I learned how to make a good LinkedIn profile, creating a resume, cover letters, delved deeper into cryptocurrency, and completed assignments.
There are 3 types of resumes; chronological, functional, and combination. Chronological lists all your experience in the order in which they happened. Functional is organized according to skill. Combination is both chronological & functional. Once you've decided which one you want to make, the first step is creating a header. This should include your name, phone number and email address. The next step is write a summary. This should be one to two sentences, and detail your work experience & skills that are relevant. The last step is to of course, list your experience & skill. You should also include your education, meaning, the schools you've went to, your GPA, and the degrees you've earned. Listing awards you've earned is also important. The word "I" shouldn't be used. It's very unprofessional, and makes you look self centered. It may seem difficult for many people since they've never been challenged in this way before, but even in my own experienced I've found the adjustment to refraining from the use of "I" to be pretty simple. It takes some getting used to, but I definitely think it also strengthens vocabulary. When submitting a resume virtually, it should be saved as a PDF first. NOT a text document like many people assume.
Cryptocurrency is a digital currency designed to work as a medium of exchange. It uses cryptography to secure and verify transactions. Which means, there is NOTHING about it's value tied to physical objects. Such as how we use "cash" (paper) or coins. It's all virtual. They're also not tied to any banks or government, making them decentralized. Many cryptocurrencies are built on blockchain technology. It's so volatile due to how new the whole industry is. Most people weren't even aware of cryptocurrencies until stories about BitCoin wealth became widespread in around 2017. You can buy cryptocurrencies through methods such as PayPal and crypto ATMS, which I found very interesting. The idea of a crypto ATM that is. Both corporation & income tax are still applied to cryptocurrencies. I was especially glad to learn more about crypto today because it's something that seems very complex to me, and it was great to have such a well made breakdown of what it is and how it functions.
I learned about improving my health & well being, creating happiness, stress management, role models, and finding a mentor. I also spent time on quizzes & assignments.
I learned that a large part of creating happiness is creating positive habits. These can be divided into daily, weekly, monthly & yearly habits. Examples of good daily habits include; exercising, getting enough sleep, practicing gratitude, giving compliments, and journaling. Examples of good weekly habits include; decluttering (living & working spaces), spending time with friends, indulging in nature, and meditating. Examples of good monthly habits include taking time to reflect on your life and mental/emotional well being. Examples of good yearly habits include taking care of your body, taking vacations & letting go of grudges. On the surface, these may not seem important, especially on their own, but maintaining all these habits at the same time will have a combined effect. If each habit only increased your happiness by 1%, then you'd still be at least 10% happier than you were before you formed those habits. This really highlighted to me the importance of habits. They're hard to form or take seriously at first because it's hard to see the value, but to see the bigger picture makes it a whole lot easier.
Improving your health is also important, which means a clean diet & adequate exercise. Eating junk food all day will make you feel tired & sluggish all the time. Eating non processed foods can greatly boost mood, energy & overall health. I've even experienced this myself. Eating junk food will also take a toll on your overall health, such as heart problems, cholesterol issues, blood pressure issues, diabetes. Exercise is also very important, as it strengthens your muscles and helps you keep your body in shape. The body is a machine, and it's good to make sure a machine sees some use instead of collecting dust all day. Keeping yourself active is also a good way to simply ensure that your body & the way it functions stays healthy. If something never really gets any use, it could start to develop issues you wouldn't have had otherwise.
I also learned how to find the right mentor. It requires knowing your goals, asking yourself who you look up to, doing the research, and being aware of your existing network. So firstly, before seeking a mentor you need to know what exactly it is you're seeking one out for, that's knowing your goals. What skills do you hope to learn? Where do you hope to be in three months? Will you have to switch careers? These are the type of questions you should be asking before reaching out to a mentor. Cause they themselves have to know exactly it is they're mentoring you in. It's not enough to say "I want to be a better stock broker." You have to say "I want to know how to sell a hesitant client so that I can have a rate of at least 3,000 sales a month, because that is where I'm struggling the most." You have to give your mentor as much as you can to work with. Being aware of your current network is also important. The more someone is already familiar with you and your abilities, the better & easier they can help you. Maybe someone at your job is already informally mentoring you, they might be the person that always seems to chime in at the right moment. That's someone you should ask to be your mentor. The next step is actually speaking to the individual. You should have an elevator pitch ready; clear, concise, and to the point. Mention what you admire about that person & their abilities. And should it not be through email, definitely make sure you are asking at an appropriate time. Asking someone while they're using the urinal, eating, or already speaking to someone for example is a horrible time to ask. Lastly, you also need to be a good mentee. Respect their time, be consistent, give feedback, and set an end date for the mentorship. The worst thing to do is to waste a mentor's time. It should feel like a mutually productive relationship. They should feel as if they are truly helping you hone your abilities, and you should feel as if you are a different worker than you were before.
