Author Archives: Kobe

An Innate Need to Create

As a kid, I used to stand atop the stairs and deliver what I deemed “The Kobe Show” to my family. While “The Kobe Show” may no longer exist, an innate need to create and express myself still exists. For example, in writing this blog post I am continuing to exhibit this trait. In this post, I muse on why this might be, my previous experiences with this trait, and regarding how I can leverage it in the future.

Why I Need To Create

Over time, I have realized that my life mission is to make the lives better of all those around me. In doing so, I try my best to always be ambitious and to always think big. Ultimately, I want to make the world a better place.

While this mission is ambitious, I look at many of the great founders, creatives, and artists in the world who have made the world better, and realize that at one point they all thought the same.

Steve Jobs always emphasized that you can only connect the dots looking backwards. Often citing the example of the calligraphy class he took and Apple’s original beautiful typography.

In creating new things and putting new ideas into the world through various media, I feel that I myself am striving towards my goal and seeking to build a narrative that perhaps will one day make sense.

Building things and enabling others with new ideas is exactly what enables the world to progress. Just look at your current environment. Ultimately, creation with good intent is the best act anyone can partake in to try and make the world better.

That is why I feel a need to create.

Returning to Being a Producer

Most of our days are either spent consuming or producing. Oftentimes, there is a tradeoff between the two.

I must admit, lately a lot of my energy has been spent consuming. To be truthful, I can not help but feel I have been a bit guilty of overconsumption.

However, rest is incredibly important and in the last year or so, I wore myself and my brain down with classes, work, and extracurricular commitments. Rest was something that I needed and now finally I feel I am well rested.

I know this, because I feel the need to create returning. I feel the need to produce. I feel the need to express my ideas and experiment with my various hypotheses about my environment.

Now is the time for me to return to experimenting with putting my ideas out in the world.

Attempting to Explore While Exploiting What I Believe to Know

Oftentimes, it is said that early in life we spend a lot of time early in our lives exploring the world and a lot of the time later in our lives exploiting all that we learned. This explore and exploit framework, is an idea I find incredibly fascinating. Yet, I cannot help but feel that the need to attempt to exploit what you believe you know is a vital process in exploration.

For instance, in school you might learn lots about what it takes to run a successful social media campaign, providing you with the false belief that you can do it. But only by trying to exploit that knowledge can you really explore and learn for yourself the falsities and truths to what you learned from school.

I genuinely do not believe that the two phenomena are mutually exclusive. Moving forward, I want to explore and learn by attempting to exploit what I believe I can.

Leveraging the Need

The act of creation, is in itself something beautiful.

By leveraging this need to create anything, whether it be a video, blog post, instagram post, sketch, or anything at all one can accomplish great things.

In addition to this, I want to pick up some habits such as:

Carrying around a pocket journal to record novel ideas
Making time to just think
Talking to others about their ideas for creations
Making friends with others always making new things

Habits are essential, and ultimately if it does not affect your behaviour information is useless. To anyone reading, I highly recommend picking up the habit of making things.

Reflecting on the Spring Semester and Preparing for a Great Summer

Coming into the Spring semester I was prepared to relax, I thought the semester would be simple and straightforward; however it ended up being quite difficult, and for that I am thankful as that difficulty forced me to grow.

Starting Strong

When the Spring semester began, I was exhausted. Over the course of the fall semester, I had taken four classes, worked twenty hours a week at my family’s business, worked another fifteen hours a week as a teaching assistant, while also spending another twenty or so hours a week training for a business case competition called JDC West, which I attended at the start of this semester.

The fall semester ended mid-December, giving me a little break to regather some energy before the next semester began at the start of January, however this energy was all spent continuously training for the case competition which I was to attend during the second week of January. Resultantly, I never ended up regaining any energy after a draining fall semester.

However, the case competition I was training for was at the start of the next semester and I figured that once I got past that, my schedule would free up as I would no longer be training for twenty hours a week to attend the competition.

So, the competition came and went, and my team won (which was one of the happiest moments of my life). That was it, we had climbed the mountain and now all I had to focus on was school and work.

A Semester of Many Group Projects and Assignments

Soon after school began it became my primary focus, the workload encompassing a majority of my time. This semester I took my first three 400 level courses (in addition to one 300 level course) and was challenged with a large amount of group projects, which included:

(Strategic Decision Making Class) a case study presentation and conduct an experiment demonstrating how concepts from psychology can be leveraged in business.
(Business Strategy Class) a case competition worth 25% of our grade in which a first place finish meant 100%, while a second meant 80%, and a third 60%.
(Consulting Class) three consulting projects with real clients.
(Global Business Environment Class) a case study presentation and an in-depth market analysis.

