8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: [06] Resumes & Resources

How creative practices make you better at your job, a better employee and a better colleague to others.

Chapter List

  • Post Haste

    I’m going to let you peek behind the curtain for a moment and remind you that sometimes creativity is smoke and mirrors, too.

    Truth is, I write these words weeks in advance of you reading them.

    Writing a daily blog is not always just about the dedicated day-after-day work of coming up with new ideas and then sitting down at a keyboard. Rather, sometimes it’s about working smarter and planning ahead. Sometimes it’s about organization and staging and schedules. Sometimes it’s a business plan.

    You want a life skill? You want to be better at a desk job? You want to get into a corporate strategic mindset? You want to learn how to get stuff done on a schedule? Oh, you can read about it in a textbook or download a course on business planning. 

    But might I suggest that you try instead a big creative project.

    Make a weekly web comic that demands you create on a schedule and manage a website.

    Join a band and try to release a demo that involves scheduling, promotion and technical skills.

    Write a novel that insists on long term strategic planning and holding big scope ideas in your head.

    I write these posts sometimes weeks in advance and try to keep between five and ten in my publication queue. Not only does that save me from rushing to write something on topic on every busy morning, but it gives me time to edit and hone and shuffle and plan out how I am making this site.

    It’s strategy. It’s planning. It’s bigger.

    And it’s more than creativity: it’s resume fodder, too.

  • Strange Runs

    I took up distance running seriously in 2008, shortly after my daughter was born. I had been dabbling in the sport for a decade previous, but right around new years and that time of making resolutions I signed up to join a training clinic at the local running supply store. Nearly two decades later I’ve run tens of thousands of kilometres, completed hundreds of races, and found a network of people who are some of my closest friends.

    Being a runner also had a strange effect at the office. 

    There were enough of us runners that we found each other. In meetings, in the lunch room, or by winks and nudges from others who relayed that “did you know so and so is a runner, too?”

    This is not a post about running. 

    This is a post about networking.

    Taking up a sport, a hobby or a creative passion and being open about that in your professional life has a weird and magical way of interconnecting us in the otherwise dispassionate spaces of the work world. 

    …not that this is some deep insight. Shared interests forge tribes, after all. 

     But while you could just as easily find that tribe talking about a great band or the local sports club, finding out that your coworkers are aspiring authors, avid photographers, spending their evenings composing music, or just own a really expensive running watch, too, is a different level of camaraderie that shouldn’t be overlooked by creative spirits.