
I am excited at how I came at this week man!, I published 6 posts on medium. This is the most I have every written anything. A streak which is a personal record for me. Exciting.
I wrote a lot more about entrepreneurship this week, and what it means to run a business, as I put together my personal manifesto around entrepreneurship and being a real business man. This is obviously a real friction for me, hence why I am writing about it publicly.
I have benefited from my writing even without an audience, and this feeling is the craziest I have ever felt. It’s as though, I am defining my inner most dreams in public, and claiming the flag on that hill. Even if nobody read my posts on business and entrepreneurship, I changed a little bit inside. That counts a lot.
Here is a short summary of what I wrote about this week;
Good enough to work for google and other thoughts on professionalism — In this article, I questioned the professional outlook in life and business. I had felt that if you are self employed aka an entrepreneur, nobody holds you to a certain standard, and you can definitely choose how you work, the habits you keep, regardless of how it affects customers. I was keen to start showing up more professionally in any work that I do. I think this post can get you started on those ideas, and how you can also explore that for yourself.
Swipefiles — How I learned everything about successful landing pages — in this article I talked about how a successful landing page should look like, the types of things it should have etc. I felt like I came a little bit short, as I could have turned that article into a more design heavy file. But I wrote about the main parts of a landing page, and how, understanding sales and marketing is the prerequisite to understanding the landing page. Also, in this post I got a private request to publish this article to a medium publication about UI design. Wow, it felt good to get that request. I thought maybe this is something I should write more about. This article also got more views than anything I wrote this week.
No way out for the technical knowledge worker/ freelancer — Coming into this article, I had just re read “ The E-myth Revisited” book. My thoughts and emotions were hot on this idea of why technicians won’t make it. Mind you, I have been a technician before. I have a decade long run in creative type jobs, and I have felt the pressure of not knowing how to keep doing more work and balancing that with everything else my business needs. This article opened me up to start exploring the thoughts I really had about freelancing and building my business, and where this might take me. I think it was very powerful. If not for my readers, then for me. Seeing these thoughts on the page reminded me that I need to be doing the right thing — business. Working on my business and not in my business.
Getting started on technical writing — In this article, I started exploring my ideas and thoughts on being a technical writer. The basis of this is that, I learn so much when I read and then write. It’s really as though during the writing is when the new learning happens for me. I was also conflicted with this article because, now I am thinking about working in my business and being an entrepreneur, maybe I should give up all hope of getting technically savvy and knowing my tools and skillset. Regardless, I am keen on exploring this idea of technical writing. I don’t think it takes away from the person that I am. It adds to it.
Learn quick and pivot — I had been listening to a bunch of things during the day, podcasts, YouTube videos, and it hit me the idea of companies being learning organisms, as said by Mark Zuckerberg. I remember thinking hmm, “this is what I need to embed into my business and my life!” A culture of rapid learning, and rapid implementation of the learnings. This post was also an exploration into one of my personal philosophies and manifestos, that I am now experimenting with putting it out there in the world. This post was also more beneficial to me than my readers maybe? Also, an important update on this article was that, I made the executive decision to start Krox University, also known as KroxU which will be the online learning and teaching of the knowledge in my business.
Knowledge work & The Modern Entrepreneur — I found myself exploring a lot of my thoughts about business, especially as influenced by how I have gotten into business before. Why is it easier to do a quick hustle than to systematize, build processes? I believe that this thought is especially important to anyone getting into business. I should mention again, that re reading “The E-myth Revisited” has greatly influenced my thought process in this article.
In general it was a great week, filled with lots of work. I found that when I write and publish first thing in the morning, I can free up my day to worry about other things and get other types of work done.
Medium has really helped me in publishing these thoughts. Normally, I would have just written about these things, and not done anything about those thoughts. There’s something about unpublished thoughts. They can only benefit you. But if the conversation is public, you might get the benefit of owning your thoughts, and getting what other people think.
