I keep saying that lots is happening and it really is...   This week I finalized the marketing video with Pull Focus (I am just waiting for them to load it to the cloud so I can download it and post it); I also sent out the next version of the book to the contributors for final comment and to a few other people for reviews; AND last night I spent a few hours with a good friend of mine (Thank you Mariko!), filming the piece for the Kickstarter campaign!!!  

I just have a small issue.....  I have no idea how to use imovie to put it all together!!!   Today, this old dog is learning a new trick!   Well, more accurately I am going to spend a little while on YouTube watching tutorials and then I am going to jump on in  :D  Hoping this all goes perfectly!   

Look out for our kickstarter campagin AND redesigned website either on Monday or Tuesday this week! 

As The20Project has decided to generously support Makomborero, I thought I would share a little bit of what effect this charity is having on the lives of the children we support.

Zimbabwe follows the UK education system, with students writing O-Level exams when they’re around 16 (typically up to 10 subject), and then A-Level exams two years later (typically 3-4 subjects).  This is where Makomborero steps in, giving a few very talented students the opportunity to complete their final two years of schooling. The students that we select have all overcome tremendous odds to complete their O-Level exams, and are often orphans or from single parent families.

These kids come from the high density suburbs and rural areas surrounding Harare, the capital city.  There is no such thing as free education in Zimbabwe, and every school child has to wear a school uniform. Typically school fees are around $52 a term, but some families cannot afford even this small amount, and the children are often sent home due to unpaid school fees.

Due to a lack of teachers and large class sizes, schools will often run two sessions a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.  Most students have to walk long distances to and from school, and one of our past students, Peter, used to walk 15 miles each way, every day – more than a marathon a day just for the privilege of receiving an education.  Very often there are no textbooks, and the textbooks that there are, have to be shared amongst the students.  Also students write the O-Level science exams with only a theoretical knowledge of science experiments and equipment due to a lack of facilities.  The fact that these students pass their O-Level exams is nothing short of a miracle.

Makomborero selects the best of these students using a rigorous academic and psychometric testing process, and the 8 students that are selected each year are then catapulted into one of the best private schools in Harare, on a full scholarship.  They are housed in a boarding house in town during the week, and are given books, uniforms, transport to and from school, and three meals a day – a luxury in Zimbabwe in its current economic climate.  The children are also given careers advice, encouraged to take part in extra-curricular activities, and are taught how to succeed in a Western business world – speaking English, eating with a knife and fork, and how to shake hands firmly and look the other person in the eye – which goes against the grain of their cultural upbringing. 

Makomborero’s support doesn’t stop at A-Levels either.  We help the students to apply for university scholarships around the world, and to those that are unable to get a scholarship, we offer a grant to study at a Zimbabwean university.  Under the guidance of our founders, Mark and Laura, our students are all blossoming.

The students who took their A-Levels at the end of 2013 are all just starting their university education now, and reading a list of their achievements the other day made my heart swell and brought tears to my eyes.  Here is what they are up to now:

1.       Pamela Saidoni (UZ, Zimbabwe – Electrical Engineering)
2.       Taringana Guranungo (Dartmouth University, USA – Engineering Science)
3.       Blessing Musungate (Dokuz Eylul University, Turkey - Computer Engineering)
4.       Lisa Luka (Wellesley College, USA - Neuro Science & PreMed)
5.       Tinotenda Makuvire (McGill University, Canada - Electrical Engineering)
6.       Nyasha Katemauswa (waiting for response)
7.       Collen Gondo (waiting for response)
8.       Philip Mukuze (Shandong University, China – MBBS Medicine)

We also pay the school fees of a further 8 students who don’t make it onto the full scholarship scheme.  Two of those students have now also received scholarships to US universities.

If you want to keep up with Makomborero, and our students, please like our Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/MakomboreroZimbabwe/, or sign up to our monthly newsletter - https://www.facebook.com/MakomboreroZimbabwe/app_100265896690345

It's official...  The20Project is certified   :)

In other news we are filming the last of the video tomorrow night at Pull Focus Film School in Gastown and then hopefully getting the video done by the end of August. 

Cheers, Hilary

Hi Everyone,  just a quick update as to what is happening with The20Project!

Marketing Video - we have scheduled another video shoot on Tuesday next week at Pull Focus to finish the interviews and start to edit the video together! 

Kickstarter - once the video is done, the kickstarter campaign will be live!  I am also going to start a discussion on the Linkedin Group about what makes a compelling Kickstarter...  :)

New Contributors - we have 4 new contributors for the project, which brings us up to a total of 20 contributors!!  So exciting.  I am working with them right now to get their bios up on the website and their chapters complete so we can do a final, final edit and get the book formatted! 

New Publishing Date Goal -> Aiming for a book launch party on Friday, October 10th 2014 here in Vancouver.  (But I will organize that mid-September depending on how everything else is going)

Thank you so much for all of your support - will keep you updated in the coming weeks about the Kickstarter campagin to get us to PUBLISHED! 

Cheers, Hilary

After working on our new Linkedin Group this week we are quickly coming up to 100 members!!  This is awesome.  However, with this extra level of interest, I have had a number of inquiries about being a contributor and I have decided to add 4 new contributors to the project in order to round up our book to 20   ;)

Welcome to our final 4 contributors:
Nancy Jean Lahn
Russell Cullingworth
Sandie Atkinson
Tosh Hattori

Thank you for your participation!!!

Cheers, Hilary

p.s -> quick update on our video....  we have another shoot on Tuesday next week to round out some more footage.  Looks like everything is coming together!  :)

Last night a group of 8 of us descended on Pull Focus Film School in Vancouver's Gastown District to help create The20Project marketing video.

The topic of the video was "What was the best piece of advice ever given to you".    I have to say that this wasn't an easy question to answer and everyone did an awesome job (after a few mis-takes and techinical gliches!)

Really looking forward to getting this done and kicking off our Kickstarter campaign!!! 

We are on a roll.   :)

As I was poking around on Linkedin this morning, I found this article that I think you might appreciate...  for all those who just don't know what to do!

Should your university degree dictate your job?
by: Jonathan Yabut

I receive dozens of inquiries every week from students and corporate folks asking for advice about their careers. I’d like to share and answer one interesting note which I think a lot of people (especially folks in marketing and sales) will be able to relate to:

Hi, Jonathan!

My name is Linh from Hanoi, Vietnam, and I am a big fan of "The Apprentice Asia"! I am a high school student and will soon attend university. I honestly don’t know what course to take but I have some options in mind. I want a course that will help me get a good job, something that I like, something I enjoy.

My question is…how important is your college course in choosing the job you want to get after graduation? I am scared that I might choose a course that will limit my options. I think I want to get a job in marketing and sales like you because you can go to a lot of companies! I think selling products and making advertisements on TV is exciting. Please share your advice.

Thank you,

Linh

*****

Hi Linh,

Thank you for reaching out. You are definitely not alone with your concerns. Millions of high school students (including myself years ago) fear the same thing.

The answer to your question (with some qualifications) is a yes. Your university degree will greatly influence the job that you will end up with because careers and jobs are defined by a set of skills, knowledge and competencies that match with what you learned in school.

Doctors need to study medicine to be able to practice in hospitals. Engineers need to study engineering to be able to participate in construction and architecture projects. Artists take art lessons to refine their creativity, and so on.

However, let me make an exception that this is not strictly the case in all situations.

As you start working, you will realize that many folks have university degrees that were not originally intended to match their jobs. I had a boss before in the marketing department who was a Philosophy graduate. I have a friend who works as a producer for a theater company but finished engineering in school.

It takes more than effective absorption of textbooks and the receipt of a diploma to practice a career and succeed in it.

The good news for folks who don't want to practice the courses "they got trapped with" is that shifting gears is still possible. You can also still make the most of what you learn in school.

Here are some insights you can work on:

1. Unless you are taking up a highly-specialized course (medicine, law), know that you can still branch out to other fields that are related to your course

Let me clarify something about me that may shock a lot of people — I’m a living proof that your course should not strictly dictate what you should become. Most people think I finished a marketing or advertising degree because I’ve been practicing marketing for 10 years now, but I actually finished with a degree in BS Economics. It’s an intensely mathematical course suited for working in government positions that involve research and analytics.

Have you heard of people who study and predict a country’s inflation rate, GDP growth, interest rates, and the like? That’s a classic example of what could have been my first job. I could have ended up as an economist, analyzing growth rates of developing economies for the Central Bank, but I didn’t.

When I was about to graduate, a telecommunications company recruited me to become a management trainee and I gave marketing a try. Because I was always fascinated with branding, advertising and product development (and convincing people’s minds to buy your product or service), I tried it.

