Make yourself become an E.V.A product!

I don’t know if anyone reading this post is induced to click the link just by skimming the title. Some with unhealthy mind may associate the title with some kind of hot stuff on many tabloids or websites. However, the content of the post has nothing to do with thing that may be conjured up in your minds.

You may ask me what I mean by E.V.A? E.V.A is simply the abbreviation for ever-value-added, one term I just have made up though I’m not quite sure about its grammatical exactness. And E.V.A product is used to refer to the product which is relentless changing to adapt to the new situation, following a spiral innovation to become more and more perfect.

Innovation is one of the most wonderful words that I keep telling to myself recent days. This word is not too difficult to know for non-native English speaker like me, however, it takes time to understand this word fully. Life changes at breakneck speed and there often exists time-lagging between inside and outside of an object. Companies, which fail to innovate on a regular basis, will be the losers on the market. Let’s take Yahoo! as an example. More than 5 years ago, Yahoo! could be considered one market leader in providing Internet services, at least in Vietnam. Its comparatively convenient text instant messaging is used by almost every Internet users in Vietnam. I still remember the time when Yahoo! Messenger dominated break time when I was a student in secondary school. It was the story of your nickname, webcam, or even emoticons that underwent the analysis of small students. What happens now? Although Yahoo! is still among the most used Internet tools of the young in Vietnam, it is now rarely in the top agenda of teenagers nowadays, or in case it is, maybe in the complaints of the young about the degrading quality of Yahoo!. According to what I have read on The Economist, Yahoo! now is just a generalist in the playground for the specialists. Take a look at Google and Facebook. The recipe for exponentially increasing revenue of these two giants just lie in the simple word “innovation”. Google is successful in making its user amazed by providing with something news every morning. Google Doodle is something that I want to check out everyday I wake up. Some months ago, when Google launched the doodle allowing users to play guitar online, this doodle was soon praised by Internet community and in that day, you could easily find this doodle in many forums or articles of the young all over the world. Committing to coming up with mind-blowing stuff makes the success of Google. Whereas, Yahoo! seems to be ignorant of improving its quality, late for updating the trend of the teenagers. As a result, in October, Microsoft offered to take over Yahoo! with only $18 billion, which is a dramatic fall from the initial offer made 3 years ago, namely $46 billion.

I seem to have digress from the topic I intend to say today. The above example is one that I contemplate much for days. Sometimes, it is interesting to translate the lessons into your own life. The lesson of innovation is also useful when it comes to individual. Make yourself adapt to the new situation or left behind the others? But here comes the ensuing question: “How to innovate?” Sometimes, innovation does not means that you have to come up with very creative solution to something, or something of novelty or originality, though good it may be. However, you may innovate by observing, learning more from others and apply sensibly in your own business provided that it results in high efficiency.

I seem to become lengthy as usual and some may wonder how innovation is linked with the so-called E.V.A I mentioned in the title. The purpose of innovation or anything else relating to business, from my own prspective, is to create more value to the product or to the brand. Innovating yourself is just another way of creating value to yourself, making yourself become an attractive “product” on the labor market. Some students may have misunderstanding of their value when they associate their value with the pretigious schools they are about to graduate. Graduating from the reputed insitution surely makes you more tempting in the labour market, however, the determined factor lies in our inner value, which can be only created by YOU, not by the name of your school.

Now it leads me to the question: “How to create or add more value to yourself?”

The answer, simply, is: LEARN – EXPERIENCE

Try to attain much more knowledge. If you want to pursue career in marketing, find more and more articles relating to marketing to read about. Try to make your life more interesting by drawing the connection from the theoretical knowledge to the real life. Recent days, I think that I may be interested in Business consulting and marketing, accordingly, I rush into reading lots of articles relating to this and try to make links between marketing and almost everything I see in my life with marketing. It is nice, though I am not sure if I am going on the right track. If you have not determined your particular interest in your career, feel free. I am sure that more than 70% of my friends do not know for exact who they want to be in the next few years. Something like become a professional marketer or sucessful businessmen may be just the products of following the mainstreams. Read anything you feel that it will be useful or learn something that interests you even there is no relation between it and the major you follow. When Steve Jobs enrolled in the calligraphy class, he did not have any idea of using this in creating the fonts that we both get accustomed nowadays. “Connecting the dots” is the lesson of Steve Jobs I like most. Try to gain more and more and it will pay in the end.

Try to experience. Experiences may come from volunteer work, student-run clubs or part-time jobs. Some students do not want to attend extra-curricular activities because they think it is just a waste of time and as a volunteer, you do not gain any money for this. However, through volunteer work, you build networking, obtain transferable skills and approach to lots of opportunities. More importantly, by talking with a lot of people, you are furnished with more approaches to life, equiped with more solutions to one problem.

Yesterday, I attended a talkshow held by Club of Future Accountant and Auditor of my university. The talkshow was about the opportunities to work in PriceWaterhouseCoopers – one of the biggest companies working in tax and auditing consultant. I think that it is a means of adding value. You will be more informative, then more well-prepared to grasp the chances life may bring to you. There are lots of useful pieces of advice I received yesterday, however, if I try to write down here, I do not know what stuff my post will be. Maybe I will mention them in my next posts^^.

All the thoughts I jot down above are just something I believe to be true. Though I have not enjoyed much success in my student life. Sometimes, I wish I could deactivate Facebook in order not to witness the success of many friends. However, don’t find fault, find remedy. Instead of avoiding, I just choose to face the problem. Witnessing the success of others motivates me to try much more. And as I have read somewhere, success is not the key to happinees but it is happiness which leads you to success. Success sometimes  does not necessarily appear in the result only, it happens in the process. I fail in applying a lot of competitions, I sometimes find myself intimidated at the result of others, however looking on the other side of the problem, I am happy because I have tried at least. I already have a blog and it is nice to know that this post will be the 60th post on my blog. At least, I have something belonging to my own world. At least, I have chances to express my own persona. And in the future, I am sure that my blog is something that I will introduce with pride in interview round for Big4 or Unilever or other large corporations. “Blogging adds more value to myself. I reflect my life, my thoughts into my blog and through this action, I have chance to understand more about my real value.” Something like this, hope that this will work.

Make you an Ever-Value-Added product! A value-added product is encouraged by every government in the world. You produce coconut, it is good but not enough. Just by adding more value to it such as coconut candy, coconut cakes, you will rake in much more money. You study in a good university. It is nice but remember that you are just the raw product of education. Adding more value to yourself by learning and experiencing, you will find yourself a big deal after graduating. E.V.A or EVA is a word that makes people think of attractive women. Make yourself an E.V.A product is to make you become more desirable in the labor market.

Have you found yourself an E.V.A product?