Certainly, some of us make half-hearted attempts to accomplish a few of our life and business goals. But how many people do you know who put everything on the line to pursue their deepest, most life-changing dreams? What are the rest of us doing, and what are we waiting for?

Choices and Challenges

Of course, circumstances get in the way. There are challenges, setbacks and detours. But each of us has a choice. Although it won’t be easy to navigate back to the right path, if we say that we can’t find our way around obstacles, we’re making a choice to leave things as they are.

Last night, I was reading about Roald Dahl, author of such hopeful and imaginative books as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That might be my absolute favorite story about an underdog who overcomes obstacles while continuing to believe in something, even when all is stacked against him.

It turns out Roald Dahl was a lot like his character Charlie. Dahl’s personal life was filled with hardship and tragedy. In spite of all the challenges he faced, he remained positive and achieved great things. As it says on his website, “The series of misfortunes and tragedies Dahl… suffer[ed did not] made him more bitter. Loss and physical adversity seemed to stimulate his enormous energies to positive action. He fought misfortune as if it was a dragon to be slain.”

Time to Dream Big

I hope that 2011 will be a year of great progress toward achieving our deeply-buried dreams, and a year of doing things that require us to step out of our comfort zones and test our abilities, even if they lead to failure or, even more frightening, success.

I challenge you, as we round out these last few days of 2010: dust off those gutsy dreams and ambitions you’ve kept to yourself until now. Dare to put yourself out there; do something big this coming year. It doesn’t need to look big to anyone else, but you’ll know it is, because it will require you to go out on a limb and do things in an entirely different way.

For 2011, live the way you truly want to live, and achieve what you’ve only ever dreamed you could achieve.

What big, audacious goals do you have for 2011?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Neal

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated
• How to Manage Consumer-Grade Collaborative Tools in the Workplace

A post from Chris Brogan stirred my entrepreneurial spirit. In it, he discussed how the phrase “looking for work” used to mean mean looking for (and creating) opportunities to work, rather than just looking for a job. He laments that, “We’ve somehow decided that ‘security’ equals working for someone else who has all the cards and pulls all the strings.”

Brogan goes on to describe how people can create their own work by being entrepreneurial. Certainly, that applies to creating opportunities where others might say they don’t exist (starting a new business, for example), but it also applies to how you look at your business right now.

For the guy running the screenprinting shop, don’t just make t-shirts; create opportunities to make t-shirts. For the lady running the bakery, don’t just make cupcakes; create opportunities for people to want cupcakes.

For each of us, we have something we want to make, do or sell, but we can’t just do the work; we have to actually create the opportunities for doing the work.

So, how does this work in practice? Let’s take the cupcake lady. Business is slow. People aren’t buying cupcakes. She needs to find a way to make people want to buy cupcakes. How can she do that? A trendy idea I like is people substituting cupcakes for their actual wedding cake, so why couldn’t she position herself as the local baker for the job? She could find and create unique wedding cupcake displays and showcase them in her bakery window or in posters around her shop. Certainly, in big cities or in trendier locations, this might be something seen at every bakery, but what if she’s the first in her area to offer it? Cupcake gold, at least for a while, and then she’ll have to create a new reason for people to want cupcakes.

So, how can you implement this for your business? You just need to think outside the box.

Think about your product or service. How do people use it now, and is there a way that you can get them to want to use it more? No matter what your business, your customers and clients all want the same thing, whether that’s more time, more money, less aggravation and annoyance, or a greater sense of security, well-being, acceptance, or achievement. How can you help them get one or more of those things?

No matter what you do, no matter what product you create or service you provide, you can find ways to create demand around your business. All it takes is a little bit of that entrepreneurial spirit and a good dose of creativity.

How can you “find a place to apply what you know how to do”? How can you “create work” for yourself instead of waiting for it to come to you?

Photo by Flickr user shimelle, licensed under CC 2.0

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

A Story About Change

My friend Betsy Talbot and her husband Warren are forging their own path and making their own way. Two years ago, they decided that they wanted to travel the world. Life was too short, they decided, to wait for that dream life to magically create itself. They had to figure out a way to make things happen — their own way, right now. They created a plan for saving money and paring down to make room for an around-the-world trip of one to two years, and one month from now on October 1, just over two years from originally setting out their intentions, they will be embarking on an adventure of a lifetime.

