Hi guys, my name is Trong, people usually call me Trong Awesome coz that’s my Instagram username, and I’m awesome too.
Currently, I’m a product designer based in Singapore, but I come from Viet Nam. You can recognize where I am from based on my accent. Yeah, it’s my Vietnamese-English accent. I’ve been working in Singapore for 2 years and a half, and my English accent didn’t change much.
As a product designer, presenting is a very important skill. It doesn’t matter how good our design are, if we’re suck at selling ideas, we’re failed. Product designers are the ones who talk a lot. We talk to our design folks during brainstorming. We talk to users during user interviews. We share findings and insights from our research. We share our ideas with the team, to convince members to invest time and effort in it.
As the early day of my career, I didn’t care much about presenting. I was a doer, hard-working and I didn’t talk much. I believed my works speak louder than words. But I realized that it might work for artists where the audience will feel their artworks. But for designers, especially product designers, it doesn’t. I only realized how essential communication is after several years working at a big design team at Carousell.
But not only designers need to be good at presenting ideas or public speaking. All occupations need to be good at it if we want to succeed.
I’m reading the book ‘How to fail at almost everything and still win big’ by Scott Adam. There’s one idea I fall in love with is that every skill you acquire will double your odds of success. For sure that it’s not fully true, not every skill will double our odds of success. But seeing it that way will make us more motivated.
In fact, if we acquire some skills, our odds of success will be double, even triple. One of them is public speaking. For designers, it’s presenting skill, or selling ideas. Because no matter how good our ideas, if we can’t convince stakeholders, team members, those ideas are useless.
I’m still in a state of practicing. I know one of the best exercises to be good at it is voice recording. If you ever try to record your voice then listen again, you will feel it very weird, like ‘Is that my voice? It’s terrible`. Everybody feels the same way. But anything is learnable, we just need some practice.
My voice and accent are terrible too, I have to be honest. That’s the main reason I’m creating this podcast. To consistently practice my voice, my accent, to be better at talking.
The main topics of this channel will about design, creativity, and stories around the life of a Vietnamese in Singapore.
If you resonate with me, let’s connect and practice together.
