Work is like riding a bicycle. When you’re learning how it’s exciting, challenging. The first few rides are exhilarating and give you a sense of accomplishment, pride, and freedom. After a while it becomes too easy just riding up and down the driveway or the street in the neighborhood. You’re ready for a challenge – a hill! There are ups and downs. Climbing is a challenge but when you reach the top you are once again rewarded with a sense of achievement plus the added bonus of coasting down the other side. There is no reward if there is no challenge. You can’t coast forever; eventually you must pedal again or you will fall over, ending the ride.

It is so important to find ways to challenge yourself, to find a good balance between pedaling and coasting, to always make the ride interesting and be proud of your accomplishments. If you work as hard as you can, you will be compensated according to your actions. Show that you are part of the team. Demonstrate your willingness to work hard for the success of your company, whether it’s your own or you work for someone else. Get excited about new projects and submit your creative ideas to make the company better. At the very least just show up and work. Stop coasting and start pedaling.

If it’s worth showing up, isn’t it worth putting in the effort? Why go unhappily through the motions each day? Why bother at all if you don’t put your heart into your work? You likely spend as much time working as you do with family – make it count. Get in gear or get out of the way, before you are moved out of the way unexpectedly.

Not everyone loves everything about their job but if you can find an aspect of your job you enjoy or appreciate, perhaps you can stoke your passion for it. Find a way to change your perspective about what you do or how you make a difference in your world.

Challenge Yourself
Do you get irritated when someone asks you to do something that is out of the ordinary, something new that you’re unsure of how to accomplish? Get over your apprehension and rise to the challenge. Start pedaling. Extending ourselves beyond our comfort zones is how we learn and grow. This eHow article by Ryan Mooney is full of great ideas of how to challenge yourself in the workplace.

Create Opportunities
Seek out opportunities for challenge and growth in your workplace. If there are none then perhaps you should create an opportunity for yourself. There is nothing wrong with taking it upon yourself to go outside the box. Create a competition within your department to see who can be most productive. Challenge yourself to write an article for your company newsletter. Approach the boss about an idea you have to grow the company or about a special project you are interested in. Assemble a group of coworkers to participate in work for a charity you care about.

Take Responsibility
Take responsibility for your work. Learn from your successes and failures in order to take a more educated approach in the future. Success is so much sweeter when you’ve truly had a hand in creating it and others will be more apt to want to work with you in the future. Mark Buchan at The Skills Portal analyzes the value of responsibility and the role it plays in improving performance. Responsibility distributed unequally among peers in the workplace can result in blame, resentment, and frustration. The first step is to take responsibility for your part in projects which you are involved. Lead by example. Be sure that you are proud of the work you produce by taking responsibility for the outcome.

Enjoy the ride!
You must ask yourself, “Am I coasting? If I don’t start pedaling soon am I going to fall?” If you choose not to pedal, you may find a lot of competition going up your next hill. Challenge yourself, create opportunities that are interesting to you, and take responsibility for the work you take part in. You may find that the uphill challenge can be as exhilarating as the rest of the ride.

If you have not tried Pinterest yet, you may be missing out on the next big thing… or at the very least another time burning obsession; hours of mindless searching, pinning, collecting, sharing. Creating perfect little worlds in the form of personal pin boards. I have fallen victim to temporary binges of pinsanity but it consoles me to know that I’m not alone.

Pinterest is not new. It has been around since 2008 but it seems to be growing exponentially. According to TechCrunch, Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history.

If you haven’t tried it, or just don’t “get” it, take a look at this article from Social Media Examiner. Their article focuses on using Pinterest for business but it also includes some great tips on using it to it’s greatest potential.

There are many theories as to what is driving the rapid growth of Pinterest and why people find the site so addictive. I believe part of Pinterest’s success is buried in the need people feel to collect things and call them their own. It is a new form of hoarding, a good kind, if there is such a thing, because it doesn’t take up space in your hallway after the guest room has been packed to the ceiling with precious crap. There is no stench of old musty magazines or fuzzy kitty #26 who crawled into a cave of sweaters with the tags still on them and never came out.

I am a very visual person. Shiny things make me happy. I found Pinterest while searching the web for bathroom makeover ideas. I came upon a plethora of bathroom pins. What was this amazing catalog of photos, fields of images, undisturbed by blocks of text or advertisements? I had to be a part of this visual catalog. After being accepted to join Pinterest (it’s very elite, of course), I began to search, and pin, and create new boards for myself. I began to use Pinterest as a search engine to find ideas and inspiration; DIY Christmas cards, artwork, words of wisdom, recipes, humor.

Pinterest has many more uses than first meets the eye. As it says on Pinterest’s “What is Pinterest?” page, “Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.” Aside from collecting pretty pictures, it is a tool that can be used many ways, depending on perspective and approach. GalleyCat created a list of pinboards for book lovers. Kristin Morrison on olecommunity.com explains how to use Pinterest as a tool for educators. On Hubpages, randomcreative suggests wonderful ways to use Pinterest as a tool for research, brainstorming, collaboration, and more. Many companies are using Pinterest as a tool to promote their brand and engage their customers. It will be interesting to see how the uses of Pinterest will grow and how the site will adapt in the future. The possibilities are pinfinite… I couldn’t resist.

I have not done the bathroom makeover yet but I have collected 15 pins (and counting) on my bathroom board and it makes me happy to dream about all of the beautiful options that are out there. It’s always a happy place and it’s just a click away.

The effort you put into your website, or marketing in general for that matter, factors heavily into the results you will see. Gone are the days when a business owner can put up a website and leave it unattended with any hope of potential customers finding it. Business owners must take an active role by making their website useful, informative, and interesting.

The million dollar question is, “How can my site be at the top of the list in a web search?” In a nutshell, the answer is “Make it valuable.” The more visitors you have, the higher your rankings will be. How do you get more visitors? Make your site a valuable resource, get the word out, and keep it current. Consider that all of your competitors, near and far, are competing for that top spot. The winner will be the one that is most valuable to visitors.

In the words of the immortal Jerry Maguire, “Help me help you!” Web designers specialize in the design and function of a site. We promise to do our best to make it attractive and organized in a way that potential customers will find and navigate easily. We do research to learn as much as possible about a client’s business but would never claim to be experts in their fields. That would be silly. We rely heavily on clients to provide a basic outline of their vision for online presence in addition to well organized content, including text and images. We are part of your team, all striving to attract as much potential business as possible. Help us help you by providing accurate, complete content so that we can understand your business and represent it properly with your website. It is essential that you participate in the way your business is seen online.

Be yourself and people will love you. There is much to be said for bringing personal elements to a website. Potential clients are much more likely to give you a shot if they connect with you on some personal level. Personal connection is more valuable than ever in these days of cell phones and email. It’s easy to get lost in the network. Find a way to show who you are, what you value, and why your business stands above the others.  You are the expert, you have inside information that your customers want – show them they will succeed with you on their side.

It is not easy. A successful website takes time and effort to maintain once it is up and running. Launching your site is only the first step. The second step is getting the word out…

UPDATE:
On Friday, January 20, the vote was postponed by Congress “in light of recent events.”
For more details, see article at www.reuters.com

Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House would censor the Web and affect everyone who uses the internet. On January 24, the Senate will begin voting.

Right now, instead of checking Twitter, catching up with Facebook friends, or posting on your own blog, watch this video (by Fight for the Future) to understand how PIPA/SOPA will affect you.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Go to AmericanCensorship.org and make your voice count.

“Surround a thought with a pencil,” Eugene Hoffman said. It has been with me since the fall of 1990, my freshman year of college at the University of Northern Colorado. Gene was full of inspirational words. He was not one to let a student fly under the radar, either you participated or you simply didn’t show up. If you showed up you didn’t want to disappoint him, you wanted to impress and that was not easy because he’d seen it all.

For Gene’s graphic design class we were required to order a subscription to Communication Arts. Like the pages of Rolling Stone in high school, I read and re-read each and every article of Communication Arts, turning each thick, white page with anticipation of the inspirational image I might find on the next page. I even ordered a back issue from 1988 in which my professor was featured. He was like a rock star to me… in plaid flannel and suspenders. Gene had really lived it – he was part of the history of graphic design, winning prestigious awards as an illustrator. He even earned a lifetime ski pass to all Colorado ski resorts by designing promotional posters back when the ski industry in Colorado was not doing well.

"Plastic Indian," 25" x 37" by Gene Hoffman as shown in Communication Arts Magazine, January/February 1988

Gene used found objects, paper, glue and cardboard to build amazing sculptures but also he offered perspective. Everything is art. You make it art. If you think about it, if you want to do it, make it happen. You are in control and are responsible for what you do. Nothing is impossible. Words are inspiration.

He said if you get stuck, make it fly, give it wings. “Time flies like an arrow, but horseflies like a stable,” Gene said. Look at things from a different perspective and a solution will come to you. Based on perspective, there are infinite solutions to the same problem. Some of his favorite words were “sycophant”, and “obsequious.” Because of the way they felt rolling off the tongue and the images and feeling they produced in their simple syllables (after you looked them up in the dictionary). Words and images evoke feeling, memories, ideas. They are the tools we use as designers to make products fly off the shelves, to connect everyday people to a brand.

In 2004, working at Citizen Printing in Fort Collins, Colorado, I ran into Gene at the front counter. He was having a show at a gallery in Loveland and needed posters. I don’t know if he really remembered me out of all of the students he had over the years but he took time to talk and was truly interested on how my life had been and where I wanted it to go. In school, Gene had said, ”Be careful how you choose your hat because your hat is you.” I had chosen my hat well, it fit me and I loved wearing it every day. The opening of his show on October 16 went as I expected. Surrounded by his works of art, Gene was talking energetically to visitors, telling stories as only he could. Sadly, he passed away a few short months later on February 24, 2005. He made such an impact on so many. Thank you Gene, for your words and inspiration.