Channels for your Personal and Professional Growth
Have you heard about Telegram? During the pandemic in 2020, this messenger app gained about 100 million new users and still continues to grow. In April 2020, Telegram was adding 1.5 million new users daily. As more and more people around me downloaded the app, I also acquired it (so much about peer pressure 😉). At first, I only used it to communicate with friends and family. Only after some time did I discover the unlimited world of the Telegram channels.
When you join a channel, which is basically a public group, you cannot send messages, but you can see all the previously posted content and (usually) comment on it. Some Telegram channels were in the news for spreading false information about COVID-19, but if you search for the right ones, you can get a lot of value for your personal as well as professional growth. That said, here are my 4 favourite Telegram channels that brighten up my day and help me widen my horizon.
All the good things
Who isn’t tired of the news? Whether we read, watch or listen to them, it’s always the same: It’s all about death, disease and devastation. Is there really nothing good happening in the world? There is, but you have to actively look for it. And this channel is ideal for giving you the daily dose of positive news. The publishers state that their goal is to shift people’s attention from bad to good. They do that by posting short texts about happenings that are making the world a better place.
Here is one recent example:
How a self-taught electrician in Malawi brought electricity to his village
According to UN-backed Sustainable Energy for All, only 11 percent of Malawi’s population of 19 million people have access to electricity, making it one of the least electrified nations in the world. The people of the Yobe Nkosi village are part of the 96 percent of the country’s rural population who are not connected to power. Thanks to one of its inhabitants, however, that’s about to change.
After getting an education 40km away, Colred Nkosi came back to his village and made it his goal to bring electricity to his community. He did this by tapping into the fast-flowing river that ran past his house. After putting his bicycle into the stream, he discovered that the force of the water was strong enough to turn the pedals.
Not long after that, Colred began experimenting with dynamos and also figured out a way to create a powerful turbine out of an old maize sheller (a piece of machinery that shells corn kernels off the cob). He then used metal cables strung between trees to transmit the generated power.
As reported by euronews, the self-taught electrician charges his neighbors only €1 a month for maintenance costs, while the renewable electricity itself is free for all. Being connected to electricity means that the children of the village don’t have to study by candlelight, as Colred did when he was a child. What’s more, this access to power also benefits the environment: “Once villages and schools have electricity…people will no longer cut down trees [for] charcoal,” says Colrerd, noting that he hopes to replicate his system in nearby villages too.
Positivity
You probably already know that an optimistic attitude on the inside changes how you view and perceive your outside world. As mentioned before, I believe that our daily dose of negative news predominates the positive ideas that are sleeping inside of us. Similar to the previous channel, the host of “Positivity” sends a few posts daily with short, encouraging words or pictures that will brighten up your day.
Here is one of them:
Improve Your Life: 8 Things You Should Do Every Day.
1) Get out in nature. You probably seriously underestimate how important this is.
2) Exercise.
3) Spend time with friends and family.
4) Express gratitude.
5) Meditate.
6) Get enough sleep.
7) Challenge yourself.
8) Laugh.
Tech for Good
We all know that the world is changing at an ever faster pace. New challenges are constantly emerging, requiring creative solutions. I am courageous enough to state that all of those solutions will have to make use of technology in some way. If you are looking for innovative ways to use technology, this channel is a great place to give you some inspiration on how to use it to make the world a better place.
I especially liked this one:
Beach boys
Imagine yourself on your favorite beach. You are lying on the sand under the sun, relaxing and feeling the fullness of life. Your hands take the sand and slowly pour it. Then, suddenly you realize you have picked up a cigarette butt (a piece of plastic, a bottle cap — you name it). Sounds familiar?
A partnership by two companies, Poralu Marine and 4ocean, has got your back. Their beach cleaning robot BeBot is meant to tackle the sand garbage problem.
The device is powered by the sun, digging and sifting sand to a depth of 10 cm. Its grid traps waste of more than one square centimeter. BeBot is not yet autonomous — an operator remotely controls at up to 300 meters. But it is still helpful. It is fully electric, takes on the hard everyday handwork made by volunteers, and can clean as many as three thousand square meters of the beach in just an hour. The team is currently testing BeBot on the Florida coast and plan to send another device to work in Hawaii soon.
IDEA FACTORY official
This channel is quite new and the perfect complement to your project which you have developed at a Moonshot Pirates Bootcamp or at the #beapirate challenge. Besides giving news and helpful information about the startup world, you can also participate in a weekly contest and receive a monetary reward for your idea.
Here is one of the latest post they shared for business:
Startup studios briefly: types, approaches, perspectives
Every person who has ever thought about his own project knows that the key to success is a minimum of mistakes. The less you need to fix, the faster and better the process goes. That is the reason entrepreneurs and startups begin to unite in the studios.
What studios are there?
The US Department of Commerce identifies 4 main types of parties:
1. Business incubators help startups to build a solid foundation for growth. The list of their functions is quite wide: it may include mentoring, technical support, assistance with finding clients, promoting in the market, and so on.
2. Business accelerators — unions that tend to get involved in the high-availability phase of the product and help the teams for a short time, long enough to prepare for a major investment.
3. Venture funds are normally looking for ready-made projects with sales and good growth potential, therefore they often conduct a long due diligence process in order not to make the wrong choice.
4. Venture builders — a form of cooperation that doesn’t just support startups, creates them itself. Such studios take full responsibility for the business: from idea to sale, or profit.
But what is the point of cooperation?
Startup studios can be compared to manufactures of the 16th century: their task is to speed up the process of product creation and create special vacancies.
How to find party members?
For this, both traditional and modern methods are used. You may apply almost all types of assessments, interviews, as well as business games, case methods, and simulations. All these approaches make it possible to identify people who are keen on entrepreneurship and who share your values.
Perspectives of startup studios
It is not a secret their number is growing rapidly all over the world, but they have serious barriers to entry and a number of problems. For example, trying to squeeze the maximum out of the project, even to the detriment of investors, is a common thing. If only the entrepreneurs resolve the difficulties, studios reach their full potential. Nevertheless, it is already clear that they are superior to individual project managers.
What all of those channels have in common is that they help you stay optimistic and inspired in all that you do. Which one did you find the most interesting? Share that in the comments below!