What’s Their Secret?

Betsy and Warren’s story is very inspiring, but unfortunately, the most probable initial reaction as an outsider is to think, “I could never do something like that. I have [x, y, z] obligations, and anyway, even if I wanted to do it, I wouldn’t know where to start.” The thing is, I have known Betsy for many years now, and she’s just like a lot of other people I know, myself included, and yet, somehow she and Warren have made this happen, so what’s their secret?

One thing that struck me that Betsy said recently was, “I’m becoming more comfortable with the unknown.” I don’t think it occurred to her that she and Warren had become comfortable with the unknown quite some time ago.

I’ve watched them carry out their plan over the past couple of years, and at almost every step of that journey, they were not exactly sure what to do or how things would go, and yet, they kept going and remained confident that they would figure things out along the way, and that’s exactly what they did.

When You Don’t Have the Answers

As business owners, we have to get used to not having all the answers, knowing that if the answers were easily found, anyone and everyone could attempt to start a business, and they would all succeed at it.

I think our first instinct, anytime we don’t have the answers or when things don’t seem to be moving along as smoothly as we might have expected, is to think, “I must be doing something wrong,” when in all likelihood, it’s just that what we’re doing has never been done before in quite the same way, and maybe that’s a good thing.

Instead of immediately thinking we should change course and do things the way someone else has done them, perhaps we might step back and ask ourselves, “Is there really one answer, one right way to do this? Has this even been done before, or do I simply need to become comfortable with creating my own way?”

Working in Spite of Not Knowing

Perhaps the biggest part of it is learning to stay the course, even when the course doesn’t yet exist. There’s no path laid out ahead of you, and you’re learning to navigate as you go. Learn to keep going, in spite of not having clear directions. Create a plan you believe is most likely to succeed by studying the cues of those who have succeeded before you, but accept that you are forging a new path in many ways, so the answers may not always be immediately available.

How have you learned to become comfortable with the unknown?

Photo by Flickr user VinothChandar, licensed under CC 2.0

The idea behind Oblique Strategies is that when we’re working hard, the pressure tends to push us away from the type of creative, productive thinking that we’re capable of when the pressure’s off. Ideally you pull out the next card in the deck, it breaks your deadlock and your creative juices start flowing again.

While many of the original Oblique Strategy commands seem designed with music in mind (putting in earplugs, for example) you can use the technique in any situation where pressure might be dampening your creative spirit, and if the command on the card isn’t appropriate or doesn’t work, you can just pull out another.

To replicate the technique yourself, keep a stack of index cards on your desk, and any time creative impulse strikes, write down a new command. The commands can be very specific (“wash the dishes”) or deliberately vague (“simplify”). However, note that the idea is that you need to have created your deck before you’re in those pressure situations and when you’re not obsessing over your work, as it’s going to be tough to come up with a bunch of oblique strategies when a deadline is looming!

Alternatively, if you don’t feel like creating your own set, you can purchase a set of the fifth edition of Eno and Schmidt’s cards for £30 ($43) plus shipping. Or there’s a free online version of the original cards here (which is also a good place to look for inspiration when thinking about creating your own set). There’s also Methodology, an iPhone app costing $1.99, which follows similar principles.

How do you break creative deadlocks?

Photo by Flickr user boboroshi, licensed user CC-BY-2.0

Along with its desktop uploader, Scrnshots has become a regular part of my own workflow, keeping a public articulation of the digital designs and elements that inspire my work elsewhere. Scnrshots has been ticking over nicely, though few features have been added recently, and the Mac edition of the desktop app isn’t compatible with Snow Leopard.

So when I recently came across Ember, a service similar to Scrnshots but with more contemporary features, a smarter interface and cleaner design, I was keen to try it out.

