Keep On Learning

Key learnings from Google Digital Garage’s free course: Fundamentals of Digital Marketing

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It’s a good time to be skilling up and there are loads of great courses out there online and many of them are free, and the ones that are paid aren’t that expensive (around £30 say – check out Udemy, Coursera etc).

Google Digital Garage has lots of free courses and the one that caught my eye was the only one that came with a certificate. Of course, that made it more attractive. That course was Fundamentals of Digital Marketing.

Review of Google Digital Garage's free course: Fundamentals of Digital Marketing

It’s listed at taking around 40 hours to complete and it has 26 modules. These encompass Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Social Media, Local Advertising, Display Ads, Retargeting and Email Marketing. To get a certificate, you had to pass an exam at the end with 80% or more.

What did I like about the course?

It’s very well organised in terms of curriculum, and the videos were informative and clearly presented. Each module took around 40mins to finish and it was fun to get the dopamine hit when completing each one. It kept me coming back.

Mostly, I like the fact that I feel like I learned something!

Here’s an example of the video lessons:

Key learnings

It’s aimed at small business owners eg. hairdressers, bakeries, craft beer shops etc.

  • Have a clear Goal for your online marketing efforts
  • Have a mission statement and know your USP with crystal clear clarity
  • Start small and iteratively – you don’t need to spend lots on a digital marketing agency
  • Start with the basics – eg get listed locally
  • SEO – learn what gets you higher rankings in search engine results
  • SEM – learn how to pick longer-tail, less competitive keywords to target, and focus on the bid amount as well as the relevance of your ad to your business
  • Content marketing – focus on answering the questions that your customer really wants answered
  • Social media – focus on engaging with your customers to let them know more about your business and how you could improve your product or service
  • Use analytics to assess, test, and then improve your online marketing efforts. Get familiar with Google Analytics

What would I improve about the course?

I’d probably make it slightly harder to pass each module’s quiz, with more questions, tougher questions and reduced ability to go back immediately and change your answers until you got the right one.

Would I recommend it?

Yes definitely especially if you have no grounding in the topic, or it’s not part of your day job. It’s always good to add strings to your bow and this gives you a solid overview of the subject as well as giving you a certificate at the end.

I’d also recommend this course if you’re a small business owner. There’s lots of content in the course which shows how small business owners such as online cake makers use digital marketing to grow their businesses.

Check out Google Digital Garage here.

I learned to swim at 39 years old. Here’s how I did it

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I’ve always been a terrible swimmer. I never learned as a kid. And the times that I’ve swum, I’ve more thrashed about than technically swum.

I remember two times where I’ve swum in the sea and both times felt like I was in serious trouble. 

I thought that I might well have died. 

In fact, without help around me, I could well have died. (I’d never thought about that until writing this just now. Oops.)

The first was in 2009 in the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland, Australia. Me and my mate Grant were backpacking and decided to do a boat trip. We did some snorkeling which was okay. But then we had the chance to do some scuba-diving. With some rudimentary instructions on signalling and breathing, we were off. I didn’t feel nervous because I felt that with flippers, I’d be able to swim easily. At least, it looks easy in the movies. Boy was I wrong. At one point, deep below the catarmaran, our leader signalled to rise to the surface. I tried to rise but instead everything I was doing was taking me towards the coral reef. I knew this stuff was jagged and sharp and I tried to swim away but every stroke was taking me closer and closer instead of further and further away. Luckily, our scuba leader came to help me out and guide me to the surface.

The second time was with my mate Colin in Palawan, Philipines in 2015. We were in clear blue, pristine waters, in amongst islands. We had a boat to ourselves with a pilot taking us from island to island. The skipper said to go into the water, so I did. Oddly, I’ve never learned to tread water effortlessly, so it became a bit of struggle. I made my way to the rocky edges of the island nearest to me, but the edges were razor sharp and I couldn’t hold on. I motioned to the skipper that I was in trouble and he threw me a life jacket much to Colin’s amusement. I knew then that I had to learn to swim properly.

Recently, these thoughts have become deafening. For example, my in-laws live in Bulli, NSW, and as in the rest of Australia, there’s a strong beach and swimming culture. I want to be confident in the sea. I want to be good in the sea.

And finally, I want to be a strong swimmer for when I have kids, which should come pretty soon. I want to be able to go swimming with them and also know that if they ever got into any trouble in the water, that I could rescue them.

Which all led me and Angelique to Nuffield Gym for lessons in Wandsworth, as well as me getting new prescription goggles. 

New prescription swimming goggles

One thing that’s always put me off swimming is the fact that my eyesight is terrible and that I wear contact lenses. Contact lenses and water don’t mix, and they get damaged by non-saline fluid. Chlorine would destroy them and make wearing them painful. 

So I looked up ‘prescription swimming goggles’ and found this great company that does them for around £20. What a bargain.

