Hello. I’m Laef. 👋
Sometimes I’ll get bored and scroll back to see the beginning of a blog or a Twitter account or a Facebook page. It’s often kind of telling to see the first post a brand or a person ever made. Sometimes it’s just something out of the blue, like a 5%-off deal or an auto-posted link to their new Instagram post; Sometimes it’s an “I’m new here” or a “#MyFirstTweet” thing; And sometimes it’s some reflection about “finally joining Twitter” or how “our Facebook page is here at last!”
For me, I want to make it a mission statement.
I’m a writer, a designer, a marketer, an aspiring journalist. This website, and this blog, reflect that. I made this site not just to promote myself and help support my résumé, but also to learn more about each of those crafts. How do I write about myself? How do I persuade people to hire me? How do I design a website that’s informative, yet simple?
How do I report on my craft?
One of the greatest conceits of someone writing copy for their company is to believe their company’s own hype: To assume that everyone else, just like you, already knows how amazing your products are; How easy your services will make their life. The greatest talent for a marketer, or a copywriter, or a business person, or an entrepreneur, or a designer, or even a journalist, is to be able to step away from their craft and to see it from the outside. To understand how everyone else sees it. To empathise with the audience.
One of the other greatest conceits — actually, the greatest one — is to assume you already know everything.
Those two really go hand-in-hand.
As hard as you try to step away from your business, from your craft, you won’t always know exactly how everyone else sees you. As hard as you try to understand more, there’s always something else left to learn.
But what counts is that you recognise that, and that you still keep on trying.
So what’s my goal with this blog? It’s to learn more. It’s to understand more about my crafts and how people look at them. It’s to explore my talents and my restrictions, the things I can do and the things I can’t yet. It’s to work out, in writing, the skills I’ll bring to bear at work. And, most importantly, it’s to teach others the things I’m learning and the things I know, so that they too can understand more and teach others as well.
So follow along! Learn from my triumphs and my mistakes, my wisdom and my naïveté, my good ideas and my bad. And let me know what you think!
Because the best way to learn is by talking with other people… then doing it yourself.
💜