Like Scrnshots, the basics of Ember are really all about uploading images, and adding some descriptive metadata for future reference. However, Ember offers a few extra capabilities:

• The ability to flag an uploaded image as private.
• Every metadata element of an uploaded image’s page is directly editable with a simple click.
• Images can be added to collections, to help theme and organize related imagery.
• Every page has an integrated URL shortner that generates URLs such as http://embr.it/gW — handy for the integrated Twitter support.
• Integration with desktop and iPhone tools such as LittleSnapper for offline use and mobile capture respectively. Though these don’t appear to be as sophisticated as Scrnshot’s desktop app.

However, unlike Scrnshots’ free offering, Ember is a tiered service, with both free and paid service plans. The free plan allows thirty uploads a month and up to three collections, but to get the most out of the service, you’ll need to upgrade to the $25/year option.

As a long-term Scrnshots user, I find it unfortunate that there’s no way for me to export data as a single batch from one service to the other. Indeed, both Scrshots and Ember illustrate a pressing need to include data portability by default in all web applications.

Ember’s a great service that’s actually pretty good value for money, though I find it hard to invest time into another app that doesn’t let me at my data without resorting to using an API.

Where do you keep images for digital inspiration?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• The future of notebooks: Following in the footsteps of the MacBook Air
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce

Contractors, freelancers and people who work in a number of different offices at larger companies know all about doing a survey of the competition to not only provide a frame of reference against which they can measure their own work, but also to find new sources of inspiration from which to borrow. But borrowing from other players in your field can not only make things stale quickly, it can also sometimes be legally tricky. Here are some healthy, if unusual, alternatives.

Use That Cameraphone

If you’re like me, the camera on your cellphone is pretty much just there for decoration, which is really a terrible waste of a good tool. Especially for creative work, things you see while you’re just walking around going about your business can provide ample inspirational fodder. Color palettes, layouts, composition styles, font faces and more can all be found out there in the real world, not just online at the websites of other designers you admire.

The camera in your phone may suck, but it can still handle a basic task like capturing the gist of a visual tableau. If you’ve got a video-capable phone, you might be able to catch even more, including motion that you could emulate or recreate digitally for an animation or other dynamic element.

Steal Your Kids’ Books

If you don’t have young children or know anyone who does, you might not be aware of what’s going on in children’s literature. Let me tell you, there are some crazy things happening there. It’s not just the current works, either. Classic titles too can provide lots of great inspiration.

Children respond to bright colors and bold lines — the sort of things that, more often than not, work well on the web, too. Checking out what the toddlers are reading these days can also help you get back to basics and simplify your designs. It’s like a homegrown primitivist movement.

Scale the Heights of Fashion

Rather than looking to what people are checking out web-wise, look to what they’re interested in clothing themselves with. The bleeding edge of fashion is a place filled with whimsical, interesting and downright bizarre design choices, but it often contains clues as to where aesthetic taste in general is headed. It’s also the case that core concepts that might seem too fantastic to the average consumer in terms of high fashion design, might work for a web page or print layout.

Fashion magazines like Vogue are a good source, but if you can, try to check out a televised show or even a live one, if you’ve got the guts for it. Seeing the designs in motion, something which many (if not all) designers have very much in mind when creating their work, will provide much more of an effect that seeing them on a static page or web site.

Anything can be a source of inspiration, as you’re probably well aware. The fact is, though, that many of us don’t actively cultivate areas that are technically beyond our professional purview. Specifically seeking out alternative sources of good creative ideas will not only help rejuvenate your work and give you an edge in a very competitive market, it will also help rejuvenate you and renew your excitement about your career.

Where do you look for inspiration?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

If you want to direct lightning to strike a certain target, you erect a lightning rod. The lightning rod is frequently struck because of its particular construction, material and positioning. To become a lightning rod for inspiration, you have to pay attention to very similar things.

Record the Context

Writing down your ideas is a great way not to lose them, whether you’re doing so digitally or using more old-fashioned methods. But while many people write down what it is they thought of, few think to record what it was they were doing when they had such a great idea. The ground in which the fruitful plant grows, after all, is just as important as the plant itself.

While you’re writing down your genius idea, also jot down when, where, and, if possible, how the idea came to you. The idea is that over time, a pattern might emerge, one that could help you replicate the circumstances which produced inspiration in the first place. There are a couple of particularly good ways to go about this.

