1) Envision:
Write a bit of fiction - imagine where you want to be, what you want to
be doing - [x] months or years in the future. Then prepare the outline
of steps, actions, investments you will need to execute - and the
relationships, skills, experience, and knowledge you will need to
acquire. Then, as Zig Ziglar once said: "Plan your work, work your
plan".
2) Expand: Attend meet-ups in your area (or form one, if one doesn't exist) on topics of interest relevant to your field.
3) Bridge: Offer to help a non-profit - in ways that will leverage the skills you want to acquire or hone.
4) Explore: Make a list of the people you respect
and admire in your field - then reach out and ask them if you can
interview them for a profile article you wish to submit to a news site,
or professional journal, related to your industry. Probe for what drives
them, Ask 'why' questions.
5) Speculate: Find a struggling start-up that you
think is worthy - and offer to provide some of your time and expertise
(ideally in exchange for some form of an equity stake - but if not,
then offer on a Pro Bono basis).
6) Plant Seeds: Connect with educators and guidance
counselors in your local high schools and community colleges - offering
to give talks on your field/profession, as a career choice.
7) Fertilize Your Mind: Read inspiring biographies of inventors, builders, creators, makers.
8) Change your Latitude: For me, it took a month of sailing along Baja Mexico - and it was like a light was switched "on" again.
9) Change your Attitude: Get your blood flowing on a
regular basis with some kind of exercise. Even better, couple that with
learning a new physical skill.
10) Change your Altitude: Get up into the mountains -
see the valleys and views from a different perspective. It will open
your senses - and open your mind.
11) Write for Yourself: Write a journal, with one clear intention: In what way have I expanded my knowledge/expertise today?
12) Write for Others: Submit ideas for articles, on
speculation, to professional journals or industry news sites - topics
that would be interesting to explore/learn - and when accepted, you'll
be forced to dive into the material.
13) Exercise Your Idea Muscle: If you feel stuck,
stagnant, powerless - it probably has more to do with your attitude -
than lack of opportunity - than you might think. Invest an hour a day to
practice writing business cases for new business ideas (or
changes/improvements to your existing company) that you would implement -
if you had the budget, time, and resources. Submit those you connect
strongly with to your management team (or, consider as the basis for
launching your own company).
14) Reflect: Consciously set aside time to reflect
and explore how each part of the work that you do goes into the assembly
of the whole - and how what you do affects the final product or
service, who it affects, how it affects them, and the value that you add
and create. Consider how what you do can be done better, faster, more
efficiently, at lower cost. Practice #Mindfulness
15) Network with Intent, Outward. Find ways to
continually expand your network of professional connections - related to
your field. Seek ways to introduce, connect, help others - and don't
worry if/when there might be some pay-off. Practice #Selflessness
16) Network with Intent, Within: Organize a weekly
lunchtime brown bag session with your company - seeking to invite people
from different divisions, departments, groups - with a rotating
responsibility for picking a topic for discussion. Use this time to
focus on how such a diverse group can generate a sustained synergy for
the creation of new ideas to remove roadblocks to the development of new
products/services - eliminate bureaucracy and waste - streamline
operations - and reduce costs.
17) Apply Shu-Ha-Ri:
Return to the source - immerse yourself in the study of the basics and
fundamentals of your field, detach from your assumptions of how things
must be - breaking from tradition, seek to transcend by evolving new
ideas that escape from the staid boundaries of what has been.
18) Transpose Your Frame of Reference with New Coordinates:
If you feel you have been in a particular industry for too long -
spending time seeding new problems/ideas may be just the ticket to
re-ignite your passion. Try allocating some time to reading recent
research papers in completely different fields to expose your mind to
different contexts. This is my favorite site for such inspiration:
https://arxiv.org/
19) Play: Give yourself permission to explore useless things - just for fun. in "
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", Richard P. Feynman tells of reaching a point of burnout - and how he recovered his zest for his work:
Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to
enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to
play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing — it
didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of
nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to
play with. …
So I got this new attitude. Now that I
am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got
this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather
enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure,
I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.
Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around,
throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it
wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going
around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around
faster than the wobbling. …
I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how
electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac
Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics.
And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was
“playing’’ — working, really — with the same old problem that I loved so
much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.
It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like
uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried
to resist it!
There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.