Each assignment was fascinating and fun, but also required a significant amount of work and coordination among the groups.

This semester I had to turn in 50 deliverables over the course of three months, and truthfully turning in a deliverable more often than every other day while also working on major group projects for every class was incredibly difficult and strenuous; yet I did it, and based on my grades I was able to achieve a high quality of work for all deliverables apart of this large workload.

Some Fantastic Things I Learned

Completing as many deliverables and a countless amount of additional readings was a challenge, but I overcame it. And for it, I learned a lot. Below I seek to record some of these learnings.

Academic Learnings

What It Means For a Business to be Strategic (BUS 478 – Business Strategy)

From my business strategy class, there are three main ideas which I wish to capture in this reflection, these learnings are noted below:

Business-Level Strategy – Business-level strategy is about how a company positions itself. To achieve above average results a business can choose to produce products at low-cost with reasonable differentiation (cost-leadership strategy), produce products at a reasonable cost with great differentiation (differentiation strategy), or in some rare cases try to do something between (integrated strategy). To develop an appropriate business-level strategy a company must understand its internal resources and capabilities, its external environment, and most importantly its customers.
Corporate-Level Strategy – Corporate-level strategy is about how a company manages its portfolio of businesses. With corporate-level strategies, companies should seek to develop a portfolio (through both internal entrepreneurship and M&A) which achieves synergies that enable the company and its businesses to thrive.
Entrepreneurial Strategy – Entrepreneurship is about solving real problems faced by real people. When a new venture begins, its founder is the company, for the venture to become successful the founder must move beyond being the business and advance to an executive role. For a young person, accomplishing this is difficult and for this reason, older entrepreneurs tend to be more successful.

Overall, strategy is about being intentional with actions to achieve desired objectives. I note these learnings in particular as I believe they will be foundational to my understanding of and ability to enact business strategy moving forward.

What It Means to be Strategic in Everyday Life (BUS 471 – Strategic Decision Making)

Most of the world has been built on intuition, intuition meaning grounded in processes that might not be seen as logical or rational. Logic and rational undoubtedly is valuable, yet so are biases and heuristics which act as decision making short cuts.

You may immediately think, how can biases and heuristics be valuable when they are not grounded in logic or rationality? Well, in a world where we are faced with hundreds if not thousands of decisions every day we need to be able to make decisions quickly as we only have so much time and mental energy.

Understanding biases and heuristics, is valuable not only because it allows us to debias ourselves, but also because it enables us to effectively leverage and manage them when we make decisions.

To be strategic in everyday life, we must be aware of how the brain works, have an understanding of where we want to go, and act in accordance with the constraints of our own ability and the external environment around us.

This class was particularly interesting to me, because prior to taking of it, I was of the notion that biases and heuristics were inherently bad, yet it seems that is not the case. In addition to this, I often see that many companies claim to be data-driven, however when learning about concepts such as confirmation bias, I have come to the realization that even when you have data to back up your reasoning, it does not inherently mean that the data says that is the right decision to make, meaning that many companies likely are not as data-driven as they claim to be.

Intuition is an incredibly valuable tool, I constantly strive to learn how to better use it and will continue to as I continue to gather more and more experiences.

I Am A Highly Capable Business Consultant (BUS 450 – Managing Emerging Opportunities)

Over the course of the semester, I got to partake in a consulting project for a robotics company, an agritech company, and a reforestation company, each project unique and interesting in its own distinct way.

Through the process I realized consulting is difficult. It involves a large amount of activities including scoping, maintaining client relationships, as well as a large amount of research. It really does require a generalist skill set and a flexible approach to problem solving.

Learning to manage these activities while working in a team was difficult, but it was also incredibly fun as I got to take on leadership roles for three projects which will have real impact for real clients, while learning about a wide variety of industries.

One particular skill I felt helped me succeed in this class was what I viewed as a strong ability to ask the right questions. Asking good questions can be difficult and it takes time to learn to ask them. Over the course of training for JDC West, I learned how to ask these questions and that skill transferred over incredibly well to this class.

Overall, with this class, I realized consulting could be a career path for me because I love talking to people, learning about new industries, and solving unique problems.

A Framework For Understanding International Markets (BUS 346 – Global Business Environment)

Through my strategy and global business environment classes, I learned how to assess international markets across their political, economic, cultural, and geographic dimensions.

