6 September 2021 1038 words, 5 min. read

The 4 most positive things I learned from the Covid crisis

By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab PhD in marketing, director of IntoTheMinds
I thank the Covid crisis for passing through my life. Really. In retrospect, the Covid crisis brought me so many positive things. You could say that Covid changed the course of my life and my family’s life and ultimately left an […]

I thank the Covid crisis for passing through my life. Really. In retrospect, the Covid crisis brought me so many positive things. You could say that Covid changed the course of my life and my family’s life and ultimately left an imprint that I feel is exceptionally positive. Here are 4 positive contributions of the Covid in my life.

If you only have 30 seconds

The Covid crisis and successive confinements forced me to reinvent myself. The personal and professional benefits have been many:

  • meetings with new people, especially in the field of remote learning
  • my 10-year-old son discovered programming and is passionate about electronics
  • the traffic on my website has exploded (+111% of page views) following the publication of a new kind of articles
  • I started to create remote videocasts and even managed to sell some
  • I acquired new skills (video editing)

All this was made possible by a supportive family environment and an adapted hardware environment. I had to totally reconfigure my office, which has become a really productive place.

How the Covid crisis came into my life

I remember the first lockdown like it was yesterday. I’m sure you do too.

As an entrepreneur, I saw the consequences immediately. Some projects stopped, the phone stopped ringing, requests for quotes became rare (that’s an understatement). My morale was low, and my thoughts were dark.

I no longer saw my employees. One of them, who returned to Lebanon before the crisis started, will take more than 6 months before she can return. I clung to the hope that this crisis was only temporary. 18 months later, we are still entangled in it, and the successive waves are beating the measure.



The Covid crisis was a catalyst for change



At the time, I had not understood the advantages of covid

Overcoming the anxiety of the crisis was hard. I wasn’t able to do that until 2021 when the business started to turn around. But looking back, I am very proud of what was accomplished in 2020. Both personally and professionally, the Covid crisis has had a substantial positive impact.

It may seem incongruous at first, but the Covid crisis forced us to find solutions, to reinvent situations that had been frozen for decades. In short, the Covid crisis was a catalyst for change.

I’m not going to talk about working remotely in the rest of this article. I’m going to talk about much more tangible and specific changes.

Advantage #1: I met people in the field of learning

When the lockdown began, and the schools closed, parents found themselves helpless. We often read that they suddenly discovered the difficulties of the teaching profession because they had to assume this function too.

Like many people, I started looking for online alternatives to face-to-face schooling. I created a resource page that was very successful in 2020. That’s when I discovered online learning and review websites.

As I delved deeper into the subject, I met some great people I would not have met had it not been for the Covid crisis. Let me mention them because meeting them changed my life: Christophe Coquis (Geek Junior), Nathalie Kuborn (WeAreCoders), Sylvie Jouanard (TeenLabs).


Advantage #2: My 10-year-old son learned programming

Without the Covid crisis, my 10-year-old son (11 years old now) would never have learned programming. Thanks to the people I just mentioned, he was able to take his first steps with scratch and then with Python.

Programming has opened a new universe for him (that of electronics), which fascinates him. It is an inner joy to see him thinking about his “inventions,” to see him creating and being interested in a complex field.

pierre-raffaele électronique


Advantage #3: Increased traffic on my website

The drop in activity caused by the Covid crisis left me time to write. Writing is most likely what kept me from going under because it allowed me to maintain relationships with people I asked to write for me. So, thank you to all those who gave me their time and shared their visions during the crisis.

The way I write has changed. I wrote more in-depth articles, rich in points of view and new data, linked to the immediate news. The effect was quickly visible: the traffic on my website soared.

On the graph above, I have compared the daily traffic of 2020 to 2019 for the period March to June. This is only my French blog (those in other languages show the same trends). The numbers are impressive:

  • users: +111%
  • sessions: +119
  • page views: +117%

This evolution is also reflected in the ranking of the website. The “Ahrefs rank” went from 39 in March 2020 to 46 today.

 

Evolution of the Ahrefs rank for the domain intotheminds.com.

Advantage #4: the discovery of videocast

The other positive impact of Covid is that I had to reinvent my way of doing podcasts and videos. Before the crisis, I recorded videos and podcasts in person. Guests would come for a shoot with Pierre-Raffaele, and I would then record the podcast with them.

The guests of the video series ” The World of Business with Pierre-Raffaele ” were received in our offices.

and podcasts. After trial and error, I finally found a way to create remote videocasts without sacrificing quality. The final result was excellent, as some of the videos were successful. I was even able to sell videocasts to clients and create a line of inbound marketing services.

Finally, the discovery of video casting and its practice allowed me to acquire new knowledge and expertise in video editing with Adobe Premiere (the video below was realized using a green background).


Conclusion

Drawing positives from the Covid crisis has not been easy. As I wrote in the preamble, this crisis was accompanied by many dark thoughts. Nothing would have been possible without a positive family environment and my wife. I want to thank her here.

More pragmatically, getting through the confinements in good conditions was also a question of space. I had to create an adapted productivity environment by totally reconfiguring my office. As I explained in this article, I transformed my 8m² office into a multi-use space where I can do everything. I am now ready for the next crisis, hoping, of course, that it will not come.

 



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