Two Months In; One Phase of Praxis Completed
- Alexander Radha Portfolio Projects
- Oct 1, 2023
- 7 min read
For the past two months, I have been participating in Praxis, a life and career development program for young adults. Since starting the program, I've noticed my overall professional development has eclipsed that of my two years in college. With the first phase of Praxis completed, I'm stepping back to reflect on everything I've learned thus far.
Throughout Phase 1, I've done several different projects to build skills and showcase them. All of these will be available to view in the Praxis Portfolio section of the website.
Starting with Week 2, the first project I took on was building the very website this blog is posted on. I chose to use Wix since I have had prior experience using the platform for school projects. Creating the website was pretty easy. Wix provides plenty of templates and outlines to build an appealing look for each page. While we only had to create Home, About Me, Portfolio, and Blog pages, I chose to create a fifth page to promote my two main YouTube channels. The Home page also features the About Me video project, a short introduction video marketing myself and my skills. The next project is one that is on-going: writing a weekly newsletter. Every Saturday on Substack, my weekly newsletter is posted detailing my week. I cover what's worth sharing about Praxis, my job, and my budding YouTube career, along with a song recommendation for fun.
Moving on to Week 3, the focus was professional performance. The two projects being setting up a digital calendar and task manager. Doing both was certainly a great way to increase accountability and organize my events better.
Week 4 was about major personal habits. One project was to come up with a habit improvement plan using a tracker app. I used Way of Life to build the habits of shaving twice a week and making progress on cleaning my room once a week. Another project was creating a case study. I chose to make mine about the BeybladeGeeks, a group of Canadian Beyblade YouTubers that have amassed one of the largest Beyblade audiences on the platform. While I initially struggled to come up with productive habits during the actual week, I found that creating new habits later on was far easier than it been prior.
Week 5 was writing week with a lot of writing activities. First was writing a life lessons post, reflecting on past experience and creating a lesson for others to learn from. I wrote about expecting the worst outcomes from life to mitigate the damage those outcomes cause when they occur. The next project was writing an opinion piece, which for my post was about how Takara Tomy should handle their new line of Beyblades if they want to see international success. Afterwards, there was a project where I wrote a sample post that could go on a company blog. The content focused on why Toyota's current performance lineup is the best option for anyone looking into buying new Japanese sports cars. Then I wrote a sample sales email, pitching Beyblade X under the context of it being released in North America. The next two projects focused on editing a previous piece of work. One was about cutting the word count in half. The other was about using short sentences to build up to a longer focused sentence. I used the Life Lessons post for both of these, with the Cut It in Half exercise standing out to me a little more.
Week 6 was about learning a new skill in a short time frame. For this project, I chose to learn how to use Descript's AI tools to use text editing in order to alter what I say in an audio recording. I have been admittedly hesitant to use AI but as things advance, I'm warming up to it and this project was definitely a good step.
Week 7 was focused on finance. Before going into this week, finance was a mystery hidden behind a headache. The projects for this week were analyzing my current budget, brainstorming ways to maximize my income and working on finance goals, and then building a usable budget model. After Week 7, I now have a firm grasp on how to organize my budget and stay consistent with spending and saving.
We read two books over the past two months: The Concise Mastery by Robert Greene and Atomic Habits by James Clear. Both are really solid, each focusing on how to build yourself in different applications. The Concise Mastery is about achieving greatness and becoming a master through learning and creating with uniqueness. The biggest takeaway for me with this book was not emulating the work of your mentors and teachers, but rather using the skills you learn from them to build your own works and creations. Atomic Habits was about building new habits in a simple way and over time. For this book, I took away the concept that sometimes creating a new habit is as simple as a change in your environment or revision to a system you work in. A great example of this for me was changing my physical environment to boost my work and sleep health. Working in the same room I sleep in has always had a profound negative impact on my work and sleep ethics. If I can't sleep, I'll do work on my PC; If I don't want to work on something, I'll sleep. I combated this by putting my desk in the corner with the foot of my bed facing my monitors. Doing this has eliminated my bed from the view of my desk. Now my bad habit of sleeping while working has been eliminated, and its beginning to show through vice versa.
There are a few new things I've been able to take from this first phase. First and foremost is the concept of striving to be better all the time in all fields. To me, college felt very limited in what you were learning. Praxis is very much about exploring as many options as possible and maximizing your potential, far beyond the academic approaches of college. College is definitely useful for specific fields like doctors and teachers, but for someone who wants to work in content creation full-time, learning as many skills as possible is a great way to market myself to a variety of online brands and personalities. Another big takeaway is impact of showing my work. School was always MLA formatted papers with specific structures and rubrics where you often have to use your words to explain something that's easier to just show. My newsletter is a great example. I will include pictures and videos to show what I'm referring to. On YouTube, I also like to put up images of what I'm talking about to make it easier for the viewer to see instead of using words exclusively. The last one I'll mention is creating value for other people; molding yourself to be desired by others. Creating something that is in demand so people seek you out to fill that demand. As a content creator, this is a very prominent ideal. It's a big sea of competition so creating content that people want to see and watch is important. However it's also about molding you're personality to be entertaining and to draw people in to want more of you.
Picking only three projects to call my favorite, first is definitely the About Me video.
It was fun to do a video project, but that's no surprise coming from the YouTuber. I didn't need to put a lot of energy to put forward maximum effort as it was natural. The video itself was based around the idea of me, as the narrator, introducing myself and using previous projects and videos as the showcase.
The second project I'd call one of my favorites is the Cut It in Half exercise combined with my Life Lessons post.
The Life Lesson was important to me and one I think everyone should utilize. Being able to cut it down to half the size makes it palatable to anyone who wishes to read it. The concise wording gets the message across cleanly and with no rehashing or extensions that take away its value.
The third project I'll put here is my newsletter.
At this point, the newsletter comes out every weekend, usually Saturdays. To recap briefly, this showcases my week as far as Praxis, my job, and YouTube events go. There is also a weekly song recommendation, usually whatever song fits the theme of the newsletter or whatever I've been listening to a lot that week.
For Phase 2 of Praxis, we had to choose four modules to complete. I opted to do Content Marketing, Launch a Business, Start a Content Creation Project, and Create a Custom Project. Content Marketing is a great skill to have as a content creator. My hopes are this skill will aid me in finding jobs in the content creation space online. Launch a Business was selected with consideration for the fact several large YouTubers have businesses they've created and launched. Examples include Oompaville with his candy company and Mr. Beast with his restaurant chain. If I were to create a business in correlation to my content creation career, knowing how to launch one would be a great skill to have down at that point. Start a Content Creation Project is a no-brainer. I had an idea for my Beyblade YouTube channel that I could incorporate into this module. Lastly we have Create a Custom Project. This one is a lot more open ended, but I can use it to build upon the other skills I've learned with some new skills or use it to find new ways to create value in some form.
Overall, I'm very much looking forward to the next phase of Praxis and this journey of development as a whole. The last two months have opened my eyes to so many realities and methods of advancements; I am truly thankful to have been able to take this amazing opportunity.
Be sure to check out my channels that make up my aforementioned budding YouTube career!
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