Life lessons are tough. At least when you are going through the process. But all lessons have a price and you have to be ready to pay for it. July is a time to look back and see how the first half of the year went by. It’s also a time when we think about what you planned, hoped, what went wrong, what went better than expected, and the plan thereafter.

Today I will tell you about somethings I learned in the first half of 2019, which changed how I looked at life, blogging and the rest.

#1 Do you even know this person?

I learned you hardly know anyone in the online space. It’s easy to create a fictitious persona, make-believe qualifications, and make believe relations. While some fiction is noteworthy signs of creativity others border on the grey verging on black. With cyber laws and cybersecurity what they are in India, you still have limited options of being safe.

Facebook group and whats app group admins, especially need to be careful. If someone is a co-admin and does something against the policy of these platforms, you as a co-admin may face action, depending on how severe the issue is. The minimum being, losing your accounts. For that matter, you hardly know anyone for real. But online it’s even easier to fake it. Trust is often misused.

I have started checking LinkedIn and other professional networking sites ,for more understanding about the person who I work with.I hope you have added your qualifications and professional details in LinkedIn.

Instagram, Facebook, and Whatsapp all facing outages, with the news trending on Twitter. Funny memes showing how Twitter surviving flooded my timeline. The many people who have built up their business and workplace on borrowed land of Instagram stress about whether it was them or everyone.

A Tweeter friend, talked about how she had switched on and off the wifi, the phone, logged in and out of Insta and lost her cool, till she found Instagram outage, a trending topic on Twitter! This, we have all faced at some point or other.

#2 Continue learning: Online courses and adult education

I managed to finish one course on Cousera, complete the basic blogging course by Blogchatter’s Credibility program and doing my homework for Creative writing course. July brings the Videoblogging course from Blogchatter. This year is turning out to be full of fun education. I am also doing a course by Pat Flynn(he gifted me this SPI pro theme).

#3 Reading makes you Smart:Books, Books, and More books

Reading makes you smarter and there’s scientific research to back that.I am reading the book Blog by numbers.I finished Write edit Promote, Geethica’s book on Delhi’s cafes and conversation, Dare eat that  .I am reading a lot of medical books and missing out on fiction. But that’s going to change this month. I have plans. I finally finished, the This is marketing by Seth Godin and still deciding whether I should do a blog post review, video review, or both. I wish I could clone myself.

I am getting my sixth book  Nutrition secrets ready for its kindle avatar, and I am glad I could do this with the help of Blogchatter ebook festival, for the third year in a row. If you are blogging anywhere check out this platform which understands your pains as few do.

#5 Working is serving God:On  the work front

I am now a self-employed professional, I talked about it during my June half-yearly review post. I love the flexibility it has given me. As a woman, I have always been looking for financial freedom, and I started earning by giving tuitions early in life. My sister helped find students for me who were mostly her friends. I even worked as a shop assistant briefly during the summer holidays, after class twelves, while I awaited my results. Didn’t have a smartphone, computer, or the money to buy one. Blogging on the phone or otherwise was not known. Neither was digital entrepreneurship even in the vocabulary. You had to be physically present everywhere, and that made things difficult. But now once I have discovered it, I realized, the internet is powerful. It opens up opportunities not present in the location. It allows transactions previously not possible.

#6 Writing is therapy: From the Blogging, writing editing world

I reviewed the PDFELEMENT, and this video will tell you about my favorite feature. I am exploring more vlogging options, platforms hacks, and of course podcasting. Just needed to calm down before going full throttle. Google is making everyone crazy with their updates, and I stopped checking.

I am doing some Medical content editing and it’s good work. It meets my skill sets, qualifications and passions perfectly. Never knew there was a requirement for this kind of academic writing in India, till I was approached. Good that there are many ways, to work and earn online. The secret is to keep working and persisting.

#7 Nature imparts wisdom: Wisdom from under the Mango tree

Nothing is definite. Someone you thought was gold, had chipped golden paint. Someone who thought beyond redemption was forgiven. There’s a way of going forward, without allotting blame, without knowing and confirming who is right and wrong, as long as it’s not illegal or criminal.

Tolerating nonsense to avoid confrontation, is always a bad choice. Because even if no one else knows, you know. If you don’t have an opportunity to correct a wrong, breathe and leave cold or appear to do so. Don’t rant, rave and threaten. Do what you have to do.

So what’s next in July?Plenty.I am cleaning up the balcony garden and deciding what I want to do next. I am thinking a lot, and that needs to be streamlined with more action.

The little one is learning a lot of difficult to spell Bengali words. I am enjoying being a mother. It’s fun and a chance of making a difference in the future, where I may not be present