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Make Something: Five Inspiring Ways to Spend a Year
When I started giving talks about my Skull-A-Day project, I quickly realized that people weren’t just interested in seeing the skulls I made, they were inspired by my experiences and the things I learned about creative inspiration. So I decided to create a way to help more people have the daily project experience, and more important, get past their excuses for not starting projects themselves (i.e. I don’t know what to make, I don’t know how to start, I don’t know what a blog is, etc.).
Thus was born my book, 365: A Daily Creativity Journal. At the start of the book I said that I wanted to hear from people who took on the daily creative challenge. The response has been overwhelming and amazing. Almost immediately after the book was published I started getting a constant stream of people sharing what they were doing and sending responses to my two-question interview: 1. Why did you decide to do this project? 2. How has doing a yearlong, daily project affected your life?
The answers to the second question have been the most moving for me, and I thought you’d find them inspiring as well. In no particular order, here are a few cool recent projects with the answers their creators gave:
A Heart A Day
Phoebe Berg
“I’m surprised to find that over the course of these 12 days it has become easier and easier to come up with ideas. The first day was such a struggle, kicking around ideas all day, but yesterday, the idea just came to me. Just image what day 100 will be like! But the really wonderful effect of this daily project is the feeling of accomplishment I have every day, because I created something, however simple, and put it out in the world.” Read More →
Announcing The Hired Guns Book Club: The Accidental Creative
Today we’re going to test a big idea that I hope will become a staple within our community: The Hired Guns Book Club. We’ve been wanting to try this for a long time. And now that we finally have a growing blog to support it, the time is now. It might seem plain crazy to launch a book club at the end of the summer, but I actually think it’s the perfect time. Fall is almost here, which means that the next few weeks give you precious time to get “inside your head” and go into the end of the year with the wind at your back. Now is the time to organize, prioritize, and create processes for success.
We can think of no better author to kick things off than Todd Henry, who will lead a virtual book club to discuss his new book, The Accidental Creative: How To Be Brilliant at a Moment’s Notice. We believe in this book and Todd’s premise that “anyone can improve his ability to generate good ideas consistently if willing to be a little more purposeful in how to approach the creative process.” We’ve been a fan of Todd Henry’s podcasts for years, and it’s high time he wrote a book that’s guaranteed to enhance readers’ careers.
So who’s an accidental creative? It’s anyone who needs to solve problems, develop strategies, and come up with ideas—that covers everyone from “true” creatives to business people who need to do mind-bending work to keep their company and products innovative. That said, this book is especially helpful to any creative classer who is feeling burnout coming over them. We say, get familiar with the ideas now, before you REALLY need them!
Here’s how The Hired Guns Book Club is going to go down: Read More →
Bullet Points: Nice Guys Finish Last; Social Recruiting Blossoms; Is Middle Management Going Out of Style?
Bullet Points: Social Media Blahs; the Dangers of Pretty; Patent Trolling
Five Ways to End Your Internship Right
It’s almost halfway through August, which means that lots of internships are wrapping up. Before you head out the door, take some time to end your internship on a positive and professional note. Here are five tips to keep in mind.
- Make sure your employers know when you’re leaving. Don’t just disappear! Your bosses need to know when you’ll be gone so that they can cover any of your ongoing duties or find a replacement. And be sure to say goodbye and thank them for your time at the company. (If you do this early enough, you might score a nice going-away party.)
- Collect references. No doubt you worked with many different people during your internship, and you’ve gained many good contacts in the process. Ask some of your coworkers if they can serve as references on LinkedIn. Be sure to ask if they will accept your invitation to connect on LinkedIn as well (and include your fellow interns from other schools). And do all this now, while all the good work you did at the company is fresh in their minds.
- Tie up any loose ends. Finish all the projects you can, and make sure any unfinished or ongoing duties are passed to someone who can take over for you. Make sure that when you are gone your colleagues will know exactly how to dig up that big spreadsheet you’ve been working on.
- Sit down with your boss. You were in this job to add some dazzle to your resume. This is your chance to get an assessment of your performance and talk about what you learned. It’s also important to review exactly what you accomplished so that you can accurately update your resume—and then send it to your boss for review for final polishing. If you want another internship at the same company, ask now.
- Follow up and stay in touch. It’s important to show that you are grateful for the time you spent at your internship. The best way to start? An email to your employers thanking them for the opportunity. And tell them about what kind of opportunity you want for next summer!
—Rich Fuchs, The Hired Guns’ outgoing intern, is a political science major entering his junior year at Penn State. He wants his next internship to be at a law firm or in senator’s office.
[Photo of cubicle:Ahniwa Ferrari/flickr]
Dreams and Goals Matter, Whatever the Market Does
This post was previously published in The Hired Guns Gig Alert, our email newsletter with all the most recent job postings as well as no-nonsense career advice from Top Gun Allison Hemming and others. If you’re not already a subscriber, head to our homepage and sign up.
It’s hard to go through these days of tumultuous economic news and not have your heart skip a beat. The news shows offer a parade of pundits that are all about the blame game but have no solutions. And while I can’t get in there and duke it out in Washington, I can offer up a few career management takeaways that will make an impact for you today.
Optics Matter. Are you the source of gridlock in your organization? Are you attached to a project in production paralysis? Break out. We’ve felt in the most visceral way that when players inside organizations are afraid to compromise, their reputation gets downgraded. Don’t let this be you. Be the voice of reason and get results, even if it means you need to dial down your risk-taking for the moment to achieve a common goal. Read More →
Reveal or Evade? What to Do When a Company Wants Your Current Salary
We’d like to welcome to the blog Jim Hopkinson, the author of Salary Tutor. In his posts, he’ll help you with a skill that most of us dearly need to improve—expertise in negotiating salary. Today he covers dealing gracefully with an all-too-common problem—knowing what to say when a hiring manager wants to know how much you make at your current job. A slightly different version of this post appeared on Jim’s website.
Conducting a job search often leads people through a series of highs and lows. You have a great lead, but it falls through. You haven’t had any interviews in a month, and then you get three in a week. Even the end of a successful job search can be stressful: the company offers you the job, but you’re not sure how to discuss salary.
Someone wrote to me with the following question: “Good news. I received this email from the hiring manager and am a finalist for the job. But how should I respond to the salary question?”
Hi Amy. We finished all our interviews and we will be making a final decision between you and one other candidate. Could you provide two references and also let me know your current salary so that we are in a position to make an offer.
Take Back Your Lunch with The Hired Guns: Wednesday, August 17
It’s been one long, hot summer. Join the Hired Guns next Wednesday at noon to get out of the office and Take Back Your Lunch with us. We’re going to get together and walk the newly expanded High Line. Then we’re going to do lunch at the food trucks at the “end of the Line,” near 10th Avenue and 30th Street. Hope to see you there.
Here are the details! Please sign up so we can reach you with specifics.
[Photo: USVIZION/flickr]
Bullet Points: The Downside of Low Turnover; Making Your Company Resilient; the Point of Social Media Experts
- Does your company have a low employee turnover? Maybe it’s because no one else wants them. [ERE.net]
- Writing for HBR, George S. Everly, Jr., has some thoughts on what makes a person or an organization “resilient,” and what you can do to encourage this quality.
- Why do startups need social media experts? [The Next Web]
- Unlimited vacation days. Cleaners sent to employees’ houses. “Whiskey Fridays.” How does your company stack up against CNBC’s list of crazy job perks?
- The Onion’s testing a metered paywall along the lines of the New York Times’. Right now it’s only those outside the U.S. who have to pay up after reading a certain number of articles a month. [Nieman]
- An excerpt in the Guardian from The Social Entrepreneur’s Handbook on how to recruit the best people for the job.
- A sign of things to come: The House has ended its page program, citing annual costs of over $5 million for the program. So far, the Senate is keeping its pages. [NYT]
- After looking at the data, Dan Zarrella of Hubspot thinks he knows the best time to tweet, and it’s right around 4 p.m. And if you want more followers, tweet a bunch. [Nieman Labs, from March]
- 5 Things Great Bosses Never Do [Bnet]
Get Your Blog On: Joshua Foer and Dylan Thuras of Atlas Obscura Talk About Staying Focused and Inspired
Atlas Obscura is a travel site that avoids the sunny beaches, “edgy” restaurants, and hip nightclubs that make up so much travel writing. Its founders, Dylan Thuras and Joshua Foer (author of the recent book about memory, Moonwalking with Einstein) have other sights in mind . . . . They aim for the surprising, the odd, and the unjustly unknown. In other words, they seek “places that expand our sense of what is possible and tell us something about ourselves, and about the wider world in which we live.”
For this installment of Get Your Blog on, Joshua and Dylan talk with Bill Brazell about how they developed their site and how they balance the wonders of crowd sourcing with the need to create a site that remains on-topic and accurate. They also cover the places they personally loved the most—as well as the ones they can’t wait to see. Check out the globe-trotting interview below:
