Weekly Challenge: Inspire

Ready for your weekly Geek Career Challenge?  Well it's here anyway.

It's hard at times for even the most imaginative of us to find new ideas.  It can be for a story, a database structure, or a marketing plan – we're just tapped out.  We all know too well those moments where inspiration leaves us, even in mundane tasks.

I find that inspiration works best when shared.  We know the power of sharing ideas and brainstorming together as we've experienced it many times in our lives – even when we may forget it.  Sharing ideas brings about new ones.

We can forget the importance of sharing ideas and inspiring each other when we, ourselves, are out of ideas.  Being out of ideas, we crave inspiration or even a good suggestion that might lead to fresh, fiery inspiration. Wanting this, we can get selfish and forget others have the same issues – and miss our chance to inspire them, and thus be inspired in turn.

So your goal for this week is to help someone who needs inspiration.

Look for someone who needs ideas, needs to bounce something off of you, has their imagination paralyzed by exhaustion or confusion or just plain no ideas.  When you find this person (or people), go out of their way to help inspire them by listening, or brainstorming with them or just making a suggestion.  As you make your efforts, go out of your way to do what you can to help get their minds moving.

When you inspire others, you can get inspired in turn, and encourage them to inspire even more people.  Make your contribution to keep brainstorming going in the world.

– Steven Savage

Fandom Shifts and Professionalism

Being the old geek that I am, I've seen fandom change over the decades (yes, decades).  I remember the 'zine days leading to the internet revolution.  I remember when Doctor Who was obscure as opposed to a sex symbol.  I remember the comics revolution – and the comics bust.

Yes, I've seen a lot.  And I'm old – in fact having seen all of this probably makes me feel even older.

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Job Research: Look for the Best Of

You have any trouble finding the right resources for your job and career?

If you're the average progeek, there's two situations:

  • You haven't done enough research, and when you do you are overwhelmed with the books, websites, meetups, and other resources and have no idea to start.
  • You have done the research long ago, and you're still painfully aware of just how much stuff there is out there you can use to find a job, research a career, etc.

One of the problems we progeeks face is, being information-oriented one way or another, being plugged in, is that we're swept away by a flood of options when we do career research.  Sure, we're great at surfing the web, mining amazon, and finding local event boards, but we have no idea where to start.

We could go do everything, and read everything, but we just don't have the time.

We could be very selective, but we worry we'll miss something.

We have frankly, no idea where to even start

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