To stay where you are.

We like the idea of doing something more with our lives.  We like the idea of somehow being creative.  We might identify what this might possibly be.

What will be your next step towards this?

And what will the thing be that you do tomorrow towards this?  (And if you read this early enough in the day: what will you do today to make this happen?)

Creativity has just become more difficult.

How come?

Too risky?
Maybe not sure where to begin?
Perhaps fear of the unknown?
Or maybe something will have to be given up?
Then, the cost may be too high?

Really, without taking a step, we don’t know if any of these things will prove to have any substance.  The thing you do know for certain is, if you stay where you are, doing the thins you do, nothing will change.  This may sound risk-free, but it’s the riskiest place to be:

“All around you, people will be tiptoeing through life,
just to arrive at death safely.  But dear children, do not
tiptoe.  Run, hop, skip, or dance, just don’t tiptoe.”
(College professor to his class)

Another reason it’s risky is because we’re living in a world of increasing possibilities, where our learning and experiences are changing in ways we couldn’t have imagined thirty years ago.  Who wouldn’t want to be part of this?

A few places to begin:

Order the book that’ll help you figure out what you must do: here’s one for starters

Join a local group who meet to enjoy together the thing you’re interested in.

If there isn’t one, start one: meetup.com is one, here’s another (all you need to begin is one other person).

Find or help build a new kind of library, one in which the librarian is “a data hound, a guide, a sherpa, and a teacher … the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.”*  (I’m part of a group wondering how we build such a library.)

Or something else which fills your imagination.

Dance, skip, run, or hop – up to you.

(*Seth Godin shares a wonderful picture of what the library of the future will look like: “The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and to coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. … The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user-serviceable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it’s fun. … The next library is filled with so many Web terminals that there’s always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don’t view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight—it’s the entire point.  Wouldn’t you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that?)