Reflections on work and art from Vicky Gu, editor and poet based in Brooklyn.
Hi - I’m excited to be working together. Here’s a guide to give context on my values, strengths, and growth areas. (Something I first discovered via Julia Zhuo.) I’m sharing this so we can develop a strong relationship based on deeper mutual knowledge of who we are and how we operate. I’d love to learn anything that this inspires you to share.
How I view success
Whatever the outcome, we come out with greater respect for each other. Success takes sacrifice. It’s important to me that we have honest conversations during growing pains. Even healthy work environments have circumstantial stressors, and I believe in cultivating the emotional safety for being human. We’re not just colleagues.
Our work breaks boundaries. If we’re not having the above sorts of conversations, then we could shoot higher and dream weirder. We set standards and deliver output that our peers consider inimitable. Like how unseen discipline and creativity goes into our favorite films—it takes soul. Soul that the corporate world could use fresh injections of.
How I communicate
I’m an external verbal processor. I think through writing and speaking. If I’m asked to speak on the spot in meetings, we might embark on a winding path because I’m trying to arrive at the core of what I want to say. This can be great for sharing context and rationale, but it’s not always the most efficient way to make decisions. Some of my best collaborators are ones who listen intently and replay my words back succinctly in a way that drives clear forward direction.
This is why async communication, visual concepting tools, and remote collaboration work great for me. I’m often clearer in writing because it gives me space to self-edit before sending a message, or take notes to track my thoughts during a live meeting. Regardless, I’m working on being more deliberate with my words in both async and live situations.
Things I do that may annoy you
I can better manage time. I might be a few minutes late to meetings. I’m working on being consistently punctual because I do respect your time. Sometimes I go overtime on meetings because I enjoy the conversation. In the right times, this is good for the business - carving out margins for open ended conversations that flow from preset or flexible agendas - because real magic can happen there. I do my best to gauge the situation, but feel free to be direct to keep the conversation on track. I won’t be offended - I get it, we don’t always have the time for play.
What gains and loses my trust
Gain my trust with good work that breaks best practices. Propose ideas beyond what we’ve historically done or what others have already found success with.
Come prepared to meetings so our time can be as fruitful as possible. Pre-read materials and send materials to pre-read. Listen proactively, take notes, and follow up. (I’m a fan of being off-camera to help focus on listening and responding.)
Show me something I don't know. Send me an article that made you think of me. Whether obscure or mainstream - I love it all. Feed my creativity and I’ll do the same with you.
Trigger me by voicing your opinions on creative work that aren’t rooted in curiosity for the why. I trust you’re good at what you do; trust that I’m good at what I do. Respect my craft rather than making declarative suggestions.
My strengths
If you’re into these things - my Strengthsfinder top 5: Strategic, Maximizer, Futuristic, Intellection, Connectedness
I think divergently. I work well with blank slates and can bridge methodical processes with nonlinear thinking. I come into meetings with ideas for us to consider new ways of seeing/doing things, likely pulled from a niche corner of the internet. Pretty much anything inspires me, especially if it’s not directly related to my work. (Can rephrase this as: I write poetry, which helps me write efficiently in a business context. Not the other way around.)
I love connecting with people - and connecting people. I build strong relationships across disciplines and industries. Let me know if I can help connect you with someone.
I maximize connections. I’m a fan of the bullpen concept, initiating bullpens, and driving conversation. I thrive when in collaborative spaces that encourage spontaneity, assuming there’s aligned strategy and direction at the foundation. As described by ex-Youtube VP Shishir Mehrotra:
“The bullpen is” a creative experiment that turned into a hallmark of our process. Many of our meetings included a long “bullpen” period. The time was intentionally unstructured and without any agenda, where the only rule was that you had to stay present. This would lead to many “multi-threaded” discussions happening in parallel, and if you didn’t have anyone to talk to, you could just keep working on your own. Many of these discussions would have naturally become ad-hoc meetings, and instead got handled in a timely manner. It also led to a much tighter leadership team since the list of interested parties in a topic was often different than might have been originally imagined.