The Double-entry Notebook

A really good way to track not only what you’re thinking about, but how and when you’re thinking about it is using a double-entry notebook. It’s simple enough to create, just take an ordinary notebook and draw a line down the center of the page each time you start a new one. You could also pick up a stenographer’s notebook, which is pre-divided for you.

The idea is that you record your thoughts in the left-hand column, and then, right after that, record any contextual details about the conditions that generated the idea in the column on the right (or vice versa, the side doesn’t really make a difference). Include details like where you are, what you were thinking about before you came up with your idea, what was going on around you, etc.

Database/Spreadsheet

If you’re not so interested in the low-tech method, you could do pretty much the same thing using a database or spreadsheet program on your computer. Plain old Excel or Google Docs could do just fine, or a more advanced (and better organized) personal database app like Bento for the Mac might be more to your liking.

With something like Bento, you can create custom fields and enter all kinds of information, while keeping your format consistent. You could do the same thing with a custom form in Word, Acrobat or whatever other program you prefer to use. The important thing is that you have a way to capture data that you’re comfortable using, which should make you more likely to actually use it.

Processing the Data

Truth be told, a lot of what you learn using the process probably won’t be useful in the strictest sense. It’ll all be interesting, and you’ll probably learn a thing or two about yourself that will surprise you. But what you will gain from the experience is a number of shining points of overlap, things that you see recurring over and over again whenever you have your best ideas.

At least some of those things should be replicable, which means that you’ll be better able to provide a working situation in which motivation and inspiration will come easily and without much prodding. Basically, you’ll have reverse-engineered your inspiration process, and you’ll have an informed and complete view of how and why you work.

How do you get inspirational lighting to strike twice?

Image credit: flickr user KM Photography

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

Vodafone also will be selling the device in Ireland. It will begin selling the phone in both places at the end of this year. Analysts see the move as a huge boon for Vodafone’s business, which had been suffering in the British market because of O2′s exclusivity deal. If you’re not keen on waiting, you can already pre-register online for iPhone updates through Vodafone’s web site.

Once it becomes available on Orange and Vodafone, the iPhone will be officially offered by three of Britain’s five mobile operators. The exponential increase in competition could have significant benefits for the consumer, if price wars ensue. The iPhone is already one of the most heavily subsidized devices on the market, though, so it’ll be interesting to see how far into profits cellular network operators are willing to cut to win consumer favor.

The iPhone is such a valuable property because of its data-intensive nature. Cellular providers are seeing profits from talk and text steadily decreasing as talk time becomes cheaper and plans become more competitive. Look at the U.S., where Sprint recently introduced free calling to any mobile on any network for those subscribed to its top-of-the-line Everything plans. Data use has become the real money maker for wireless companies, since customers still regard it as a premium and are willing to pay more for it.

Bernstein analyst Robin Bienenstock emphasized the role of the iPhone in O2′s recent success:

We estimate that the iPhone represents more than 100 percent of O2 UK’s growth, 6 percent of subscribers, 14 percent of service revenues and 13 percent of earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization. In the UK, O2 has consistently taken contract share from competitors (in particular Vodafone) since its sole distribution of this iconic brand began.

Clearly, Vodafone wants to take that contract share back, and now it has the means to do so, when it begins to offer the iPhone 3G and 3GS through 13 of its operating companies early next year. Hopefully, this is a taste of what’s to come for U.S. markets somewhere down the line. As Liam mentioned yesterday, the real show will take place when these three vie for consumer attention following the launch of whatever iPhone iteration Apple has in store for 2010.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Where new opportunity lies in the mobile operating system space
• Forecast: the converged mobile messaging market
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Sagmeister illustrated a traditional career as a timeline comprising three distinct “eras:” learning, work and retirement, with each “era” roughly taking up a third of one’s lifetime; around twenty-five years each.

While a confident minority of people might take a traditional career sabbatical, Sagmeister keeps his perspective and his work fresh by taking periodic sabbaticals throughout his career to date. In essence, Sagmeister closes his studio every eighth year, interspersing some of his retirement years into his active working career. This new career timeline looked more like learning, work, retirement, work, retirement…and so on.

