Now
December 2024
The last few months have been hectic. I spent a three weeks in New York, and made an extended stopover in Doha on the way home.
Qatar is a strange country, it felt like a ghost town, designed and built to be a liveable city, except there were no people. I guess this is a story I’ll have to share another day.
When I finally returned to Melbourne, My partner and I played ping pong with colds and viruses right up until the end of the month. That hasn’t made for a very fun or productive return to the everyday routine.
Things are winding down for the year in Australia. Businesses apparently don’t need to be productive for the next two months. I say that somewhat passive aggressively, but I am looking forward to having two weeks off over Christmas and New Years.
Back to the normal update, here’s what I’m doing and thinking about for the next month:
Completing the ECBA Certification
At this point, I’m a certification addict having completed quite a number of these over the last 3 - 4 years.
Recently, I completed DataCamp’s Data Analyst Associate Exam. I considered continuing on to the second part of the Data Analyst certificate which would provide further evidence of my Python and SQL abilities. However, I’ve put that on the back burner for now while I consider whether this is something I want to do longer term.
I don’t know how the ECBA certificate idea came about, but I believe that it is something everyone should do. It is a useful skill that applies to all aspects of a business, large and small.
Over the last three months I have read the BABOK from cover to cover. It’s an exciting read and I guarantee if you dedicate the time to reading it, you’ll find a bit of a pep in your step after every reading session. (No sarcasm here…)
I’ve also been watching an exam prep course on Udemy and I think I’m about ready to attempt it. This likely won’t happen till January.
Story
I see a lot of people on Linkedin posting about how using stories is a better way to communicate with customers and coworkers. Yet it seems clear to me that none of these people have learned anything more than that 90 second video we’ve all seen from the south park creators.
I regularly come back to story. I can never just watch TV or a movie without also trying to uncover the secrets of how they keep an audience engaged. Story is one of the things that occupies a permanent space in my mind. You might even call me obsessed.
Which leads me to YouTube. YouTube is the second most visited website globally. Additionally, it has double the visit duration of Facebook, Instagram, X, Reddit, LinkedIn, even Microsoft Office. Your colleagues are spending more time on YouTube than they are checking their email.
This seems like a perfect opportunity to educate and entertain your potential customers. Why aren’t organisations taking advantage of YouTube in the same way they have tried to with every other social platform? Why aren’t more organisations using this platform to tell their stories?
More and more organisations have jumped on the podcast bandwagon. In the industry that I work, I know of five organisations who have started a podcast. It’s easy to start a podcast. It’s as easy as jumping on a Zoom call. You don’t need a lot of equipment. On the other hand, because it is easy to publish a podcast, it’s hard to get people to listen to yours. What is your USP, how do you get people to listen to your podcast? Tell great stories.
Final thought on story in business – 37 Signals became well known because of the books they wrote. They wrote about their work philosophy, they wrote about how they got things done. This is part of their story, they don’t hide behind their software, they talk openly about how they built their company, and how they get things done.
Honeymoon Planning
I’m getting married next year, and as part of the wedding, we’ll be off on a 6-week trip to remind us of how we met and fell in love.
I do not envy anyone who decides to plan a wedding, we are eloping with our parents, and that alone requires more than enough coordination stress.
Anyway, part of this journey / event is we are creating a website to ask people to be involved in different ways. Those ways are yet to be revealed but I think it will be fun for our friends and family despite not getting to attend a free party. Me being me, I couldn’t use SquareSpace, Wix, or any of those other site builder tools. No, I had to do this all manually. Writing all the HTML, CSS, and Javascript without the luxury of any frameworks, templates, or tools. Why I do this to myself? I don’t know, but it is coming together nicely.
Wrap Up
That’s all for this entry. I’ll be back in January with fresh new years resolutions!