I realized later on that marketing wasn’t just about the glamor of making the most talked about TV commercial or video on YouTube; it also involved a lot of mathematical analyses such as forecasting. My forecasting acumen (thanks to my Economics degree) have been helpful in marketing — from forecasting my product’s inventory in grocery shelves, or forecasting the number of times a person will likely send an SMS or call, to forecasting the number of times a passenger will travel.

There were many skills and disciplines in Economics that were related with marketing, too — analysis, research, finance and budgeting, and the like.

In most cases (again, except in cases of highly technical courses), what you learn in university is the general discipline (ex. a deeper level of mathematical acumen vs. what you learned in high school), the general set skills (ex. a deeper level of reading comprehension, vocabulary and writing ability), and the general knowledge (ex. a deeper understanding of your culture, your world and the dynamics of power in your society) that will further expand your capacity and tenacity to learn.

In this context, I’d like to believe that the skill and discipline I learned from taking up Economics was generally suited to practice marketing. Other courses which I think are also suited are Psychology, Communication Arts and Sociology.

Finally, your industry can also be an influencing factor. An engineering graduate who is also creative can work as a marketing or sales executive in the IT industry. All those folks in Silicon Valley who built and managed their own start-up companies? They’re likely IT or engineering graduates, too — not marketing or advertising graduates.

2. You gotta love what you’re doing to be good at it

What does it take to become a Marketing or Sales man? From my personal experience, getting a marketing degree can give you advantage from a theoretical perspective. However, being a successful marketer also involves an immense amount of love and passion for it.

My smile always reaches my ears when my brand has stolen market shares from my competitor. I get a kick whenever I see my brand’s viral video being shared on Facebook by random strangers. Simply put, marketing makes me exercise what I’m good at — being creative and strategic.

So even if I often spend sleepless nights developing endless powerpoint presentations, or visiting a remote farm to interview a customer under the scorching heat of the sun, I still get motivated to succeed because I love what I’m doing. You need to love your job for you to be good at it.

3. You will learn the most while doing the job, more than anything else

You may have heard of the popular 70-20-10 model of learning and development based on a research crafted by Morgan McCall and his colleagues. In this study, they concluded that lessons learned by successful managers come from the following sources:

• 70% from doing the job (doing the job routinely and repeating what works, and avoiding next time the things that don’t)
• 20% from people (feedback and observation shared by your boss, colleagues, etc.)
• 10% from courses and reading (ex. school, books, online articles, case studies of other businesses, etc.)

What does this mean? It means that even if you miss all the lessons in marketing in university, you still have the opportunity to catch up as long as you persevere to learn (and be humble) while being on the job. I made many mistakes when I developed my earliest TV commercials. As I did more, I made less and less mistakes as I got better at it.

Practice perpetually breeds perfection. I was always a curious learner. I loved asking questions from my mentors and bosses, even if it got to the point of irritating them at times. I requested to sit down in meetings of other marketing departments that had nothing to do with my project because listening alone taught me a lot of things. I went to events and concerts organized by other industries (those music concerts sponsored by companies selling sanitary napkins or feminine wash? They're impressively creative!) so I can steal best practices and apply them to my brand.

Learning by doing was my mantra. This, coupled with the an open mind to constantly ask people for feedback on what they think I can further improve on (with emotions put aside), and constantly reading articles and watching videos on the Internet about success and failure stories of popular brands — I got my way into becoming a marketer and, finally, becoming “one of them.”

Take this advice with a grain of salt

Of course, not everyone will fall into the same situation as I did. I am arguably a fortunate case of being at the right time, at the right place and with the right heart. This article is not declaring that anyone can be an instant marketing or sales executive regardless of his course in university (the marketing geniuses of our times such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates didn’t even finish college, mind you).

Neither is this article claiming that students and teachers of marketing are simply wasting their time. Marketing students study dozens and dozens of case studies about the rise and fall of various companies and brands that they are obviously more knowledgeable about than an Engineering or Education student.

This article celebrates the fact that we are fortunately living at a time when opportunities are plenty, whether it may be in the field of marketing, medicine, law or what-not. Opportunities can be twisted to our advantage. In today’s times, technology has immensely leveled the playing field to almost equal for everyone.

So if you are somebody reading this article with a university course you feel you have wrongfully chosen (and is painfully forced to stick it out for three years or more), know that the possibilities remain abundant (and what more five years from now!).

If you do succeed, please do reach out and share your success story with the rest of the world. Good luck!

What do you think???