How to Become a Notion Certified Consultant (My Story)
This is how I became a Notion certified consultant at 22 years old. To understand the full story, we need to go back some years, when my interest in tech, fitness, learning rose out of the unexamined mind.
Let the Youtube algorithm do its job: watch valuable content about fitness, science, tech innovation, from unbiased channels and stay away from politics. Learn a lot and open your mind to unexplored life possibilities you didn’t even know existed. Keep being obsessed with learning on YouTube and through books until you build your website—from merely consuming to creating something. Commit to writing every weekday for at least 30 minutes and publishing one new piece of content every week. You want to become more articulate, be able to communicate, express your thoughts, and think proficiently.
Discover Notion on YouTube when it is still a startup. Begin using Notion as a tool to organize your university life. Then your workout periodization. Then your knowledge management. Then your project management system. Then whatever you can imagine can be systematized in your life. Fall in love with the idea of creating systems through Notion. Start creating free Notion templates around the things you love. Get some traction and positive comments that raise your self-esteem. Help people on the Notion subreddit, without any expectation. Keep building Notion templates and get featured on Product Hunt for one of them.
Once you have gathered enough self-esteem to understand you know how to use Notion very well, begin offering Notion consulting services, without permission and unapologetically. Do it because it is genuinely fun to develop systems in Notion. Start very small, but start. Feel like an imposter in the first few months and be completely clueless about how much to charge, or how to charge for your services. Get the first business client through some mix of luck and very low prices. Let that client have a great experience so that you can get your first valuable review and feedback. Also, listen to that client when he tells you your rates are too low and you need to raise them. Feel a mix of pride and personal attack when you hear that. Tell the client you don’t care about money at this point, but just tangible experience to start flywheel your business forward.
Discover there is a Notion consultant certification program. There are about 20 certified people at that time. Write in your impossible list that you will become a certified Notion consultant. Keep working with clients at low rates and build your portfolio. Apply for the consultant certification program after 4 months from the start of your “business”. Get accepted and almost cry of joy at the news. Keep doing what you are doing, from now on with more status and proof of competence to differentiate yourself from the crowd. All the while, you are still at university, and it’s Covid-19 times.
Increase your rates. Then also become a Notion ambassador, so in love you are with the Notion software and community. Keep going while learning about how real-life business actually works. How to craft proposals for clients. How to determine fixed prices for your projects. When to be assertive and when to be accomodating. Learn by doing.
Always feel like your business may crumble at any time and you would need to reinvent yourself, from scratch. In the meantime, keep going and work on exciting projects with companies from all over the world that you could not have even imagined you could collaborate with. Enjoy the journey. And accept the fact that some people (clients) are unreliable, cheap, bitter. Let go of yourself. Drop your perception of self in order to reinvent it if need be. Work attentively on non-egoic identification with what you do because that is dangerous. What if you lost it all tomorrow?
Keep going and expand your skills to automation, coding, other no-code software that can be seamlessly integrated with Notion. Be grateful when you take the train to Paris at 8:20 in the morning and you feel claustrophobic in the midst of a crowd of standardized individuals walking fast and typing on their phones. Now you understand what you intend to avoid relentlessly. And that will drive your decisions.
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