Here’s the company: http://www.prescription-swimming-goggles.co.uk

So armed with my new goggles, I was ready for the next stage:

Getting lessons

We decided to get professional instruction and we found a great teacher called Sophie. She’s a school teacher in her day job and teaches swimming in the evenings. 

My first lesson was just me thrashing around in the pool. It turned out that my technique for freestyle was just instinctive and terrible. My arms were like side-on windmills and chopped into the water. My legs were sinking and very low in the water. And I couldn’t do more than half a length without stopping.

For the next few lessons, we worked on getting my arms to come over into the water at a much straighter angle and to engage my core so that my legs would sit straighter and more horizontally in the water. 

We used swimming aids such as pullboys (which go between your legs at your groin), and floats. The pullbuoys help with engaging the core and encouraging good leg action. The floats allow you focus on your leg action and good arm motion.

After 5 lessons, Sophie said that we should take a break from lessons and that I should practice on my own and get my endurance up. My lack of endurance was holding me back from making good progress. She was right. My endurance was weak and left me gasping for breath and a rest at the end of every length. Every lesson felt like a beasting!

By the 5th lesson, I felt like I had made progress. My technique was definitely better. I could do lengths pretty comfortably. And then Sophie said something that gave me confidence. (No wonder she’s a teacher!)

She said that I’d done 25 lengths in the 30 min lesson we’d just finished and that this would be our new benchmark. In the future, we would never do less than 25 lengths, no matter how long it took. She said that she could see me doing a kilometre in a session. It had crossed my mind, but when she said that, it breathed new life into my confidence levels. I started to believe it. And that’s what a great teacher does: they push you and stretch you and encourage you to look beyond what you thought you were capable of towards what you’re really capable of. 

I joined the two local Nuffields through PayAsUGym which allows unlimited access for a month at a time and for the last month, I’ve swum around 4 times a week. 

I LOVE IT!

My goals now in swimming are:

  1. Get to 200m without stopping (10 lengths in our 20m pool)
  2. Get to 500m without stopping (25 lengths)
  3. Get to 1km without stopping (50 lengths)
  4. Finish a sprint triathlon (that’s a 750m swim)
  5. Finish an Olympic triathlon (that’s a 1.5km swim)

I had hoped to do achieve these goals by the summer of 2019, but it’s looking more like the end of 2019, given those triathlon distances.

My freestyle tips for beginners 

I’m no teacher (!) but here’s what’s worked well for me: 

Get your face in the water and your chin to your chest

For some reason, this makes your body lie more horizontally in the water, which is good thing.

Roll your body to the side as you swim

This will feel weird but it will allow you to breathe easier to each side.

Master your breathing

I’m not a master of this yet, but it’s fundamental to good freestyle swimming.

Look behind you as you breathe

This will help your body to be more streamlined as you take a breath.

Swim as fast as you can 

This will develop your cardiovascular abilities specifically for swimming.

Takeaways from learning this life skill

  1. It’s never too late to learn anything. It really isn’t! If you want to learn the guitar, do it. If you want to learn Italian, do it!
  2. Get good coaching and instruction. This is a shortcut to learning the right technique and doing the right drills. You could teach yourself, but how’s that going to go vs getting good coaching. Even Tiger Woods has a coach.
  3. Learning new things opens up horizons you never dreamed of. Before learning how to swim, I had no idea how much I would enjoy it. I love it! Now I want to go scuba diving, learn how to dive off the high board and go surfing. What could you learn that would open up your horizons?

Invest in yourself and compound the investment!

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Warren Buffett said that the best investment you can make is not in the markets, but instead, in yourself.

That’s pretty deep and until today I had no idea what he meant.

Yes, you could learn a new skill like data analysis and translate that into more money at work or something, but I think Buffett meant something slightly different.

He’s big into the power of compounding. Remember Einstein said that compounding is the eighth wonder of the world. To get the full power of compounding, you have to start something (like investing) early, and do it for a long time, so that you start making money on the money you make.

Imagine that you learned a new skill like touch typing early in life. Think on just one variable, time-saving, just how much that would have saved you. Imagine that I had done this at 19, and not at 39. That’s 20 more years of touch typing wizardry I would have had, and 20 years of faster typing. It isn’t just this variable that would have been impacted. Faster typing would mean that I could have typed at the speed of thought and not had to slow my thoughts down every time I two-finger typed. Think about all that lost thought. That’s a loss of a return on a return.

Invest in yourself now. Now is as early as you can do it. And the earlier you invest in yourself, the longer you can compound the investment.

What would you do? How would you invest in yourself? Would you get fit? Learn a language, learn to code, learn to cook delicious meals, parachute, sell things well, paint, write better, memory training, conversation skills etc? Imagine you learned all of that in the next 2 years. Not crazy or ridiculous. Imagine compounding all that knowledge, all that interweaving of new and old knowledge? And then compounding all of that with new skills, knowledge and experience? Now that would be an incredible investment.

