E is for Eskwelabs Issue 69 - Love as a Key-Shaped Person 💘🗝️
Love is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. For a person with varying expertise on different skills, love is the comfort and confidence within one’s abilities and uniqueness. 🌉
We created this newsletter to keep our alums, partners, and anyone interested in learning skills for the future of work updated and connected to our ever-growing community. If you want to read our previous issues, you can check them out here.
Ciao! This is Meg speaking, wishing you a happy belated Valentine’s Day! 😘 There are no bitter feelings and cries of loneliness in this letter because I’m putting the spotlight on YOU, dear Eskweloves, and all the reasons you should be loving yourself a little more during this time. 🤗
This love letter is guided by this reflection question: What does self-love look like for a key-shaped person?
How hard should I push myself? 🤔
How do I put more heart in what I’m doing? 💓
How can I tell if I’m stagnating? 🛑
Reading time: 9 minutes
How hard should I push myself? 🤸♀️
Being a key-shaped person is something we’ve discussed last month as we were searching for our niche. We talked about leveraging our expertise to actively seek out opportunities to learn and grow in other areas. 🔦
While the idea of learning something new everyday is exciting, we can be faced with the dilemma of prioritisation. 📜 There’s only so much you can do in a day! So, do you focus on sharpening your unique talents or do you spend time exploring other skills, eventually becoming a jack of all trades?
Regardless, it’s important to find a balance between pushing yourself to new heights and giving yourself the space to become adventurous. ⚖️ I’d like to think of it as productive “procrastination.” When I take breaks in doing my tasks, I make sure to use that time to explore other projects, read about interesting topics, or even just go for a walk. Taking a break to drift off into an alternate reality also feeds your creative juices, bringing in fresh perspectives and ideas when you come back to your original task at hand. 💡
Pushing yourself as a data enthusiast 💯
…can be as simple as setting monthly learning goals, or as lofty as committing to a data bootcamp. The goal is to walk that thin line of stretching yourself beyond the ordinary without burning out. 💪
To that end, we’re ecstatic to announce that Cohort 10 of our Data Analytics Bootcamp is now open for admissions! 🤩 There’s a lot to look forward to in the coming cohort, so take the opportunity and go through our admissions process with the steps below:
🔍 Sign-up for Cohort 10 here: https://eskwe.link/DABootcamp
🧠 Take the assessment exam before April 7 to determine your current skill levels.
🎤 Accomplish your fit interview with confidence! This friendly conversation is a chance for our admissions team to get to know you. Schedule yours before April 14.
🚗 Complete your tuition payment, and you're off! Woohoo!
🤝 Consult with our loving admissions team for questions and clarifications: https://eskwe.link/AdmissionsConsult
Plus, here are some FREE events 😲 you can look out for that can surely help you in the application process:
The Data Analytics Bootcamp Open House 🏠 on March 9, 2023 is held for you to ask our admissions team about anything related to the upcoming cohort. Register here! https://bit.ly/DABC10OpenHouse
Review Sessions 📚 1 and 2 are designed to provide a space for aspiring data analysts to collaboratively review together for their Pathfinder Exam! Stay tuned!
If you’re ready to level up your data analytics skills, let’s do it together! 🤗
How do I put more heart in what I’m doing? 💓
When we think of self-love, the most common answer is to do things that make you happy. 🧘 But for key-shaped people, it’s even more important to do things that make you passionate—things that nourish what makes you unique. 🪴
For us, self-love is being confident in our ability to adapt, grow and make an impact with our own set of skills. 🌠
An underlying implication of this is our ability to be resourceful and to maximise what we have to attain this goal. 👏 Recent debates on the workplace have brought to light the idea of a “do-it-yourself” mentality—people taking complete ownership of the outcomes of their work.
This was particularly directed towards the question of whether using AI writing tools such as ChatGPT is accepted in academic and professional writing. 🤔 Some argue that it’s an effective way to save time, while others say it’s a way to cheat your way to success.
Creating an output that is entirely from AI tools is considered by most as academic dishonesty. ❎ However, it can’t be denied that such tools can be used as a guide to generate ideas and enhance creativity. ✅
Making things happen 🔥
Moving forward, it is best to educate ourselves more on AI tools and their functions. You can explore them yourselves by checking out Futurepedia—an AI tools directory. 🔮 Through this platform you can look up tools for blog writing, text-to-music prompts, social media creatives, data coding, and many more!
To elaborate, let me share some examples. I sought the help of AI tools to make plans for Valentine’s Day: 😉
I asked ChatGPT to describe what a Harry Styles-themed Galentine’s Day dinner would look like. 💃
I asked Midjourney to create a visual using these prompts: valentines day spent with grandparents, dinner, garden, lights, dreamy. 💞 It came up with this result:
I asked Riffusion to make music with this prompt: slow, soft jazz music in the style of John Mayer. 🎷 Here is the result!
So, for us, self-love looks like making things happen—putting more heart into your work, maximising resources, and strategically aligning them to attain the best output. ✨
We want to see the creative things you’ve made too! Let us know in the comments section below, or you can reach out to us on our social media pages! 💌
How can I tell if I’m stagnating? 🌇
Stagnation is the bane of key-shaped people. We have the ability to do and become anything, and the world of opportunity can be overwhelming. 😕 We may attempt to spread ourselves too thin, and the consequence is that we can get stuck.
For us, I dare say that to get out of the feeling of being stuck, we can productively procrastinate. 🤔 Productive procrastination or structured procrastination is a process of organising or managing your thoughts toward completing pending tasks. While this is a normal thing to experience, it should still be done correctly for it to benefit us as learners and as key-shaped people. 👍
The trick is to procrastinate with things that you consider important. 💡 List down things you need to do, then create another list of things you feel like doing while putting off those previous tasks. As you tick things off in either list, you can then measure your progress because you now know what needs to be done. 📏
A great way to manage these lists is through the use of a Kanban board! 📌 This is an agile project management tool that uses cards and columns designed to visualise work, limit work-in-progress, and maximise efficiency.
https://kanbanzone.com/resources/kanban/what-is-kanban-board/
These boards can be customised to your liking! Start integrating this agile practice into your routine and see the difference in how you progress in your day-to-day tasks. 🎯
More on agile practices and tools soon! 😉
Ultimately, self-love for key-shaped people looks like putting more heart into our work and using resources to achieve our goals.❣️ It IS possible to push our boundaries, all we need is to be more intentional in building the bridge between where we are and where we want to be. 😌
I hope this letter is one of many acts of love you receive this month. Until next time! Cheers. 😚
💌 Learning with you,
Meg Ruiz
Junior Content Designer at Eskwelabs