Meet Nishant Patel | Digital Media Consultant, Content Creator, Co-Founder Let It Wag, Animal rescue app startup and Guest lecturer for Media.

We had the good fortune of connecting with Nishant Patel and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Nishant, why did you pursue a creative career?Being a Dyslexic child I had a difficult childhood where the entire education part was very negative and suffocating for me with no hope for my future, thanks to the diagnosis and the counseling after that for a long time allowed me to gain some confidence about my self and slowly steadily I got into a momentum of self-learning and exploring opportunities in my liking of work, I was always creative since childhood and was always curious with stumbling around art and craft, never did I know how important my curiosity will be for my career.

I started with internships in Event management that led to working in the media industry where I got jobs in Television production for reality shows which kept on opening my horizon into the content industry, the constant jumps in my professional graph from one organization to another gave me a lot of insights of how the industry works and what are the new things evolving in the media industry.

Then came social media and blogging which caught my eye. Being a foodie and having a general understanding of photography inspired me to start blogging for myself, The very first day I thought that even if I didn’t get millions of followers and did not get famous out of this, ill still keep doing it as my own personal online memory album, that started my journey to explore the world and enjoy clicking photos and videos, It has been 9 years of every single day uploading 1 piece of content on my Instagram blog page @IndieOpus and it has been a super fun journey, I am grateful that I did not choose to pursue this full time and kept blogging as a passion as that gave me more opportunities and gains as compared to just revenue if it was a full-time job. It allowed me to learn daily about the entire digital media world which helped me in my full-time profession of Digital media consultation, It also allowed me to meet so many different people which led to experiencing different food, cultures, tech, travel opportunities and finding some of the most dear and closest friends in my life. Looking back at all my experiences through blogging, I am surely happy and proud that I kept on going even though the growth of the page was affected due to the algorithm, the change of locations, and all other problems for the page. I have continued and will forever keep uploading every single day because I am doing it for my personal happiness!

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?

So I run a Travel and Food blog on Instagram called @IndieOpus. This passion project of mine has been active for 9 years and I make sure no matter what I keep uploading something daily. This constant need to upload something daily gave me a boost to make sure I go out, see things, try new things, and meet new people.

Creating content was something that continued parallel to my Digital marketing job and professional journey and it sometimes directly or indirectly helped me in my work, Things like getting better at photography, learning what Instagram and other social channels want from brand pages, trending content formats, how others created content and what were the technicalities around social media helped me a lot to consult my clients and it daily helps me to keep getting better at my work. The added benefits were the yummy food I got to try with every invite from food brands, the travel experiences which I may not have done myself, and meeting so many people from all different walks of life which helped me build my network and got me so much business and for eg one travel brand invited 30 creators from different genres and backgrounds and I made friends with someone who worked at TEDx and thanks to my Animal Rescue app startup, they gave me the stage to give a TEDx talk and all these milestones in my journey is surely credited to my content creation journey. I was also invited as a guest judge for MasterChef India show and so many such moments have kept me motivated to keep going on.

We often don’t think how much our actions come back to us with things that are more than what we have thought from taking those actions, It is difficult to do everything by everyone but it’s just a matter of our perspective to see things in a different way and I saw my blogging as a passion project and it in return gave me so much more than I could have imagined, as simple and real as this interview itself is because of my page and because I kept on going even when my overall page is going down due to me moving to the states from India 2 years back and the whole audience, timetable, relevance, audience connect and content has changed which is affecting the page’s growth but I still upload daily and I will keep doing it because now I know that things will come towards me because I love what I do and my passion has kept me going, I have a 95% drop in overall engagement and growth as compared to what I had back in India, still I feel this is just a start to the whole new journey of exploring USA and the world ahead of me.

It does take a toll on me that all my investments in better gadgets, learning new things, and uploading content daily don’t result in growth and it does affect my mood to maybe just quit it and start a new page or just not do it at all, but since I am stubborn to keep doing it, I hope the Insta-Algorithm-gods will see my efforts and push my page to a better place lol.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
I moved to High Point, NC in May ’22 and have been exploring around a lot, always trying to take the car and go around in cities around me. I do love Chapel Hill downtown, Raleigh Durham Triangle has so many spots to hang out and try new restaurants, I love the brewery culture around and Red Oak in Greensboro is also a beautiful and big brewery to chill, There are multiple car racing, NASCAR, monster truck events which keeps happening regularly so they are surely a must to experience. Morrisville has a Coffee and Cars meetup every first Saturday of the month and motorheads have to go there at least once. The museum of Art, Science, and Pullen park are also some top spots in Raleigh that you cannot miss, there are so many more spots I have created videos on so ill invite you to see them on my page – @IndieOpus

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?

I have had a beautiful opportunity to work with some of the biggest brands in the world like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Cadbury, Coke, and Marvel, and in every job of mine, I’ve always been very inspired by all my bosses and seniors who are specialists in their jobs, But I feel that one of the biggest Inspiration to me is my Neurodivergence, being a Dyslexic child it was always difficult to cope up with the other students around me and till I was 13-14 I was super underconfident as well as heavily bullied for my regular mistakes. The diagnosis and therapy changed my life completely and allowed me to learn more about the advantages of being dyslexic and focus on how my creative thinking helps me in every step of my career.

Jumping jobs, asking so many questions to everyone, taking action in my own way, and seeing results getting better through my creative thinking was the natural confidence booster for me and it became a daily growing journey that became an empowering thing for me. Something I hated about myself slowly started becoming something I love about myself and this took a while and a lot of wrong turns but surely the more I learnt about how important it is to accept how I behave and do things differently, made me more conscious about the benefits of being a neurodivergent person. Someone who was very behind the whole class of students now with time became so ahead of them that the whole league itself jumped to the next level. I am 100% proud of being a dyslexic as the race became way bigger than just the finishing point. With working at such giants, my ‘differently thinking’ started getting appreciated and that added more push for myself to keep taking my own path instead of the roads taken by the whole world. Mental health is now something which everyone is talking about and the more we go ahead the more people will become aware of being the chosen ones out of the whole world. I have a deep passion for people who have dis-similarities to the ordinary world and it’s them who need the extra pushing and motivation to identify their skills and expertise to become successful in their own journey.

So I would say shoutout to everyone who is ‘Neurospicy’ and fighting in their journey of learning themselves and growing stronger every day, I just wish they find their inner strength as I blindly believe that every single neurodivergent person has a superpower in them and they all can change the whole world and leave a legacy behind them. I deeply love the quote by Steve Jobs – “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Website: https://linkfly.to/NishantPatel

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/indieopus/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/NishantPatelMedia

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/indieopus

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/indieopus

Youtube: https://youtube.com/c/IndieOpus

Image Credits
All photos are mine, @IndieOpus