I learned how to improve my quality of life, financial awareness & management, and the difference between luxuries & accessories.
A budget is a financial planning tool that allows you to plan how much you will spend or save each month. It also helps you track spending habits. Budgets are very important because otherwise it is very easy to overspend and end up in debt. Many many celebrities have gone broke despite once having millions because they would just spend their money freely with no budget.
There are six steps to creating a good budget. The first is to round up all existing financial paperwork that you own such as bank statements, investment accounts, credit card bills, etc. These will reveal to you your income & expenses, which is crucial. The second step is to calculate income. The third is create a list of ALL monthly expenses. This includes things that are routinely billed to you as well as things that you know you make the decision to spend money on each month such as groceries. The 4th is to understand the difference between fixed & variable expenses, and then deciphering which ones in your life are what. Fixed expenses are things that are consistently billed in similar amounts each month, such as rent, mortgage, insurance, etc. Variable expenses are ones that can fluctuate greatly such as eating out & gasoline. This will greatly help shift priorities, as well as establish if extra room is needed for variable expenses that have a tendency to occasionally spike. The 5th step is totaling all income & expenses. If income is higher than expenses that's great, but if it's the other way around there is a big problem that needs to be addressed - which is the sixth step. Cutting back on spending as much as realistically possible so you are no longer bleeding money each month. Despite all this, a budget is only as good as the will of the person that created it. It's the persons' responsibility to make sure they're honoring their budget and not overspending. Monitoring it & honoring it is key.
A smart purchase is one with high resale value like camera lenses, real estate, and rare items that are generally popular. A wasteful purchase is one with very low resale value, like brand new cars, smartphones, etc. Usually pieces of technology that are in high abundance that also go through significant wear & tear throughout usage. Furniture counts as well. Wasteful purchases can seriously put a damper on your bank account and should be limited as much as possible. Consumable items are ones that are generally necessities but have next to no resale value. Such as food, medicine, insurance, and toiletries. These type of expenses can't be recuperated.
A necessity is something someone needs to survive. What counts as a necessity varies from person to person. For example, someone may need a certain medication in order to stay alive. However, there is still a general consensus on what does & does not count as a necessity. These things include housing, food, & clothes. Something can also become a necessity if it simply needs to be paid. For example, a car isn't a necessity, but car insurance is. A lot of it is very dependent on the type of life you're living.
A luxury is something people don't need but still want. Even though a luxury is often defined as something that's also expensive, if you're financially conscious it's better to view a luxury as simply something that isn't needed but would be nice to have. There're a lot of luxuries; vacations, gaming devices, expensive jewelry, expensive cars, expensive clothing, collectible figures, skateboards, gym equipment, etc. Even in what I've listed there is a large range in term of pricing, but if you are financially conscious and focused on what matters, these would all count as luxuries.
I learned about music theory, creating music on a computer, how to make a beat, how to sell music, copyright law, and color theory.
Music theory is the study of the practices and possibilities of music. It examines musical qualities such as timbre, tone, pitch, and texture, as well as compositional elements such as rhythm, dynamics, tempo, etc.
I learned what a DAW is, which stands for digital audio workstation. Even though it sounds very sophisticated, it's as simple as an audio program. Such programs include Logic Pro X, FL Studio, Audacity and GarageBand. A MIDI Controller (musical instrument digital interface) is what allows your electronic instruments and your DAW to communicate with each other. If you want to record your real life instruments, you need an audio interface. They provide the link from your computer to any of your external hardware. Lastly, mixing equipment is needed. However it isn't complicated either, a pair of mixing headphones will do.