I care a lot. I have an intrinsic motivation that applies to whatever I do. Because I’m a writer who uses language to emote and get others excited - I work well with sales and recruiting/people collaborators.
My growth areas
In my communications, I’m working on leading with the decision - then following up with the context. Otherwise, I’m prone to overarticulating my thought process. I’m working to prune down to sharing just the right amount of information when working with others.
In my management style, I’m working on providing the right amount of direction. A coworker has described me as an aspirational coach, which, great, but I understand there are also times I need to map out concrete processes so ideas get clean execution. I want to nurture creativity and strategic thinking, but sometimes I leave too many blanks and it might be overwhelming. I assume you can connect the dots or raise your hand for support, but it might also be more strenuous than I expect. Please tell me if more direction will help you be more efficient. I’m working on the balance of giving enough direction so expectations are clear, while allowing space for creativity.
I value teammates who push for clear articulation and documentation of process, and who proactively problem solve when old processes invariably stress and break as they grow to accommodate new tactics.
What I expect from people I manage
Don’t ask forgiveness, radiate intent. Signal next steps so I know you’re thinking ahead. Show your work early and often, at least in the beginning of our working relationship.
Operate with structure and systems-thinking. Drive our 1:1s so it’s clear to me what you need and by when. Organize your asks so it’s easy for me to help. Show me you’re thinking about all the dependencies and steps in your work. Bring it back to our big picture and long term goals.
Prepare for our feedback sessions. I will always be thinking about how I can help you grow, but for best results, this takes dedicated thought from your end as well. Share your own insights so I can respond to them.
Lead with positive resilience. I don’t expect metrics to motivate people. People motivate people. I’ll give external validation but there’s also your own intrinsic motivation that I can’t give. This has been key to my own journey - I’ve been lucky to have fantastic managers but I’ve also had to learn to manage my own insecurities (an ongoing process!). Let me know if I can support you more here.
How I give and receive feedback
My feedback philosophy is flexibility. I’m open to receiving and delivering feedback in both ad hoc and in intentional containers, whether voiced out loud or written. I’ll note quick feedback after the moments that trigger it, and then recap in dedicated 1:1s to review consolidated learnings.
In summary
Generally speaking - I’m often most comfortable when I get to be an editor. It’s when I naturally ease into flow state - when I trust my judgment and get to bring out the best of the people I’m working with.
The way I operate somewhat draws upon the Chinese businessman paradox. Cedric Chin (linked) puts it in a more tactical way but the relational way is - they get drunk together and then make millions, not the other way around.
It reminds me of Joan Didion’s portrayal of Martha Stewart’s “proprietary intimacy.” I can’t turn off the passion but I can temper it. Refine the zeal with grace. Understand when to give and when to hold back.
Looking forward to working together, whether now or in the future 🙂
Interested in more on today's weird work world? Sign up for my infrequent newsletter hyperdisciplinary.
Today's visual poem: another to file away into the loose canon formed by the strange medical condition that is ‘young, hot, and single in new york city,’ as put by an ex coworker. Symptoms: to be young and distraught. Cure: to clutch the unbearable lightness of being, buoyed by transient glows, anchored by depths unseen.
For the best reading experiences on these — take an extra minute and take it slow, reread a couple times, let the mind simmer. Poetry demands sincere attention.
A snack to prepare the palate for today:
To say homeboy, daydream, decanter, meadowland, rhythm.
To say anything.
To listen to the sum of every silence.
To give a name to the space full of promise.
And then to fall silent.
—Yuri Herrera, Kingdom Cons
Thanks to my supporters for enabling my art. Paid or free, you can subscribe here to receive monthlyish updates on my creative work.
What do you do when you have people you love who live 3,000 miles away? You go see them. You receive their love and wonder at the grace to know it. You indulge in vibez. Below — a letter to my past month out west and a small tribute to Seattle, Portland, SF, LA and their beautiful inhabitants. (Also a response to my mother recently asking me 什么是 vibe? Translated: what is vibe? Answer: This is viiibe.)
Thanks to my supporters for enabling my art. Paid or free, you can subscribe here to receive monthlyish updates on my creative work.
"An adventure time was, if you calmed yourself to its receipt."
