- Turning Pro Newsletter
- Posts
- Episode #035: Peter Kang
Peter Kang is the Co-Founder & CEO at Barrel, a creative and digital marketing agency in New York City that specializes in designing digital experiences for consumer brands. Before launching Barrel, Peter worked on Wall Street as an investment banker at Lehman Brothers.
In this episode, we discuss the highs and lows of agency life, the importance of team support when things aren’t going right, and Peter’s lessons learned from running Barrel for 18 years.
The top 10 highlights from this week’s episode:
When starting a project or learning something new, make sure you have a clear ‘why.’ In the beginning, it will be slow, hard, and you probably won’t see many results, so make sure you keep sight of why you started.
Find people who share your vision. In whatever you do, whether it's entrepreneurship, fitness, etc, it’s important to surround yourself with people who have similar goals. Staying consistent with anything is hard, but having like-minded support can give you the energy you need to keep going.
Take the time to appreciate your milestones. It’s easy to see a successful person or brand and think it happened overnight, but it’s the culmination of lots of hard work and accomplishments along the way. In whatever you're pursuing, make sure you recognize your own wins and appreciate your progress.
Look for opportunities to grow when you get knocked down. Life is unpredictable, and sometimes you’ll get caught off guard by an unforeseen event. Instead of focusing on what happened to you, look at what you can make happen next; you can do alot when your back’s against the wall.
When creating content, be authentic and speak about what interests you. It’s important to focus on topics that you feel a connection with, as it’ll be easier for you to create and will appeal more to people since they’ll feel that it's genuine
Recognize the power of compounding gains. Nothing great is ever achieved without consistent, intentional effort. It doesn’t matter if it's business, fitness, building relationships, consistency wins every time.
Have non-negotiables outside of work. It’s hard to maintain a work-life balance, but it’s even harder to do one thing for the majority of your time at the same level of productivity. Invest some time in activities out of work so you can operate at 100% when it’s time to get things done.
Don’t work just to say you’re working. A lot of people think they have to put in 16 hour days to be productive, but all 16 of those hours won’t be 100% optimal. Instead, if you can set aside a few hours of deep, focused work, you’ll see you get more done in that time than most people do all day.
Keep your weekends productive. Regular work may stop during the weekends, but there’s still plenty of ways to keep those days productive. Whether it's strategizing, brainstorming, etc, the weekends are the best time to set yourself up for the upcoming week.
Make the time to learn. Many people make the mistake of building a skillset and then not putting in the time to improve it. The more you know, the better equipped you’ll be to solve a variety of problems.
Subscribe to the podcast here to be notified about future episodes.