Across the specific dimensions, I also learned a variety of frameworks, however as each region and situation is incredibly distinct and requires special analysis I choose to include minimal discussion of them here.

I recognize the ability to understand global markets will be incredibly important as the world only continues to become more interconnected. And I also recognize that although these learnings primarily were focused on differences across countries there can also be differences within countries and that for some contexts its better to group operations into regions as opposed to countries.

General Learnings

Be Conscious With Commitments

I am going to admit this, this semester I signed up for more than I can handle. I am a person who always seeks to deliver excellence and with the workload I was under this semester that excellence was hard to achieve (and I was not able to achieve quite as much as I would hav liked to). In addition to this, I either picked up or began to recognize a habit where I would describe intentions to group mates, then proceed to be unable to achieve those intentions. Resultantly, I am now more conscious of what I say I am going to do or be able to do to others, thinking about what I really can do as opposed to what I desire to do (which admittedly is everything).

Constantly Challenge Your Assumptions

Earlier I mentioned that data-driven companies might not be as data-driven as they claim to be. Prior to this semester, I assumed that they were (as I am sure they do to). Listening to the founders podcast, a constant trope that has come up is that time and time again throughout history, it is the individuals who challenge both their own and societies assumptions that are able to create change. Just remember, it was once (and still is by some) thought that the world is flat.

Be Flexible, Adaptive, and Resourceful

Every problem and every situation is distinct. Being able to organize within these distinct situations and act uniquely to meet the needs of the task at hand is a critical skill for anyone. Historically, I have been someone who is quite rigid, someone who looks solely at precedent when embarking on a new project thinking I should simply do the same things I did before because it was successful once (which is a flawed way of thinking, because one can always improve), but now I am someone who is always looking to adapt to the situation at hand. Working on three consulting projects in industries I had no prior knowledge of, engaging in a research paper which involved creating an experiment, and participating in a traditional academic case competition were all challenges which involved a large amount of unfamiliarity, yet I was able to thrive regardless. The way I was able to do so was by being flexible to the situation, adapting my styles accordingly, and being resourceful in looking to solve the problems at hand.

Always Be Genuine, Do Your Best, and Be Understanding

People appreciate it when you are genuine, they also appreciate it when you do your best, and most importantly they appreciate it when you understand them. Being genuine shows to others that you are just a person, doing your best shows you care, and understanding others shows you care for them. In all future ventures and projects, I will follow this philosophy, as I believe it will allow both me and my teams to succeed.

What Is Next

The Spring 2023 semester has now come to a close. So now you might wonder (though probably not) what is next for Kobe? Well, regardless of whether you want to know or not I have outlined what is next below.

Taking a Rest

First on the agenda is regaining energy. The primary way through which I seek to do this is with rest. I am trying to get lots of sleep, spend time with loved ones, and watch games of my favourite baseball team, the Seattle Mariners.

Establish Routine

While also resting I do want to establish a general morning and night routine to bookend my days with non mentally draining certainty. As I mentioned when discussing my learnings from my strategic decision making class, you only have so much energy every day. Routine is one way to ensure that energy is used efficiently.

Developing Kobe Golfs

I have always loved golf and creating content. Creating golf content is a perfect marriage between the two, and it is something I have experimented with and had a lot of fun with in the past. Recently I think I realized a unique way I can contribute to the golf community, by leveraging my distinct knowledge about strategy and mindset to deliver content that can help people have more fun rounds of golf.

Learning to Build Mobile Applications

Finally, I have always desired to build great things. This summer, I want to learn how to create mobile applications. I do have a little bit of background in programming (though very minimal) and have always been incredibly interested in design, and this semester I want to harness these two interests to learn to build some really fun and great items.

I have also always desired to build a company, and as I mentioned before when you start a business you typically are the business itself, so with this endeavour I hope to learn some fundamental skills that will enable me to do it.

Conclusion

Overall, although it was difficult I am incredibly grateful for my most recent semester of school, after all the obstacle is the way (a great book by Ryan Holiday) and I am really looking forward to having a great Summer.

Action – Getting Things Done, By Doing Things

Confessions From A To-Do List Addict

I admit it. I love creating to-do lists.

When I am creating to-do lists, I envision what I will accomplish and often think that simply by having that baseline understanding of what needs to be done, I will be able to accomplish what I set out to.

It is magnificent and gratifying.

However, oftentimes my to-do lists end up being a sham.

What I claim I will accomplish in a day, often ends up being too much to handle.

