I spent the bigger part of the week on a lengthy material that offers wellbeing advices in order to better market certain products. The brand focuses on improving productivity with the help of building habits, helped of course by their very own products. This is how marketing works after all, we all want to sell something.

Reading certain advices though I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that the brand’s marketing strategy is extremely restrictive, unrealistic, and potentially harmful, at least from where and how I look at it.

One major advice is not to linger in bed in the morning for more than 5 minutes. No days-off are mentioned, when you actually don’t do any work, but you just ‘are’. The thing is that it’s totally up to you how and what time you get out of bed in the morning (keeping in mind your job if you are employed by a company) as long as that’s what works for you. It takes time and many fails to find your way but there is no one rule we all have to follow.

I finished one other project on Saturday evening and I knew that the only thing I wanted to do on Sunday was sleeping, and maybe taking a walk and enjoy the sun. It was 18 degrees but next week winter is promised to pay a visit again. I woke up at 10am (terrible, isn’t it?) and I got out of bed at 12pm, but only because I have been hungry…

An hour of sorting out emails followed then I watched a webinar by Sylva-Michele Sternkopf, PhD – that I will tell you more about in the coming days. For dinner I prepared black beans the Cuban way, inspired by a Spanish class I had with Elie last year. Since that class I have made it several times and I didn’t touch the bean variety we traditionally use in Hungarian cuisine. That just tastes bland compared to black beans. (I am looking for someone knowledgeable to taste my cooking, I want to know if it has anything to do with its Cuban cousin. It’s delicious if you ask me and so much better than what I tasted in a Mexican restaurant in Budapest recently, that left me so disappointed.)

At the end I didn’t even leave the house, I was absolutely content with staying in and “wasting my time”.

I am not a marketing expert and I was only tasked to do the translation of the material, my views are irrelevant, but this time I am not sure I will be able to stop myself from sharing my feedback with the client.

I am more than a translator even when I am paid to be one, why would I deny that?

Image: that’s me in the deepest Sahara, being lost in a sunset, doing nothing other than being present.