Wise Words Column

Over the years, I’ve had my work featured in many top-level sites and publications, like Business Insider, Thought Catalog, Forge, Marker, and many more. Getting your work featured in prestigious websites and blogs does two things; it puts your work in front of a new audience with the potential to lead to new connections and relationships, and it increases your authority within the space you write in.

Both of these are essential if you want to move from hobby writer to professional.

But how do you successfully pitch to an editor or publication?

I’ll level with you. No matter what I’m about to tell you, be warned: you will often face rejection, and other times you will get nothing but complete radio silence. It’s all part of the writing game — the higher your authority, the better chance you have, yet you can’t build that authority without getting a chance. …

From creating new words like “Kodak,” forcing words together like “Facebook,” or intentionally misspelling phrases like “Krispy Kreme,” companies have a long history of picking phonetically fabricated — and occasionally nonsensical — brand names. For the past two decades, one particularly popular business trend was for companies to drop vowels from their names; if you glanced at a list of tech firms circa the early 2000s, you might be forgiven for assuming the humble vowel was going extinct. Flickr, Grindr, and Tumblr all launched within a few years of each other, each one seemingly forgetting to bring the letter “e” along with them. …

Hey post-grads, pre-grads, and everyone in between.

We’ve had another great week here at the publication, and had a really great bunch of stories to read through since the turn of the year. We’re excited to see where we can take the pub in 2021, and we have some really amazing things planned (one of which is being put together as we speak.)

Can’t wait to share more!

But for now, here’s our weekly Post-Grad Picks.

This Weeks Post-Grad Picks

First up, Jon Hawkins asks a really important question. What does success look like when you’re new to the game of freelancing? …

Hey post-grads, pre-grads, and everyone in between.

First off, happy 2021. (Though, for many of us, it’s already had a pretty wild start… things can only get better from here, surely?)

In more positive news, we had a look at our stats for the year, and nearly choked on our cereal when we realized we had almost 5 millions views this year.

Holy shit!

We really can’t thank you enough. …

For most of my life, I’ve never been particularly satisfied with what I had. Whether it was goals, jobs, money; I’d always arrive at my destination, take a quick look around, and then immediately load up the map and chose somewhere to go next.

I always wanted more.

I’m not alone. That’s what life is all about right? Almost everything is focused around the principle of ‘upgrading.’ Think about it. You regularly drop a perfectly working phone to get the latest model. You get your foot on the property ladder, appropriately named because you’re always trying to get up to that next step. …

At its peak in 2015–2016, Blue Apron was delivering over eight million meals per month and raking in over $1 billion in annual sales. Within just five years of its inception, it was employing 4,500 people and was valued at over $2 billion.

It looked set to dominate the meal kit market, helping meal prep delivery overthrow traditional shopping and home cooking. But then the bottom fell out of the box: The market quickly became saturated with competitors like HelloFresh, and in response, Blue Apron overspent to acquire customers and retain them. After a disastrous IPO in 2017 and facing competition from Amazon, the company was at rock bottom. By the beginning of 2020, it looked like the writing was on the wall. …

We’ve published 1000’s of stories this year at the Post-Grad Survival Guide, reaching 1,000,000’s of people in the process. It’s an amazing feeling to know our publication, and the brilliant writers and work we share and promote, is finding so many fellow post-grads — and hopefully making a positive impact during in a year in which we could all use a little pick-me-up, and a sense of direction.

As the year wraps up, we went through each month of the calendar, and picked out the best performing story of the month.

We’ll call it a hall of fame of sorts.

We hope you enjoy these stories as much as we enjoyed sharing them. …

The world of design has produced some life-changing inventions across a plethora of industries and sectors, with our lives being improved in previously unimaginable ways. At the same time, some companies continue to make pointless iterations and updates to existing products in the hope of designing the next big thing — whether it makes sense or not. For a while now, the current trend has been to make everything “smart.”

And I mean everything. If an object exists, you can bet your life someone is attempting to make it smarter. While some companies get this fusion of object and internet connectivity right and produce incredible results, the trend also leads to a whole host of pointless and expensive gadgets that might be worse than their normal alternatives. …