—Adam Haslett, Union Atlantic
Hi, friends.
The world and our hearts are still at war and it shows no signs of ceasing. Madness. Calling for artists to give language and sign and tribute to terrible times.
But art is hard. Hearts are harried. Who has time to receive the adventure of time?
These past weeks I did things like pick up a peanut butter chocolate chip cookie at a bake sale for Ukraine. Watch Questlove's spirited Summer of Soul, Taylor Swift's raw folklore studio sessions, Min Jin Lee's epic Pachinko. Play Connect 4 at a dive bar. Sip lambrusco at a pizza bar. Twirl in a dance bar. Loosen the creative impulses otherwise held taut by the demands of daily work. Till the soil for new seedlings.
With that, a little illustrated photo poem on love, life, and labor.
Thanks to my supporters for enabling my art. Paid or free, you can subscribe here to receive monthlyish updates on my creative work.
I almost didn't write this recap. Year two of independent consulting during year two of a global pandemic didn't feel worth publicizing. (Are there not far more impressive and devastating things that demand our attention?) But as I noted in my consulting manifesto and continue to remind myself, small is beautiful again, and so here we are again, another year to archive under blistering suns and soft moons.
Intros first, for those who are new here: I'm Vicky, an editor, writer, and designer who thinks strategically and systematically. Applied to current market context, I'm a brand and content strategist. And in today's wild world, I'm an independent agent via Studio QQ, who found herself ambushed by the vagaries of indefinite contract work during a global medical-economic-ecologic-socio-cultural crisis.
Working by short term contracts is like seeing capitalism in its underpants. Once intimidating, the structure—in pandemic duress—reveals its vulnerabilities, whispering yes, market value is arbitrary, yes we expect you to keep wrangling the algorithms and human desire at the expense of mental health, sorry not sorry, but still count yourself lucky?
In any case, whether you're a fellow flex worker, considering the jump from a traditional full-time job, or just curious about the independent work lifestyle—I hope this reflection sheds illuminating light on otherwise opaque industry underbellies. I hope this paves the way for the fearless ones to come. For those who come not armed with corporate networks or generational wealth or racial privilege, but compassion, grit, and of course, general badassery.
[FYI this is longish, as I wanted to be detailed and transparent. Read it when you have the time, and share share share with anyone who could benefit.]
Table of Contents
- What I do
- Work highlights
- Process highlights
- Writing progress
- Tough times
- Plot twist!
- How to support my independent work
It took me two years to transition from my last role in:
marketing for millennial-oriented consumer products—think daily digital campaign management, tight-paced creative production, influencer and brand partnerships, the stuff you see on subway and Instagram ads—
towards brand and content strategy for software and service-based companies—think pulling complex, messy topics and themes, synthesizing and writing insights, editing down to the core concepts and stories, and structuring a plan for ambitious yet realistic execution.
The lesson? Functional and industry pivots are hard. I'd say two years is on the quicker end of the timeline, accelerated by a hot labor market for digital skillsets and loads of extra work I spent building my media collective Currant (doubling as a portfolio piece, which came up in pretty much every conversation I had). Decisions to pass or take on projects were made with much more deliberation than in my first year. As a whole, my project range reflected more generalist than specialist scopes, as I wanted each engagement to be a slow turn towards new directions.
Some things I'm proud of:
- Honing communication practices across time zones and cultures with my first international client, for a project bringing an Asian product to the global market through an education-driven marketing strategy.
- Formulating brand strategy and positioning for a sexy Fortune 500 retail company for a 2022 product line release. That's it, that's the tweet. [Example of strategy framing below.]
- Solidifying my conviction into applied expertise in the social impact space, through developing brand, content, and social strategy for GOOD WORX, a social impact and DEI consultancy. (And, referring someone for the next stage of execution! Feels good to entrust stewardship.) [Brainstorming and auditing exercise below.]
- Sharpening up chops as an editor and web designer through Climate, Changed: a feature series for Currant around how climate change is affecting the food & drink we know and love [below!]. Also through relaunching as a food media collective and articulating the vision behind it.
