Hey y’all 👋🏼 I hope you’ve been enjoying Sana’s Notes so far, if there is anything you’d like to hear about from me, just hit the Reply button and let me know! I hope you enjoy this week’s catch-up.

— Sana Tabassum

🍎 food for thought

This week has been a gloomy one. London is back to classic British weather and although I love hoodie season, it’s making me wish for a little bit of sunshine. I’ve been really enjoying my latest routine with a good mix of freelance projects and my own work.

Lately I’ve been working on my website relaunch and planning some new content for the upcoming months. Sometimes I like to wonder about the future, my ‘career’ or potential paths that I could take and whilst it’s exciting, it is also very daunting. I often end up giving myself more stress.

What I’ve learned 👇🏼

• something along the lines of ‘if you want to get something done, you have to do it yourself’ — over the years I’ve thought about building a team behind this platform to encourage fresh ideas and projects but honestly it takes a lot to do that and I end up with the realisation that I’m good at this solo for the time being

• remember hearing about Gen Z being the lonliest generation? I think this can be true at times, but if you re-frame lonliness as independence… does it work?

• I’ve been doing a little bit of cooking around the house lately as I have more time on my hands and I genuinely think it’s one of those activites that is therapeutic. It would be really cool to merge this hobby with my passion for architecture someday.

🍗 content nuggets

A real gem that I watched from start to finish is Colin and Samir’s latest interview with Amelia Dimoldenburg a.k.a Dimz from Chicken Shop Date. I’ve really admired her because she’s been on quite the journey in terms of taking a risk and following her passion through extreme creativity. She mentions in the episode how the show gave her the opportunity to build her confidence and you can see it.

Towards the end Amelia talks about how she worked really hard to fund Chicken Shop Date, ultimately making the decision to run it independently and funding it herself through the personal opportunities she was given. She didn’t give away the authenticity of her creation. Samir describes Amelia as ambitious and I totally agree. I think ambition is one of those qualities I really admire, so I would definitely listen to this episode.

I’ve begun to talk about the power of building a personal brand and usually it’s through the lens of trying to find a job. But I think a personal brand can be much more powerful than that. Struthless explains a bit of the history of personal branding and how it can literally change lives as well as the perception of someone online.

🦋 casual magic

I received a few messages this week from followers and students of :scale studio updating me on their progress or simply just how this page has really helped them in the lead-up to the new academic year. Messages like these seriously mean A LOT. Sometimes it’s easy to get sucked into the numbers and analytics, but my first ‘goal’ for this platform was to help at least one person.

:scale’s turning 4 soon and I’ve been taking a trip down memory lane with the website re-design. (It’s unreal how many podcasts I’ve been on 🤯). I pulled out a copy of :scale mag and it made me want to start up that project again because of its unexpected success. I think this reflection has helped me to be more determined to push for the future.

🔥 on the back burner

My latest video — How to do an Architectural Site Analysis is up on YouTube! 🎉 It’s an all-you-need guide on what a site analysis is, what you need to include and programs that help you do this like Digimap 🗺️. Check it out below.

— Sana x