By Soly Hak

To be more succinct.

That’s it, that’s the end of the blog.

Oh, that’s more of a Tweet than a blog post? Oh okay, then, I guess I better expand.

I learnt a lot of things while interning at Intelligent Ink. Sure, a lot of it was about copywriting and content marketing, but a lot of it was just about myself!

Before this devolves into an introspective, navel-gazing piece that benefits no one but myself, I should reflect that these are the sorts of things that I think would benefit anyone in their early 20s to think about. Especially if they’ve just waded their way out of the quagmire of academics, realising – truly, deeply – that that way lies madness (at least for now).

If you’re trying to figure out where to go from here, what you want out of the real world and what you can contribute to it, you’ve got to practice at being in the real world. What’s better practice for the real world than an internship?

Real life as you picture it (distant, in the future, something other people do) doesn’t exist. There’s no mountaintop you can stand on top of and say, yup I’ve finished, I’ve done it. There’s only one place, and then the next, and then the next. And if you’re happy with getting to see different places, maybe you’ll find where you need to end up along the way. This was a good place to start!

You’ll do a lot of stuff and be a lot of things. You’ll never be finished changing. So you never have to worry that you’ll be stuck.

But, the copywriting stuff first…

Firstly: relax.

You have to train yourself out of a lot of things coming out of academics. Being overly formal. Impersonality (the illusion of personal distance). A tendency towards the sesquipedalianism. But most of it boils down to letting a bit of yourself back into the way you write, the way you form arguments (I mean, ideas!), the way you articulate opinions and ideas that are in fact all fed into by who you are as a person. The stuff that has long been buffed away and trained out of your writing for the sake of verisimilitude to objectivity. Put those pronouns back in! Put yourself back in.

I’ve learnt to put myself back into my writing.

Secondly, I’ve learnt what copywriting and content marketing actually is.

Probably a good thing if I want to keep doing it in the future, I guess.

This idea in your head that copywriting is all slogans and persuasion. Manipulation and a silver tongue. If any of that’s true, good content achieves that by being personable. By being relatable. By being as close to authentic as possible. And that means being confident enough to know that your authentic self is a self that people want to engage with.

You don’t have to strive for some ideal of unimpeachable tone and style. I mean, who wants to read something that sounds like someone suffered to write it? Well, maybe Russian lit majors.

Actually, it turns out I’ve tricked you, because the stuff about copywriting turns out to apply equally to things I’ve learnt about myself (and how I try to function in the world). You provide value when you are bringing something unique, something of yourself, to the table – Oops, would you look at that – you’re already yourself; you’re already halfway there (I’m rounding up).

There’s a balance you have to strike between editing and overthinking. If I’d stop to think about how exactly I wanted this blog post to look when finished, I would have never even started it. There’s no way to know exactly what the end result of something you’re making will be, especially if you just keep it in your head.

I’m trying hard to stop thinking about some abstract ideal I want to achieve, and instead just be happy with productivity, with each experience as it comes, with life in the living of it.

Intelligent Ink has given me so much space to learn, and time to figure it out. They’ve retaught me the importance of a positive attitude, a smile, and my own intuition. Instead of measuring myself in metrics, figuring well, I got an 85%, that means I’m 85% talented right? I will be able to just say what my talents are! I’ll always be grateful to them.

I’ll always remember the Inkers as a bunch of people who sincerely care about their clients, about doing good work, about spreading stories that would otherwise go unheard, and about exceeding expectations to put their clients in the best position. I’ll always remember to push myself and others to do the best possible, period.

I have a page of notes in a rainbow of colours that summarise best what each of them individually taught me. But I think I’ll keep that for myself. If you want, you can come and intern here and make your own list.

I’m a bit sad that my time at Intelligent Ink is coming to a close, but I feel so much better prepared and excited about what awaits me, with a lot more confidence in what I can do, what I want to do, than I ever did before. Lukewarm is no good. Trying to straddle the line between what you think you should do and what you think someone – or the world! – wants you to do is no good. You work quickly once you just work. You can always make it better. Perfect is boring – and no one in the real world has time for it anyway.