- Experimenting with organizational design for Currant. Dreaming and scheming with our four-person distributed team. Meeting lovely people from across the world in our Discord. Talking partnerships. Hosting our first in-person brainstorming offsite. Documenting company culture and working processes. I'd like to make our internal Notion an open source resource when it's ready—as a primer, here's a mini handbook for working with me. [Below: a taste of Currant at work.]
Process! Oft hidden yet deeply fulfilling. Things I enjoyed:
- Developing relationships with studios I admire and respect: data viz studio Polygraph, brand creative team Another, design studio XXIX, culture change agency Invisible Hand. (Always grateful for the one who got me started: Elizabeth Tilton and the Oyster Sunday team.)
- Scoped out my first FAANG (er, MAANG?) projects, around supporting ad marketing and creator initiatives. Good data points to note on the subworlds of subcontracting—and where I found my past marketing experience came into helpful play.
- Wrote my working manifesto and realized my ~proprietary edge~ that I bring: I infuse art back into technology. Sure, I can whip up performance reports and SEO and social copy, but since I'm a literary nerd, I do it with style and flow. (Brainstorming on an essay on the creativity of business writing.)
- Refined my workflow with Figma and Figjam, which I use for brainstorming, research, auditing, and drafting. This has been gold, as I'm equal parts verbal and visual thinker. Clients also enjoy working with it and getting to participate in my process, whether they're new to or familiar with the platform. [Quick research example below.]
- Translating work between industries. I largely worked across the hospitality, media, and social impact sectors, so writing startup-oriented content strategy tips for Julia Lipton's Awesome People newsletter (thanks B!) pushed me to think and scope with another type of audience: early stage founders and VCs.
- Cultivating my creative community. As someone with few real life friends who overlap with my professional disciplines, I spend lots of time on Discord and virtual coffees, and a bit on social media and Slack. Each conversation an infusion of energy. [Below: my profile for Tiny Factories, a tribe of creators supporting each other.]
This isn't directly tied to my independent consulting work, but it fuels it. (We could call this the meta-work?) I can't help but write, all the time. My reminders app holds an embarrassing backlog of half-baked thoughts before transferring them to my perfectly chaotic Obsidian. I love squeezing into the gritty, squishy corners of culture, pushing and pulling our biases, thinking critically and compassionately about why we work. Some things I published:
- Profiled NYC-based chef Lucas Sin for Currant, whom Food & Wine named a Best New Chef of 2021 five months later.
- Wrote and photographed a piece in DC for HK-based creative culture publication MAEKAN: The Business of Changing Taste — Foreign National's Erik Bruner Yang. Got to work with the iconic Charis Poon on edits and Nate Kan on production. Possible thanks to the legendary Vina Sananikone. [Below: sooo satisfying to hit that homepage feature.]
- Self-published a culture crit piece on hautecore on my blog, which got me in touch with the Real Life Mag team (thanks K!). Noodling on a pitch around the history of community design for them, after a good convo with a friend around web3 ethics (thanks C!).
- Photographed Seattle-based jam-producer Ayako & Family, for Currant's upcoming feature series around climate change through the lens of jam. [Sneak peek below.]
- Gained personal press hits: the kind Daisy Zeijlon interviewed me in a roundup of food media innovators for Lunch Rush. The lovely Kristen Siharath from Mailchimp interviewed me about demand generation, then the team transitioned, then they got acquired and things got nuttier, so TBD on pub date.
- Rest of World Editor Louise Matsakis retweeted my thread about Meaghan Tobin's article "Why China’s crypto cowboys are fleeing to Texas."
- Planning a fun (!) editorial series for my newsletter and website, featuring smart, so smart friends with collectively eclectic areas of domain expertise. [Noodling in process below.]
It ain't always sunny times…
- It's still COVID. Caring for self and loved ones demands lots of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual labor. Relearning all the time that it's okay to stay still when I don't have the margins for much else.
- Staying focused on the long goal through the slogs, which meant declining work to make way for the work I wanted to grow in. The summer months were a relentless cycle of personal biz dev: exploratory calls, scoping out new projects, building my portfolio, developing my methodology and positioning, and applying to jobs. At the peak, I engaged around 20-30 people and companies per month.
