The Weekly Digest Jan 29
Welcome to the Weekly Digest, a bunch of thoughts, tidbits and insights from John Ochuro.
First of all, welcome to issue 3. In fact I am very excited to launch and sustain this new habit of sharing my insights and thoughts from the week. Here is what happened in the week.
Young Professionals Group & MeetUp
I had purposed to be more pro active in building communities this year. I started by building one around my local church called “Young Professionals.” And let me tell you something, I am so excited about the possibilities that could come out of this.
The Problem.
Let me first establish that my involvement in anything lately is very “selfish” and autobiographical. That means, I could see how solving this problem would be beneficial for me.
My younger brother just got done with his college diploma, as well as other younger people in my community. We got talking last week, and it was interesting to note that these guys did not have CVs neither did they have a LinkedIn account. I was beyond shocked to learn this, so I decided I would create a forum where we would all seek career growth through this.
I would offer my mentorship, and general good advice around linkedin, the thought of career development and getting better jobs, and they in return would give me their time, and an opportunity to grow my skills in teaching.
I prepared a short presentation, created a LinkedIn group and called a few people that came to mind, for this event where we would begin this journey. It was a fantastic opportunity for me to experiment on a lot of teaching skills I have been learning, like “the coaching habit.”. This is where you learn your material before hand, and present it as a debate or a dialogue where your students or participants, scaffold toward the right answer. That way, they can learn more because they engaged more.
It ended up being a fruitful engagement and the people told me they benefited a lot, would love to know more, and would love to see how this conversation expands their worldview moving onwards.
I felt satisfied with my ten attendees. Looking forward to do more. To build more communities and to keep these things alive.
The Bungoma Bible School Website Redesign.
The next three days I jumped into redoing the Bungoma bible school website — bungomabibleschool.com. I wrote about some of my thoughts during the build. I am indeed very interested in the knowledge that I can milk from any new endeavor.
This is not how I actively used to think before. I have a lot of new experiences and thoughts on learning and teaching that makes me show up like this.
This was a fun undertaking for me. I learned a lot, and opened myself up to the world of UI/UX which is something I have desperately wanted to know more about. Hence why I have been learning web technologies. I would love to know how to build web technologies from scratch, efficiently.
Why I can’t be a freelancer!
I started working on a new article for medium about this idea of freelancing, after I found my old Upwork profile that had been rejected back in 2017, is still active, and still rejected. I wondered why that account never took off. Why have I never taken actively the idea of freelancing?
I would like to give this idea of freelancing another go, but it does seem as though it’s a tough grind and people who actively freelance and make any money from it have their whole lives dedicated to this thing.
Generally though, I had an amazing week. I still am thinking of starting a technical blog, or finding a way to be a technical writer. I think I can derive a lot of value in sharing the things that I learn.
I believe that the only way to be a great learner is to also be a great teacher, and I am motivated to explore that path.