There are multiple ways to sell your music. The first is through streaming royalties through digital distribution. There's a difference between the two; a streaming service is a platform people use to listen to music while a distribution network distributes and collects royalties from those streaming services. Selecting the right distribution network is important because you'll want to make sure you're not wasting your money, especially because people that usually start out don't have that much money. The second way is playing live for a venue. You'll likely need an EPK to do so. An EPK is a digital collection of your documents, videos, images, and music. It's sort of like a portfolio/resume. The third way is collaborating with other artists. Doing so puts you directly in the limelight with a preexisting fanbase of people. It can also be very mutually beneficial. The 4th way is by selling your beats & samples online.
In regards to photography, you can sell your images as practical items such as greeting cards, postcards, calendars, notebooks, journals, phone cases & T shirts. You can use sites like Etsy & Society6. You can also sell them as stock photos, which are essentially images that people and companies use when they want a basic image that represents whatever it is they need reference to. For example, if you're doing a presentation on ice cream trucks and the money they produce, you may want to start that presentation with a stock image of a child enjoying ice cream. Stock photos are very useful because they are highly applicable & reusable in many different scenarios. Selling them to magazines is technically a more direct way of selling stock photos, however these are able to be more specific and detailed. You can also easily work photoshoot gigs for things such as birthday parties, weddings, etc. Social media is also a very powerful tool in which you can network with hundreds of millions of people. You can use that to find gigs or other work to do.
Color theory is a body of practical guidance to color mixing and the visual effects of a specific color combination. It's essentially a commonly agreed upon guideline for how colors should be used and their relation to each other. This also leads to something called color harmony. This theory is accompanied by a color wheel, where all the colors on the spectrum are segregated in a circle. There are primary colors (red, yellow and blue), secondary colors (green, orange and purple) which are made by mixing the primary colors, and lastly tertiary colors (yellow-orange, red-orange, red-purple, blue-purple, blue-green & yellow-green) which are made by mixing a primary and a secondary color.
Even though I was only able to work for an hour today, I still learned a lot. I learned about niche websites, which is a website that focuses on a very specific subset of a broader market with the purpose of monetizing its traffic. They generate revenue through through ads, affiliate marketing, online services & private communities. While it may be asked, why focus on something so specific? Wouldn't it be better to appeal to the most people? Well because if you can do a niche & do it very well, YOU could be the one stop shop for most people in that niche. Sketchbooks may not be the biggest market around, but if you are unquestionably the best/most popular brand of sketchbooks, you'd be securing a lot of revenue. Niche websites earn between $200 to $4,000 per month on average.
Even though I already knew how to use Google Trends, it was good to get a solid refresher. Google Trends allows you to see the history of a certain term in regards to its popularity. This is an extremely useful tool, as you can see when something is on it's way up into the mainstream and when something is on its way out. This can save you from a bad investment in newer ideas. You can also use this tool to see if there's a particular recurring time, season, or event that causes a surge in searches. For example, the NBA may be a more popular search term around the time of the finals. Or politically, certain movements may be louder during election years. Data is knowledge, and knowledge is everything. By making efficient use of Google Trends, you can navigate your niche and other business areas a lot better than people that don't take the time to study the data.
I learned about stocks, cryptocurrency, blockchains & sellable products.
For example, I learned that a stock is a security that represents a fractional ownership in a company. Investors spend money on stocks they think will increase in value. That in itself causes a company's value to increase. Investing is inherently a risk, but the potential reward is what makes it worth it. So in order to make money with investing you need to make smart investments on companies you believe will go up in value, and at the very least show low risk of losing you money.
I learned the difference between a common stock and a preferred stock. A common stock means you owe a share in the company's profit. Preferred stock pays investors a fixed dividend. Preferred stock is less prone to both losing & gaining value since they're less volatile. It's also best for long term growth.
I learned that a blockchain is a technique that is intended to timestamp digital documents so that it’s not possible to backdate them or temper them. They securely transfer money, property, contracts, and things of the like without requiring a third-party intermediary. It's used in many many areas such as markets, areas of government, finance & accounting, IOTs, and the medical field for reasons such as data transfer, voting, IP registration, supercomputing, inter divisional accounting, personal development contracts, and so much more. It does have limitations however.
I learned that many different components of technology can be sold. Like for example, in a DVD player you can sell over 10 different components such as the power supply, LED display, IR detector, buttons, switches, mic jack, amplifier, motors, neodymium magnets, and more. This really opened my eyes to how valuable the technology we own is and the many ways in which you can make a return on your investment in them.