James Hsu

Greetings!

I want to share with you a story I wrote for Women’s Day — an interview with two remarkable female leaders from my business school:

https://www.ceibs.edu/people-stories/20994

I’ve been conducting interviews for quite some time via the Humans of Magic project. Last year, I decided that I was going to apply my experience and “conversational framework” towards business settings.

Jessie and Yangyang were wonderful and my interviews with them lasted 90 minutes each. In the end, I decided to convert the full interviews into Q&A format as it was the most readable/digestible.

Lesson from content creation: it is critical to give audiences what they want and answer the question, “So what?”

While planning for the article, I outlined extensively and asked for 360 feedback from the school association before writing the story.

As a result, I highlighted the upcoming events, both taking place in Shanghai, as the “anchor” of the article. That became the focal point of the article. It answered the “So what?” clause.

The secondary element — and the part I enjoyed writing the most — were the life lessons and experiences the ladies shared. But that takes a backseat to the focal point.

First of all, I don’t interview people strictly for my own personal enjoyment. Second, if a concise summary is better than full-length, then I’ll settle for the concise summary every single time.

Creating content is not an excuse for stroking one’s ego. It is done to scratch one’s creative itch; that’s the correct reason. I try to leave my ego at the door.

Not sure why I wrote a huge digression there, but I’d love it if you could give the story a read. It was a pleasure to learn from these high-achieving women, and I’m honored that the school selected me to write the Women’s Day story.

Cheers,
James