Results tagged “Inspired”

Once a quarter, I take each team member to lunch to talk about "stuff". The discussion usually starts with work, but I always take the time to discuss career choices and growth in general. It sounds stuffy, but the conversation isn't about five year plans, or goals and objectives, its about digging. We do a little excavation, looking for that "one thing".

Now if you've seen City Slickers, you'll know I'm blatantly referencing Curly's response to Mitch's question about the meaning of life. I'm not sure you can boil the meaning of life into "one thing", but I do believe that you can trace your happiness in a career path to a singular defining theme.

There is a constant in the work we all choose to do, and that constant is what drives us to get up and go to work every day (and its not a paycheck, that's a cop-out). The trick is to do some honest soul searching and discover what that one constant is. For some its family, for others its making people laugh. For me, I enjoy creating things for other people to experience. The constant is always simple, and always strikes true as an answer to "Why do you do what you do?".

If you can discover that singular theme, then I would bet you can look back through your career path and clearly see how that theme ties together most of the job choices you've made. In my career you can see the choices from my degree as a film major, to creative services in radio, and ultimately web design/development, all tie into my constant: creating things for other people to experience and enjoy. More importantly, it can make the path forward a lot clearer.

Knowing that constant allows you to look at your career path with a broader lens. A broader view can allow you to see opportunities that may not be directly in front of you. It also allows you to look forward and see if your current job is still on your path, or if its time to move on. Always take a little time to question yourself:

• Are you still growing the knowledge or skill-set you need?
• Are you gaining the experience you need?
• Are you still happy?

Today's world is unforgiving to those who don't own their own career path, so take charge.

Find that one thing.

At the end of 1999 I was working an overnight job that a monkey could do. My most recent romantic flame-out was fresh, and a deer had run in front of my car on the way to said monkey job on Christmas Eve. All of these events inspired me to spend New Years Eve with some friends and a large bottle of Patron Anejo tequila.

The next day (after the fog had worn off) I made a decision, I was going to take charge of my life again. I started learning HTML and Photoshop in the spare 6-7 hours of my 8 hour overnight job. I also decided to pursue the woman who I had fallen for years earlier, but the timing was never right.

Now I stand at the cusp of 2010, married to that same beautiful woman for over seven years (we're expecting our second child in June). I'm also now the User Interface manager if an excellent team and am ready to embark on the next decade of my career in web.

So my goals for the next decade?

• Focus on the things that matter to me. Gaining this focus won't be the hard part, keeping it will be.


• Patience to see the opportunities already in front of me. Maintain the long view of my goals and persevere.


• Appreciate the good luck, relationships, and life I already have. I've spent much of the last few years lamenting what I'm not doing professionally and personally. High time to turn that around.

Professional goals for the next decade?

• Share more (blog, meetups, etc.). Focusing on my particular POV being inside big biz with a small web team and the tools/methods we use to succeed


• Attend one social web meetup/gathering each month. I learn so much more when attending events like these and getting to know fellow web professionals in Denver.


• Keep my eye on the prize. Always remembering my career is my own path. Always be checking the road signs to make sure you're still on that path!

And on a personal note, my new years resolution is to restrict my TV time to the weekends so I spend more time reading and with my family. This one will be particularly difficult as TV is how I chill out on any given day!

I've been spending spare cycle time this last week thinking about a good name for the freelance small-biz web consulting I want to start doing on the side from my day job.

And...I can't think of a single good name...at all.

I've thought about just building out a branch off of seanevanking.com, but I really want to keep that strictly a resume site.  So I'm left domain name hunting.  So far I've been to:

• The Dotomator


• crawled all over Urban Dictionary (I swear someone buys the domain name for every entry)


• Brand Bucket (too costly for freelance, but not bad for startups)


• I even went through a list of words ending with "us", to cleverly use the .us tld

I'm not giving up.  I think this just may take a while, and a large section of my oversized whiteboard.  If I'm lucky, I'll stumble across something before 2010...

I'm back.

It has been over 18 months since my last serious blog post, and I'm ready to start talking again.  I have more greys, more corporate battle scars, but I also have a renewed focus, and am looking to share with whomever will listen.

Look for more...soon.