And sometimes, my extensive to-do lists are not actually so extensive. For, instead of saying what actually needs to be done they provide a vague suggestion of what should be done.

Over the course of the current Fall semester, I have come to the realization it is not the creation of to-do lists which accomplishes things. It is the actions that enable their completion.

This may sound obvious, but admittedly it is something that I need to remind myself of constantly.

Action is what accomplishes tasks, not planning.

The Job-To-Be-Done

This semester, I have learned much about a framework titled jobs to be done.

Jobs to be done, is about framing problems in a way that explains the benefits a user wants to receive, as opposed to observing issues with the current way in which the user receives similar benefits.

For instance, John wants to complete his assignment, to do so John needs to overcome a long strenuous research process, followed by extensive analysis where he will be required to synthesize the facts that he discovered during research. In this situation, the job-to-be-done is the completion of the assignment. That is where the problem lies.

Accomplishing the job, moves the user’s life from one state, to a preferred one. The way in which they can accomplish this job varies (Klement, 2016). The role of an entrepreneur is to help users complete their jobs to be done in easier ways.

When I create a to-do list, the to-do list itself is only a part of the process that is enabling me to be productive. The creation of the to-do list is not the job-to-be-done, it is an ancillary effort that enables the job-to-be-done which is the completion of the task requiring the to-do list.

In creating this post, I am hoping to explain to you, the audience, that action is the key to productivity and that to-do lists alone accomplish nothing. A secondary purpose for creating this message is to explore research done by others and learn new things for myself about to-do lists and action.

The job-to-be-done for me in creating this post is to communicate this message and learn things for myself.

Accomplishing this requires an extensive amount of additional work and while that work most certainly needs to be done, communicating this message and learning more about the subject is the job-to-be-done.

Action Accomplishes, Not Planning

Once again, planning is useful. Creating to-do lists, detailed schedules, and outlines are incredibly useful tools. They are also essential parts to the productivity system that I have established for myself, but the truth of the matter is. Creating to-do lists does not accomplish anything. Doing the work itself does.

To challenge myself on this, I am writing this post with no prior planning. I am simply researching as I go, with a vague outline of how I want to construct this message in my head.

In fact, when I put my fingers to the keyboard and type out the words that you are reading on your screen right now, I feel a certain sense of presence that I fail to engage in, when I am planning.

Planning is great, but it’s also easy to get lost and distracted when planning. While I am most certainly not an expert, my theory behind this is that accomplishing a task requires a lot more attention than simply planning out what you need to do for that task. That extra attention you are required to pay fosters greater commitment, and as a result of this commitment you become more engaged in the work that you are doing.

Doing things requires commitment and once you have committed it is often harder to turn back (see the sunk cost fallacy), when you can no longer turn around, you will accomplish what you set out to do.

Action accomplishes, not planning.

Planning Enables

I must admit, when creating this post there was an act of planning. The truth of the matter is, everything impactful you do requires some degree of planning.

When planning it is critical to recognize what it is that you want to accomplish, then you can realize steps that will enable you to get there.

For instance, when creating this post, I realized that I wanted to make a post about the importance of doing things as opposed to the importance of planning things, and the step that I chose to get me to the creation of this post was simply putting my hands to the keyboard and typing away to communicate the message I want to share.

Thankfully, Not Everything Goes According To Plan

Things do not always go according to plan. Your current self who is creating the plan may see that as a bad thing, however oftentimes it actually is a good thing.

If things went to plan everytime, you would know exactly what is going to happen.

That would be very boring.

Thankfully, uncertainty looms in everything we do.

Oftentimes we go out with a plan, sometimes everything happens in accordance with it, but I would argue more often that not things do not.

However, it is critical you realize the reason for this is not because planning is bad, rather it occurs because we learn new things when doing things that we were not aware of when we were planning.

For instance, this entire subsection under the heading “thankfully, not everything goes according to plan,” was not planned. However, I do believe that it is a critical part of the story that I am writing about and you are reading right now.

Act, Adjust, Plan

In the book, The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, Eric describes a framework for startups he calls build, measure, learn. Building is about creating something, measuring is about examining what that things does, and learning is about improving that thing that you have built. This process is notably iterative, meaning that you are meant to do it over and over again.

Here, I would like to propose an analogous iterative framework for the completion of tasks in everyday life.

Act, recognize, plan.

Acting is about getting started on what it is that you want to do.

Recognizing is about realizing changes that need to be made to what it is that you are doing.

Planning is about incorporating what it is that you have recognized into an actionable plan to accomplish the job-to-be-done.