- This is another convo, but healthcare. Switching from Oscar to the public health marketplace was one of the best decisions I made. Of course the digital and physical UX suck, but in return, I gained better coverage and a deeper understanding of how public welfare actually works. No empathy like lived experience.
- Realizing the limitations of going it solo, vis-à-vis growth potential when embedded in a long term team, where I'd have steady mentorship and functional support, fuller enablement to scale and specialize.
Which brings me to an unexpected curve in the path: I'm sunsetting Studio QQ to join NewtonX, the world's leading B2B market research company, as our Content Strategist.
I'm excited, especially because this decision didn't come easily. Took a bit of time for my head to catch up to my gut and articulate the driving reason for the change: I'm not just here to build content strategy; we're here to build an organization. We're redefining scale and doing it methodically. With lots of growth on the horizon, joining now means making impact on the foundational level—empowering the people around me—while having the resources to dream on higher levels. (Also, we're hiring! Across marketing, product, people, sales, and engineering.)
After these two years, it's hard for me to get excited about the current dialogue around the creator economy. I'm not a full-time creator, but there are parallels to me accidentally going indie while early career, without corporate networks of scale. Still, I'm grateful for the anchor in working with businesses rather than relying on the end consumer. I suppose that's why we need people with careful, deliberate optimism to work on this, from the unions to the community organizers to the venture capitalists. Because they see a future I'm too tired to envision.
But alas! So many! Things! To make! If you want to join me on the fun and unpredictable journey, consider supporting me at $5/mon or $50/yr. (You can also sign up for free! Makes my day either way.) The main perk: you'll enable me to keep creating things that touch others, in small and big ways. The tangible perks: you'll receive intimate musings on work and life and peeks at creative projects in the works, with original photo, design, and illustration woven through. In a nutshell: expect a party in your inbox, a couple times a month. It feels ironic to ask for your support given what I just talked about, but maybe this is me believing in the future I can't see.
Thanks to my family, for everything. A special thanks to my coach Julia Regan—for listening, calling me out, and nudging me on.
Indulge me for my redundancy, but there are truly too many people to thank. You know who you are. Much love to my existing subscribers. I suppose that's the theme of these everlasting and neverending years. Gratitude.
If you're curious, my year one recap of independent consulting here: Field Notes: 2020.
On my first year of independent work
This year was about staying afloat.
We all lost many things in 2020, some more than others, and I'm lucky enough to feel grateful in the midst of it all that I don't know what to think of it. Equal parts recap, reflection, and release, this post details my first year of freelancing during the first year of a global pandemic. For anyone considering the leap into independent consulting (contracting, freelancing, etc)—I hope it helps. Inspired by Tom Critchlow's indie-versary recaps.
I left my last 10-7 desk job on Wednesday, November 6, 2019, intending to freelance a bit as I recruited for the next job. Shortly after, Covid-19 tsunami'd our lives, breaking through our safe harbors. Each wave a new lesson: never mind the work, quick, preserve the life first!
My full-time conversations came to an indefinite hold, I plunged into the project-to-project flow, and incredulously, my haphazard collection of flotation devices buoyed me through the waves.
The sinking forces were also many: I'm the first in my family to be born in the states, with no corporate network from working at a brand name company, no reputation from staying in the same industry, no benefit of the doubt from looking or acting in ways society glorifies, and no cachet from an aspirational social media presence.
Yet I have giving and empowering mentors, talented and kind peers, sacrificial family and entrepreneurial blood, and divine grace. Plus the privilege of English and digital fluency to navigate government benefit systems. My parents left everything halfway through their life so I ostensibly wouldn't have to, but what can they say? Like father, like daughter.
The world needs more indie and more weird, pushing its boundaries and constructs. Here's the beginning of my tribute to that.
Table of Contents
- The Operating Work
- The Speculative Work
- The Stewardship Work
- The Life Work
- Onwards to 2021
The Operating Work
As natural, my projects reflected the (net)work of my last full time job in brand and product marketing. Breaking down my projects (by revenue) and how I'm planning for them to evolve:
Notes:
- Most of my work in 2020 spanned the gamut of digital marketing: content and campaign strategy, copywriting, design, project management, asset organizing, and customer service. For small to mid-size clients across consumer product, food & hospitality, and media.