 

What’s really holding you back? Truly?

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If we start from the position that we all have potential, then why is there a gap between where your potential self is and where you are at the moment?

How big is that gap? What is your true potential? It might be that your true potential is way more than you think it is. In which case, the gap is even bigger than you know.

Step one is where you are now.

Step two is looking at where you think your potential is. So this might be being a writer or being an artist.

Step three is discovering where your true potential might be (and you would need help from outside to discover this). This might be being a rocket scientist, climbing the world’s highest and most difficult mountains.

Step four is addressing how to bridge that gap and narrow it as much as possible.

Do you think that you can achieve step two and step three?

If you don’t think you can, then something is holding you back.

It’s a mindset thing for sure.

A great example of opening up your mindset and horizons is what learning how to swim has done for me. Even after my first lesson, when I couldn’t really even finish a length of the pool, I was looking up scuba diving holidays. Now after three lessons, I’m thinking about taking up wild swimming in rivers and taking up surfing. This is all stuff that I’ve dreamed about doing but thought it was pure fantasy. Those are the sort of things that I come up with when asking myself “What’s on my bucket list? What would I love to do?” And now it’s all possible. My horizons and possibilities with regards to swimming and watersports have expanded.

Now if I asked myself about step 3 (discovering where your true potential might be), what’s possible with my swimming? What couldn’t I even contemplate or imagine before that first swimming lesson? Swimming the Channel or swimming the Hellespont? I wouldn’t have dared dream about that a month ago. Now it’s possible. Maybe not likely, but possible. Hold on, why isn’t that likely? Maybe I’ll think differently after I master the freestyle stroke. Imagine once I get to 1,000m without stopping, maybe my horizons with regards to swimming will be so far from what I can imagine now? Maybe swimming the length of the Thames? Who knows!

So what was holding me back?

Why has it taken me until I’m 39 to finally address my terrible swimming and do something about it? In my head, I told myself that it was because of my eyes that I couldn’t swim because of my poor eyesight. I’m a minus 4.0 in my left eye and a minus 0.75 in my right eye. This means that I can’t really see anything without contact lenses or glasses. And glasses or contacts don’t work in the pool. That’s what I told myself and that’s why I couldn’t go swimming to learn in the past 10, 15 or 20 years.

This was probably bullshit. Stuff I told myself so that I wouldn’t have to do it. Now that I’m 39 and thinking about having kids soon, I think it’s really important that I learn to swim. Just in case I ever need to and to teach my kids and just for the sheer joy of being good at a fundamental human skill.

The solution was ridiculously easy. I just googled ‘prescription goggles’ and it was SO cheap and easy. £15 for prescription goggles. Now swimming is something that I look forward to.

How easy was that?

What’s something that you want to do and what’s holding you back?

How can you break through? Maybe it’s that you want to be a singer. So how about taking a singing lesson. £100 for 5 lessons from a professional singing teacher. Or maybe you want to be an artist. Go on a short course at a decent art school. I did one for about £350 for 10 x 2 hour lessons at Chelsea School of Art. At the very least, it’s fun and you’ll find out whether it’s something you want to pursue. Let me know what you want to do in the comments below!

Discovering Mel Robbins: a summary of her message and her 5 Second Rule

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I recently discovered Mel Robbins on Instagram. She puts out great Instagram content such as:

I thought at first that she was Tony Robbins’s wife. But she’s not. Imagine those guys as a motivational power couple!

I’ve watched her great TEDx talk:

and her interview on Lewis Howes’s podcast:

Here is my summary of her message.

  • There is a gap between what you know you should do and actually doing that.
  • Motivation is not enough. Most of the time you won’t feel motivated to do what you don’t want to do.
  • The way around this is to make use of your basal ganglia which manages habit and unconscious action. eg for an example of unconscious action, think about when you put on your trousers in the morning. You just do it and if you thought now about which leg you put in first, you would have no idea!
  • To activate the basal ganglia, don’t let your prefrontal cortex and natural desire for comfort to hijack you. Instead use the 5 second rule.
  • Whenever you are going to procrastinate, you just count backwards from 5 and by 1 you’ve started doing what you’re wanted to do but were too lazy/scared to do. Eg if you want to start getting out of bed, you can’t just say ‘I’m going to start getting out of bed early’, because in all likelihood, if that’s not your habit, then you’re not going to do that. If instead you count down from 5 to 1 as you’re deciding to get out of bed as soon as you first wake up, then you’re more likely to get up.
  • Nobody is coming to save you. Don’t wait for that raise, starting that podcast, starting that business etc. Nobody is going to magically come and do this for you. You need to do this yourself. Help yourself.

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