Acting is how you get started, recognizing is how you learn about what you are doing, and planning is realizing the best way to do what you need to do.

Going through this process repeatedly is almost automatic when you start by acting. However, cognitizing and recognizing it can also be incredibly helpful for individuals who struggle to get started.

For me, this means that sometimes the to-do lists need to be developed after I start a task, rather than before.

If you need to begin, just act.

References

Klement, A. (2016). What is jobs to be done? Jobs to be done. https://jtbd.info/2-what-is-jobs-to-be-done-jtbd-796b82081cca

Regarding the Importance of Rest and Community

The End

This site was created as part of a class at Simon Fraser University titled, Publication of Self in Everyday Life.

As part of the class, we were required to develop one post a week about the process of creating our website. The teaching team supported the course in this endeavour, by providing materials to reference and prompts to adhere to. In the course, we referred to these posts as “process posts”; each and every post on this website that has the word regarding in the title is a “process post.”

This post is the final “process post” that will be created for the class.

Unfortunately, I was sick for last week’s lecture and unable to make it, however, I do know that the lecture was about community and am able to access the readings and slides from the course. Subsequently, this final process post is going to be about the importance of rest and community.

Rest

Last week, I fell sick.

When I was sick, I came across a Linkedin post by TED Conferences which made the point “by doing nothing, you are actually being your most productive and creative self. It might feel weird and uncomfortable at first, but boredom truly can lead to brilliance.”

What the post explained, is the value that you receive when you take time to sit with your ideas. It explained that when you take time to do nothing, you are allowing your brain to process all the information from your life so that you can spend time daydreaming and realizing your aspirations in life.

Truthfully, over the course of the semester, I cannot help but feel that I have spent too little time doing that.

However, it makes sense. Just see my post 30 Minutes: Working a 99 Hour Work Week. Since making that post, I did experience a period of severe burnout but thankfully recovered quickly after having a few days of rest.

When I was sick last week, I had the opportunity to spend some time reflecting on my life, and as a result, I honestly feel much more in tune and aligned with myself than before I was sick.

Ironically, having no rest is what truly has allowed me to realize the value that rest does provide.

Community

On the internet, there are communities, that would not exist if it were not for the internet.

One such community that I am incredibly thankful to have participated in is Lookout Landing, a Mariners fan site, with an incredibly loyal audience and fun community.

I found the site sometime in 2016 and have ever since been a follower of the site. In fact, almost every morning one of the first things that I do is take a look at posts which the site calls Moose Tracks. Moose Tracks are daily posts that share links to news around baseball. However, the content of the posts themselves are only a small part of the Lookout Landing experience, the comments below each post is where you actually get the opportunity to engage and talk to individuals in the lookout landing community. Typically Moose Track posts have around 300 comments per day, and if something big in baseball happens you can guarantee that these posts will have 500+ comments.

Although based off my initial explanation it may not seem this way, Moose Tracks are actually only a small part of what makes Lookout Landing what it is. The staff of the site also posts game recaps, game threads (for discussion), game charts, analysis, creative writing pieces and more. All content based around the Seattle Mariners.

Although I myself rarely comment and am a bit more of a lurker, I still feel very much a part of this community and it has helped fuel my Mariners fandom.

Lookout Landing most certainly is my favourite online community, they have a fantastic audience, great policy, and even better writers.

If you are at all interested in the Seattle Mariners, I highly recommend checking out some of the posts on the site.

The Secret to Maintaining Energy and Creating Great Products

We are a product of the people around us.

This is a fact. Simply start hanging around a different group of people and evaluate your speech pattern before and after. It will change.

People around you also influence how you think of and view yourself as a person. A lot of the time, the people around you will either provide you with energy or drain you of it.

Community is key to shaping who we are and providing us with energy to move forward.

We are a product of the decisions we make.

The decisions we make, forge the path that we take and subsequently shape the history and future of our lives. When we do one thing, it will close some doors and open others.

Oftentimes, the decisions we make are impulsive. When we are well-rested and aligned with who we truly are as people, these impulsive decisions can be effective. However, when we are tired and in dire need of rest, we often make poor and sloppy decisions.

Rest is critical to the decisions we make.

It should also be noted that we all have the opportunity to choose who it is that we spend time with. Rest enables us to choose the right communities for us to be a part of.

To maintain energy, be our best selves, and subsequently make great things, it is critical we are well rested and engaged with the right communities.

References

Zomorodi, M. (2022). By doing nothing, you are actually being your most productive. Ted Conferences. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ted-conferences_by-doing-nothing-you-are-actually-being-activity-7003032527359672321-dEjR/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Mini-Assignment #6: Transform Your Live Photos into GIFs

Preface

As part of the class that I am taking which has resulted in the creation of the website you are viewing, I must complete some mini-assignments.

This post is one of those mini-assignments.

The instructions for this mini-assignment were “make a GIF.”

Recalling a GIF From Grade Nine

I am in my fourth year of university now, which means that grade nine was over six years ago, but I distinctly recall a GIF that I made in my grade nine information technology class.

The GIF was a cartoon character running and unfortunately, I no longer have access to it.

I mention this because it is the only other time I have been required to create a GIF as part of a class.

The GIF I Made Today

GIF is really not a term that comes to mind often. So when I saw the term the first item that came to my mind was Apple’s live photos.

I recognized that these two types of media were very similar and wondered if there was a way to turn a live photo into a GIF, so I googled it and learned that there indeed is! (Here is a link to the resource I used to turn one of my live photos into a GIF).

So, here is the GIF that I ended up making:

My dad and I at T-Mobile Park in Seattle.

This GIF was made from a photo of my dad and me at the Seattle Mariner’s first playoff game in Seattle since 2001.

I really cherish this photo, as one of the ushers at the game saw us and asked us if we wanted him to take a photo for us. It was an excellent example of generosity and the photo itself ended up being really nice.

I will always remember this game and if you want to learn more about my experience at the game, here is a link to a video where I reflect on it.

An Additional Note

It should also be noted that turning your live photos into GIFs certainly does sacrifice quality. However, there is a certain aesthetic to the graininess that makes the GIF appealing to look at.

Regarding Various Channels and Media

In this post, I explore how to choose a medium for your message and the importance of using channels to distribute your message to your audience.

Choosing Your Medium

“Types of media”

Upon googling “types of media”, you will discover that definitions and descriptions of types of media that exist in the world vary significantly from source to source.

Just look at this section that was the second item to show up on my google search:

Google search results depicting text that says

People also ask
What are 10 types of media?
What are 4 types of media?
What are the 7 forms of media?
What are the 3 media types?

After reviewing the various types described in these search results, I realized that boxing and organizing types is unnecessary.

Media, after all, is just the plural form of the noun medium which Oxford Languages defines as “an agency or means of doing something.”

After all,

The medium is the message
Marshall McCluhan

In other words, you must craft your own form of media to communicate your message.

Crafting Your Own Form of Media

To craft your own form of media, I recommend you examine three elements, the message itself, yourself as the messenger, and your audience as the recipient.

To review these elements ask questions such as:

In what ways could I share this message?
How does this message want to be shared?
What is the broader purpose of this message I am sending?
How have others previously communicated a message like this? Could they have done it better?
Are there conventions for messages such as this? Are they ideal?
How can I make this message uniquely my own?
If I could do anything to share this message how would I share it?
What am I capable of doing to communicate this message?
How can I compromise between my own ability and my ideal for sending this message?
How does the audience want to receive this message?
What do I want the audience to do upon receiving this message?
How is the audience capable of receiving this message?

After asking questions like these (note that you are most certainly not limited to these or required to answer all of these), choose your medium. Then take action to craft it.

Selecting Channels

What a Channel Is

When I hear the term “channels”, I immediately think of television channels. Although those are most certainly types of channels, the type of channels we are looking at here is broader.

Here, we are going to define channels as paths that we can use to enable our content to reach our audience.

Channels themselves are too media, however, they are different than the form of media described above in that we are going to be using them to direct our audience to our message, whereas previously we were using our medium to direct our message to our audience.

The purpose of channels is reaching our audience so they can connect with our message.

Choosing Channels

To choose channels, we need to answer the question “what is the best way to get our audience to reach our content?”

Sometimes, the best channel is by talking directly to people and asking them to interact with our content. Other times it is best to simply let the content exist and be found by others.

Channels again come down to the sender, the receiver, and the message. Examining these three elements will allow you to choose the best channel for your content.

Media and Channels

To choose your form of media and your form of channel, you need to examine the sender, the audience, and the message.

In examining these items, you will discover a distinct medium you need to create to embody your message and channels you can use to spread your message to your audience.

Communication is an art form. Practicing and iterating on messaging is the best way to improve.

References

McCluhan, M. (1964). The medium is the message. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf

Regarding Generosity & Content Marketing

Last week, a class I am in, Publication of Self In Everyday Life, had a guest speaker named Steve Pratt.

Steve has an extensive history in the publishing field, He most notably founded a company called Pacific Content which was recently acquired by the Canadian telecommunications giant Rogers. He is now moving on to develop his own consultancy for creatives titled The Creativity Business.

During class, Steve did a presentation where he provided an overview of what it takes to build a creative-based business.

After viewing Steve’s presentation two particular points stuck with me:

Generosity is critical to making the world a better place
Content marketing is perhaps the best way to build your own brand

Why Generosity is Critical

In my own life, I have traditionally defined virtuous acts as acts which are good for the sake of good.

In viewing Steve’s presentation I realized demonstrating generosity by taking generous action, is perhaps the purest form of a virtuous act.

Steve described generosity as giving, without expecting anything back in return. A definition that aligns with my own definition of virtue.

If we all gave without expecting anything in return the world would most certainly be a better place. If we all thought a little bit more about being generous, perhaps more hardship could be overcome and more social problems around the glove could be solved.

The trait of generosity is now one I know I will embody moving forward.

The Power of Content Marketing

When Steve was presenting, he talked about many of the amazing brands such as Apple, Slack, Spotify, and more that he got to work with as a part of Pacific Content. The whole time I was incredibly curious as to how Pacific Content was able to acquire these pretentious clients, so as soon as I got the chance to ask I did.

Steve’s reply was simple and something along the lines of “we made content.”

Steve explained that simply having content on the internet that showed Pacific Content knew what they were doing when it came to podcasts led to these companies approaching them.

The irony is that the content explained how to do what their business did. They explained how to do they job they could provide, yet people paid them to do the job anyways.

To me, this seemed backward. I had believed if you have a secret formula, you typically do not want to let others know what that secret formula is.

What I now know, is that no, you are not only telling others how to do your job, you are showing that you know what you are talking about.

The content marketing created by Pacific Content was incredibly powerful, because clients realized they could help them create great content because of the evidence that Pacific Content provided with their content marketing.

Conclusion

Generosity and content marketing. Two simple concepts are incredibly powerful.

Two concepts, that will make my life and the world a little better.

Peer Review #3: Examining Abysmal Guides

Context

This website was created for a class at Simon Fraser University titled Publication of Self in Everyday Life. In this class, we are developing our own digital identities and assisting our classmates in doing the same. This is the third and final of these reviews.

In this review, I will provide my evaluation of the site AbysmalGuides.com in regard to its intended target audience.

The Target Audience and Content Strategy of Abysmal Guides

The author of Absymal Guides provides a description of their target audience and content strategy in their post titled My Ideal Audience.

In this post, they describe their ideal audience and the content they are creating targeted at this audience. Their ideal audience is beginners or new players of the game Genshin Impact. They then go on to explain that they will be creating posts that help introduce players to the game, as well as some posts describing some deeper nuances which will require the basic information knowledge they provide in their other posts.

Abysmal Guides has developed a clear and concise target audience and an appropriate content strategy to approach this audience.

While this target audience is concise, I do believe that it would be worthwhile for the author to further empathize with their target audience. With this information, they could further explore the demographics, psychographics, and behaviours they believe this group has to better create content suited to this audience. It is worth noting, that this is an analysis they may have done but not published on their site.

Examining the Content of Abysmal Guides

Abysmal Guides’ Landing Page

When an individual arrives at Abysmal Guides, they are greeted by text explaining the site’s purpose and a background image from the game Genshin Impact.

The text that immediately grabs the audience’s attention is a large “Welcome to Abysmal Guides”, after viewing this text the audience likely then goes on to view a caption saying “Just another blog about Genshin Impact guides”. I love the large welcome as it does make me feel welcome, but am a bit thrown off by the caption as it does not assert that this site is the place I need to be. I believe that using stronger language and saying something like “The Genshin Impact Blog for Beginners”, would confirm for the audience that they are on the correct website would improve the site.

The landing page then goes on to explain the two purposes of the site, the fact that it exists as a guide for Genshin Impact beginners and that it was created for a class. This context is something I am sure the audience appreciates as it depicts transparency and lends credibility to the site’s information.

Following this, the audience can then see a few recent posts on the site with clear categories above titles ensuring the audience viewing the site can get to the posts they need to see.

Posts

In examining the content of AbysmalGuides.com, I began by viewing the post Things to Know Before Starting Genshin Impact. This post is well-structured and easy to read, very appropriate for this site’s target audience. Reading it gave me a good overview of the game and has enabled me to an understanding that I did not previously have.

Next, I wanted to view a character page as the author described these types of posts as ones that could be viewed and understood only after gaining a basic understanding of the game, so I viewed the post Venti Character Build. This post is again well structured, providing an overview of the character then diving in to specific attributes of the character.

Conclusion Regarding Content

Abysmal Guides is well written. The content fits the audience very well, and the author has accomplished what they set out to do in their initial post. I am greatly appreciative of this and enjoyed viewing the site.

Affordances on Abysmal Guides

Affordances are defined as action possibilities provided to the actor by the environment. They are critical to making the uses of an item immediately obvious (Kaptelinin, n.d.). In evaluating Abysmal Guides’ design I examined the site through the lens of affordances.

Affordances That Make Sense

The menu bar on the top, provides an immediate easy way for users who know what they are looking for on the site to find what they are looking for.
The sidebar on the side of the screen has many good elements which make navigation of the site much easier.
The headers found on public posts make Abysmal Guides, guides easy to navigate. This is greatly appreciated and useful for the users as it minimizes the amount of time they need to spend on the page to find what they are looking for.

Affordances That Could Be Improved

Author title – Currently, all the posts are authored by “Admin”, changing the name of this poster might be worth exploring, though the title Admin does lend the posts some credibility.
Category colours – The categories above the post titles are coloured which makes the site much more visually intriguing, but these colours do not mean anything as they are randomly assigned which makes them confusing. If different colours went with different types of categories, it would be useful and intuitive.

Affordances That Could Be Added

An easy way to access the post Things to Know Before Starting Genshin Impact, immediately after arriving on the site would be a nice touch and fitting for the site’s target audience.
Headers could be added to the posts created for the course. They are currently on the posts for Genshin Impact which makes them easily navigable and it would be nice if the author carried these ideas over to their other posts.

Conclusion – Abysmal Guides Successfully Targets a Niche

Abysmal Guides does a fantastic job targeting their content at a niche. The site is functional and easy to use, providing users with a positive experience.

In the article Embracing the Power of Niches, Steve Pratt (2020) explains that targeting a niche can allow a content creator to reach audiences that others have not yet realized, and I believe that this site has done a fantastic job implementing this principle. This is evident in the fact that several of the posts on the site have comments from users thanking the author for the information they provide (for example, on the post Things to Know Before Starting Genshin Impact).

I greatly look forward to seeing what Abysmal Guide develops into in the future and thoroughly enjoyed evaluating the site.

References

Kaptelinin, V. (n.d.). Affordances. The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, Chapter 44. Interaction Design Foundation. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/affordances

Pratt, S. (2022). Embracing the power of niches. The Creativity Business. https://creativitybusiness.substack.com/p/embracing-the-power-of-niches

Mini-Assignment #5: My Online Self

Preface

As part of the class that I am taking which has resulted in the creation of the website you are viewing, I must complete some mini-assignments.

This post is one of those mini-assignments.

For this assignment, we were asked to create an infographic summarizing our online selves.

What I created is below!

The Infographic

Regarding Monetization: What Can and Should Be Monetized?

Did you know you can monetize a wedding?

Many weddings involve large gatherings of people. Those people are an audience, who are all likely to share some similar interests.

Marketers want to capture large audiences with similar interests and they do so by paying for advertisements.

To monetize your wedding, you can sell promotional space to advertisers.

Weddings are expensive so recouping costs by any means possible just makes sense.

Monetize your life

Today, there are opportunities to monetize everywhere.

You can do things such as:

Leverage your network of friends and sell them products you believe would improve their lives.
Make above-average content about your everyday life and get sponsored.
Write a blog like this one and run advertisements.

Now, just because you can monetize everything, should you?

Deciding what to monetize

While it is simple enough to live life in a manner to maximize profits (this is what corporations do), it is not typically the way that most people desire to live their lives.

However, although maximizing profits may not be directly what we want, we can take lessons from corporations and implement them in our own lives.

When faced with the choice of monetization, I think the following:

What are the costs of monetizing this (social, financial, environmental, etc)?
What are the benefits of monetizing this (social, financial, environmental, etc)?
Do the benefits outweigh the costs?
If yes, is this something I am comfortable monetizing and will not regret in five years?
If yes, go ahead and monetize.

Choosing whether to monetize or not, really comes down to a cost-benefit analysis and a review of one’s own feelings in regard to the item you are thinking about monetizing.

Conclusion

Always look for creative ways to monetize your life. Your and your friend’s attention and time are valuable, so allow others to pay for it. Have a system to decide what is worth paying for and what is not.