- I've done a lot of social media work over the past few years, and I'm ready to dial it down. Open to the strategy of it but the execution can be relentless: rewarding when reactive, attached to optics and signaling, and co-dependent on dubious, slithering algorithms.
- I've noodled on web design and curation since ye olde days of Blogger and Tumblr, and this year I started creating websites for people and ideas larger than myself. Of the six sites, I built five on Semplice, a design-driven platform based on WordPress that needs little coding ability. A website example here. Aiming to keep pushing in immersive narrative design.
- Key moment when I scored my first project through cold application—as opposed to existing connection—for a lovely team at a literary magazine.
- I pitched my first published personal essay (w/photos) for food publication The Counter. Big thanks to my editors Mike and Jesse!
- I occasionally picked up 1-2 week sprints, in copywriting and UX design.
In 2021, I'd like for my roles to evolve from bolt-on digital marketer towards something like a strategic partner in brand content and media systems. Visualizing how I see those elements in relationship below, as a sort of spidery-flowery web molecule:
Content: What are the important stories to tell? The nucleus.
Media: How might we communicate them? The tendrils.
Systems: How does it all work together? The whole.
How I envision future engagements might look:
- Building editorial platforms for organizations to establish themselves as thoughtful media and content leaders. Orgs spanning design & innovation consultancies, food & hospitality, social equity-driven nonprofits, and new consumer product ventures.
- Upgrading digital marketing systems for editorial publications, potentially including audience development and engagement
- Helping independent journalists build niche news products for wild times
Today more than ever, we need individuals rather than corporations to guide the web’s future. The web is called the web because its vitality depends on just that—an interconnected web of individual nodes breathing life into a vast network. This web needs to actually work for people instead of being powered by a small handful of big corporations—like Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, and Google.
More succinctly put, I'd like to:
Help organizations deepen their voice as media brands, and media publications strengthen their digital presence. While holistically serving their human communities.
Reach me at vicky [at] studioqq.co if you'd like to talk about working together!
The Speculative Work
I wrote 67 newsletters (1.3 per week!) this year, to two groups of good people. I'm shocked, because that entailed a massive amount of reading, note taking, synthesizing, writing, and editing. It's a far cry from my past life sending emails to 120,000 people for the chance to win $1,200 worth of normcore travel gear. I now write to 1,000 people who are interested in questioning that very relationship: how might society, capital, and government live symbiotically?
Currant
Currant is my food media baby. It's a hybrid model of many things: global publication/community, public/gated space, and passive/interactive fun. It's thrilling but creating an amorphous publication in all strategic and operational senses is ten thousand fridge loads of time and work. Raising ten thousand glasses to my inimitable partner Sarah Cooke and our contributing team members. Building our team up = one of the most richly rewarding experiences of my year. ♥️
Highlights: I waited 2.5 hours in NYC's freezing winter AM for a rapid test before interviewing writer Mayukh Sen, which got picked up by Harvard's Nieman Lab. I canceled our first physical press party, and now we've opened our Discord. And much more, which you can read in my editor's letter in our 2020 Currant Annual Report below.
If we're lucky, we're still kicking. And if we're still kicking, we're still creatures that need to eat, through our zealous days of youth and retired days of senility and the muddle that is everything in between. That's why Currant exists: to clear the way through the mud. To uncover and connect food truths, carefully devein systems of their sh*t like our parents do with shrimp, and treat each other with dignity in the process.
Writing
In 2016, I started writing a Tinyletter to keep up with people I cared about. It's since matured into Curious Futures, a lovely regenerative space on Substack where I noodle on media, tech, and culture. (Literally—I use Adobe Creative Cloud to make hand drawn illustrations and designs for paid subscribers.) My readers support me, I support those whom I read, and we meet new people in the process. A blessed low stakes socializing.
My writing is hard to categorize or market, which I'm fine with. All I want is a digital cubby where I don't have to worry about growth or audience acquisition or SEO optimization and just let the words somersault out, stored in a safe squishy place.