Returning from a sabbatical in Indonesia back in 2007, Sagmeister realized his work had a new clarity, vision and purpose and that his “job became a calling again.” Sagmeister felt his post-sabbatical work was stronger and edgier; his year out provided the insight, innovation and income for the following seven years. So what is his formula?

1. Talk to people who’ve taken sabbaticals about how and why they did it, and what they learned.
2. Add five years to your planned working life.
3. Intersperse those extra years into your career, taking a year off every seventh year.

Humorously, Daniel Pink himself decided to re-imagine “going on sabbatical” as “taking a Sagmeister”!

As the world of work evolves into distributed portfolio careers and job markets become more flexible — and turbulent — it’s worth reconsidering the structure of your career. We have weekends and workweeks to partition our time and recharge ourselves, yet in the arc of a lifetime, we locate our intellectual renewal at its close. Perhaps it’s worth reconsidering and questioning this orthodoxy and begin to “take Sagmeisters,” breaking up our working lives with periodic sabbaticals and rebooting our passions. Sagmeister’s solution may not work well for everyone, but there’s an opportunity to experiment and mold the structure of our working lives to suit ourselves.

How would you incorporate sabbaticals into your working life?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics

Take a moment to think about the blogs you regularly visit, the high-profile professionals that you consider your mentors, and the groups you interact with online. How have they shaped your work? What extraordinary ideas have you learned from them?

As I pondered this myself, I identified the most important ideas that have helped me as a web worker.

Inbox Zero. Email processing is an important skill for us to learn. Most of us deal with dozens, if not hundreds, of incoming email messages each day. This makes email processing a tedious task for most of us. But for me, what made this task simpler was the concept of Inbox Zero from Merlin Mann of 43 Folders.

The main idea is that you need to process your email inbox until there’s nothing in it. There are only five things you can do with each email you receive: Delete, Delegate, Respond, Defer or Do. If you know that each email is actionable, tackling a hyperactive inbox won’t feel as overwhelming.

The E-myth. Just as I was starting my online freelancing career, I was lucky enough to read “The E-Myth Revisited” by Michael Gerber. Basically, the E-myth refers to the “entrepreneurial myth” that if you’re good at a certain skill, you can automatically run a business around that skill. If you’re a talented and original graphic designer, for example, it doesn’t always follow that you’ll be good at running your own design studio or practice. From budgeting business costs to marketing, entrepreneurs deal with several responsibilities that they have to learn on their own.

Although this might not be relevant to telecommuting employees, it’s essential for freelancers to understand. We may be very skilled in our line of work, but we also need to be smart business people if we want to succeed.

Stop when you’re going good. Two months ago, I came across a post by Nadia-Ballas Ruta for Write to Done. Included in the article was a quote from Ernest Hemingway about how to beat writer’s block:

“The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day…you will never be stuck.”

I still take advantage of bursts of creativity, but I follow Hemingway’s advice and always end a writing session mid-sentence. This means that I can avoid being stuck during the following session.

The Purple Cow. Seth Godin wrote a book called “Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable.” The gist of this book is that whatever it is you’re offering — whether it’s a product or a service — should be remarkable and original. For example, it’s not enough to just be a web designer. There must be a compelling reason why clients want to work with you and not the hundreds of thousands of other designers out there.

At this point in my career, I may not be a remarkable purple cow. But the idea gives me something to aspire to. At the very least, I no longer fear my own attempts at being remarkable. In his book, Seth Godin wrote something that I take comfort in when I’m in doubt:

“Another reason the Purple Cow is so rare is because people are so afraid. If you’re remarkable, then it’s likely that some people won’t like you. That’s part of the definition of remarkable. Nobody gets unanimous praise — ever.”

From my day-to-day habits to the big picture, it’s likely that I’ve overlooked dozens of other borrowed ideas that have helped me become a better online worker. Ten years from now, if I look back and feel proud of my career accomplishments, I know that I’ll have a vast digital village to thank for that.

What borrowed concepts have you followed and applied to your own work? Have you tried any of the ideas listed above?

Image by brokenarts from sxc.hu

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast