6 months… Time flies!
It’s almost the end of my journey as a Digital Marketing Intern. There has been impacts and changes in my life within this half year. I’m more than happy to share that I’ll keep staying with the company in 2021!
I’ve got inspired a lot both in marketing fields and daily life aspects, including basic marketing knowledge, tools, different strategies, learning methods, etc. I tried my best to categorize these inspirations into 3 major points. Working at a startup is like exploring a whole new world, these are the inspirations I got:
- Being humble — the breadth and depth of knowledge
- Running business is about helping, not killing
- No one waits for you — the reality and cruelty of the world
Being humble — the breadth and depth of knowledge
Since the first day onboarding, there had been tons of tools to learn, articles to read, and training videos for me to edit.
The workload did not decrease despite the fact that this is a remote working job. I took courses on HubSpot Content Marketing and Google Analytics Academy. It took me so much time but finally got a few credentials, which will be big bonus for my resume.
In spite of the length of these courses, it requires extra time to consume them and apply in real world situations. It’s not easy at all!
An activity called Donut Pairing was born because of the remote working culture. What this does is basically randomly pairing two colleagues in the company and you’ll have time to schedule a call.
You guys can play online games together, eat together, or just chatting. I didn’t use the service very frequently, but every time I chat with other people, I always feel motivated to work harder. I suppose it’s because everyone has huge passion for what they’re doing, plus we all have diverse background.
I truly believe it’s the exchange of ideas between my colleagues and me, and understanding of digital marketing after working for a few month that make me see skills and knowledge I’m still lacking.
Consequently, I’m pushing myself to read a little bit, take 30 mins of online courses, and read blogs at a daily basis. I know everything I learn now will result in a better future. This kind of intrinsic motivation is the biggest and most durable power for me to excel at different things.
Running business is about helping, not killing
Ranging from the relationships between corporate and our company, press release service and us, to interactions between team members, it’s merely possible to spot toxicity in these relationships.
I’m not sure if it’s just my stereotype. Before having a job, I’m afraid of working environments. People talk about the dark side of it, being burden by managers, being tricked by colleagues, never get to do the things you wish to do, never being able to find your own stage.
While the existence of a company is to solve a problem, meaning that every company actually shares the same version, and everyone who’s working should, too — trying to solve problems in this world.
It might be that the working culture here has been influenced by the startup culture at the Silicon Valley. My boss told me once that when he was studying for his master at Stanford, he found out that all his classmates had already learned everything to be covered in the courses.
They were there to make friends. That’s why the Bay Area is such a nice place to start a business — helping each other is the fundamental of relationships because everyone is here to build a successful business.
The best way to illustrate this point is from what I’ve experienced. There aren’t too many companies doing business about AI-powered corporate gifting. We have a habit of taking a look at what our competitors are doing, and sometimes we mimic them.
There are also times where other traditional gifting companies would try to mimic us, and even huge corporate trying to buy us. Many of these doings may be seen as “copying” or “monopolization”, while we’re actually more than happy to see all this happen. Cause this means that we’re on the right track, doing so well that we’ve become a pioneer in this industry, and others have to follow up so they don’t fall behind.
This not only reminds me that the business world is not as notorious as how people have depicted, but lets me reflect the way I build all kinds of relationships in daily life.
I’ve been a practitioner of both altruism and egoism. While a lot of times I tend to forget that I should have thought of other’s needs first and then mine. This may convey some sense of ingenuity without me being conscious about it, which result in loss of a few friendships. What I want to say is that this job has had impact on both my career and daily life.
No one waits for you — the reality and cruelty of the world
There are times when we don’t get as many orders as we expected, when members are too busy with lives that lead to lower productivity, when our employee morale is low.
When that happens, my boss always encourages us with this: “You might be replaced by others at anytime.”
This can’t be more true. I know a bunch of people worrying about if they should go to class tomorrow because they just don’t want to, about where to go shopping, about what to have for lunch, about whether or not to have a cup of boba tea…
It’s not that you can’t have these thoughts. What matters is how frequently do you think about these not-so-important stuff. When all you brain capacity is filled with these fleeting ideas, do you really have other space to think about endeavors and future plans?
If I don’t learn time management well, there’ll be people mastering this to replace me; if I don’t learn something about analytics, there are groups of people who are proud to call themselves analytics nerds. So why my company has to keep me here? What value can I provide?
Reminding myself and reflecting what I’m doing at the moment allow me to form a habit of absorbing all kinds of knowledge like a sponge at any given time of the day.
Since I’m aware of the explosion of knowledge, I realized that in order to advance myself in the field of marketing, there are so much for me to learn. This transformation in mind has allowed me to do changes to practice in life as well.
Having ideas in mind, what about actions?
If you ask your friends or colleagues around you, who don’t have a grand plan waiting for execution, wonderful goals waiting for practice? How many of them are actually doing it?
Only those who actually started would know that having ideas and actually practicing them are two totally different stories.
Only those who started would realize how many difficulties are there to be overcome, how much resources they are still lack of, and that how much time it takes to complete one single goal.
For those who want to reorganize their lives, do you know how unorganized your life is right now? Do you know how to get started? Do you know what are the tools out there to help you? I didn’t know these answers, either.
It’s only when I began to do stuff I realized it would take weeks or even months to organize my life instead of a single weekend, and it requires me to keep contributing so it stay the way I like.
Everyone has ideas, the difference is only between execution. It’s no shame to fail, but don’t regret not executing.