Who is this for?
You like creative nonfiction but not enough to subscribe to The New Yorker
You’re disillusioned with your job or social status yet resentful of how ungrateful you are
You love the big coastal cities but for good reasons don’t live in one and would gladly pay rent vicariously (through me) while receiving updates on urban culture
You relate to high nerd energy, deadpan irony, and/or devastating truths
You wonder, there must be more than this
OpenIDEO
Following two months of multi-continental interviews, I joined the OpenIDEO New York Chapter Organizer team last April, along with my wonderful team members Kaleb, Gayatri, and Jess. Last summer, we devised an educational design sprint via Discord and Twitter, based on the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored Food System Vision Prize.
It's not easy to distill "innovative solutions to pressing social and environmental issues" into forward movement, whether resource-rich or not. Highlight: learning from chapter organizers across the globe, from London to Lagos to Beirut to Mexico City.
The Stewardship Work
Behind and before every project, every break, and every crisis comes the realities of ongoing business development. Not always in balance, but at least attempted. 🙂
- Continuous emails and calls with experienced people I admire, recruiters, friends starting new ventures, and those considering the freelance leap
- Contributing to seven distributed teams and digital communities
- Rebranding Studio QQ and IG @studioqq.co
- Pruning my digital garden. Even if I feel an urge to scrap all my digital/social platforms twice a year, I like how each contains distributed pieces of me, withholding full expression because they were never meant to carry that kind of weight on their own.
- Religiously updating my career and revenue planning sheets - color coding spreadsheets is a sick love of mine?
- Reading, listening, watching, & attending interesting things! Especially people and projects that unapologetically retain their wildness.
I don’t want to see the uniqueness and wildness of Chinese literature tamed and consequently lost in the English translation.
The Life Work
I have never relied so much on public institutions for my personal welfare, and I am a better citizen and journalist for it. I waded through New York's Health Plan Marketplace, applied for freelancer benefits c/o the CARES Act, incorporated my LLC, started my business bank account, sorted out taxes (I hope), and designed my own invoicing and project management systems. This all takes an obscene amount of time and maintenance, with continued updates as I learn from more established indies.
Onwards to 2021
I'd like to talk about 2020 without sounding trite or earnest or jaded or weary and I'm not sure I'm there yet, but at the least—my work this past year was highly stressful yet exhilarating, affirming yet frustrating.
I've also talked a lot about work, without mentioning rest. I know I'm going to burn out soon if I don't enforce a break for myself. Hopefully that'll happen sooner rather than later, but given that I have no dependents and no underlying health conditions—I can comparatively afford to be generous with my time, applying my margins of energy to support others whose reserves have gone negative.
Here's to another year, a little more positive.
If you'd like to talk about working together, you can reach me at vicky [at] studioqq.co. If you'd just like to talk, ping me at vickygu30 [at] gmail.com.
Special thanks:
For your advice and time: Paul Jun, Dan Oshinsky, Jodi Bryce, Julia Regan, Michala Sabnani, Deanna Ting, Hannah Chloe Lee, Rachel Meade Smith, Travers Johnson, Michelle Lin Park, Cherie Hu, Matt Daniels (for the best rejection email I've ever gotten)
For your mentorship: Elizabeth Tilton, Tessa Maffucci
For your encouragement and inspiration: Sarah Cooke, Eugene Kan, Charis Poon, Mayukh Sen, Tae McKenzie, Tom Critchlow, Will Pay, Alex Larson, Nora Keller, Anna Wilhelm, Dami Aboaba, CJ Quartlbaum, JP Preisser, Emerline Ji, Mark Stenberg, Patrick Moore
For your partnership: Sam Rose, Sally Luu, Leah Herman, Tavia Kowalchuk, Mike Lindgren, Jasmine Chou, Mary B Safrit, Luke Schmuecker, Caroline Cotto, Kate Anthony
For your support: Hayden Jeong, Rona Shen, Sam Hillman, Chaoyu Huang, Hannah Keem, Carolyn Hill, Ashley Hong, Melanie Henderson, Bailey Smith-Dewey, Anna Rickrode, and my family