One of the people that I follow on twitter, @briguyblock, wanted to talk about his year – the good, the bad and the crazy. But, has not fully immersed himself in the world of blogging and asked for a bit of help. Since I believe wholly in the creativity of the individual, I couldn’t say no. Plus, his story is worth telling. So, Happy New Year Brian – and here’s his story:

I won’t give you my life story, but I started out the year at the bottom of the work totem pole, as a boyfriend, a social media enthusiast and a grandson.

Going in chronological order, I began the year by proposing to my girlfriend. Later that night we were officially engaged. Facebook said so. We spend the next several months planning the wedding which would take place almost two years from the engagement. It was a long engagement, but a good way to keep someone close.

Since then and throughout the year my family was blessed with five new little cousins. All were chubby with 50 toes and 50 fingers.

I also spent this time to try and build myself in the social media community. Meeting great people and mixing with other like-minded professionals was addicting.

This had carried me through most of the year till August. Then things went sour.

My great uncle passed away. He had been sick for a while, but it was still a major shock that knocked our family down hard. He was loved so much. There’s a short list of men in my life who I feel everyone can learn something from to live a better life. He was one of them.

My fiance left me in late September. I had been searching for her birthday gift the last night she asked to meet . She had some personal reasons for not being able to continue on with me. It was definitely a mistake, but unfortunately it was a necessary step on her part.

In October, I was finally promoted to Account Executive. That was great. This gave me a stronger direction for my career as a social media promoter and PR professional. In fact other people had noticed me too and asked me to step up to take part in greater social media activities. This helped some to get me out of a depression I had been in, but not for long.

In November, I was asked to take care of an event that had been planned three weeks later than it should have and allowed me that same amount of time to put it together. Throwing all disregard into the wind for how I usually like to treat projects and the people who I work with outside of the company, I began pulling strings and my hair to get this project accomplished. It was one of those 60 hour a week, constant pressure from the boss projects that take up your time and make you late for everything in your life.

The day before the event, my mom called me to tell me my grandfather had passed away. He is one of other men on the short list I mentioned earlier. I can’t begin to tell you who he was and what he did that made him special, suffice it to say that a sanctuary that probably held around 600 people was filled to standing room only. He was survived by 8 children (including spouses), 15 grandchildren, 5 great grandchildren and one loving wife.

We all have bad years and good years. This has been both and one too important to let it just be a passing 365 days that happened. I’ll keep this one close to me.

Believe it or not, that was the short version of my year. I might have been able to summarize it better had I simply said that, “in 2008, I learned the difference between a toast and a drink, a pink-ribbon scar and a wound, and the strength to hope for the best and the strength to make it happen.”

Forget limits exist.

idea for the post courtesy of @lizstrauss

Mount Everest. The highest mountain on earth (measured above sea level, of course). Only the strongest dare risk its treacherous peaks, freezing temperatures and thin air.

“Everest for me, and I believe for the world, is the physical and symbolic manifestation of overcoming odds to achieve a dream.” – Tom Whittaker

This has long been one of my favorite quotes. And I strongly believe it is extremely pertinent in the business world. We each must create our own Everest in order to truly succeed in life. Notice I didn’t say climb our own Everest, only create it. Each of us needs a Mount Everest: A ’treacherous peaked, scary as all hell, hard to breathe’ goal that we never think we can get to. Mine is to finish writing my book, get it published & in stores. This goal gives me focus, drive and motivation for everything else in this world. It gives me something to aim for. It makes me work harder in my job, knowing that the harder I work now, the more free time I’ll have to work on my book in the future.

Although I may never get to the top of my Everest, knowing what it is makes sure that I never stop trying.

Do you agree? Do you have an Everest?

When was the last time you just sat down and started writing – let the words take you where they wanted instead of where you wanted? Adults have been taught to stay in control of their destiny, plan their next move and that each word has to mean something. Children believe that losing control is fun, planning moves is only for chess, and words can be made up.

Your inner child has a huge influence on your creativity. Without an inner child, we are all just a bunch of boring adults talking about nothing. Your inner child is the one that lets you make a joke to break the ice, write about something you are passionate and fail at a task without beating yourself up. The portrait above was created by Dan Kellner, someone I have found through the glory of social media (thank you Twitter!). His art is extremely creative and I believe this sketch captures the truth of his inner child & was my inspiration for today.

Our inner child is the little voice in our head that tells us not to take life too seriously. The little voice that we have taught ourselves to ignore. I’m a firm believer in not ignoring that voice – in fact I embrace that voice and often let it tell me where my creativity should go. Yes, my blog often takes random turns – goes from an analysis of your creative breaking point to planning an Alice in Wonderland themed wedding from a cake. But, I never started this blog to change the world. I started this blog to give myself an outlet for my creative (and yes, random) thoughts. In the process, I have gained a few readers and learned a lot about myself. And, I could have never done any of it without my inner child. She was the one that told me it was okay to fail. That writing about random creative thoughts was perfectly okay, and that if no one ever read them, it would still be a great blog. I am thankful for my inner child and the freedom she gives me.

Next time you are stuck, trying to come up with a new marketing campaign, color scheme or blog post, let your inner child out. It may just surprise you how much creativity you have inside of you.

I found the start of my creative inspiration from one great site, through another great site (Cake Nouveau through Cake Wrecks). Normally Cake Wrecks shows off those creepy cakes that make us cringe or wonder ‘what were they thinking’. But the story that caught my eye was about a few cakes too beautiful and unique for words. The cake below was my favorite, as I loved Alice in Wonderland as a young girl….and that of course got me thinking. Rather than just feature a creative cake, I expanded it into a creative theme! By combining some great table designs, decorations and costuming, I created the backbone to an Alice in Wonderland themed wedding. Below are the pieces that put it together:

The cake (courtesy of Cake Nouveau)

The bride *you would be surprised how hard it is to find a non x-rated version* (courtesy of heavencostumes):

The groom (courtesy of Anniescostumes):

The bestman/maid of honor (courtesy of BuyCostumes):

The mother of the bride (courtesy of Lenny’s Alice in Wonderland):

The father of the bride (courtesy of HalloweenCostumes):

The decorations for the table (courtesy of Hey there, cupcake’s Flickr):

Testing your creativity on things that are just for fun can help you keep your creativity strong when it really counts.

Today’s creativity test:

If you were given this picture and free reign to come up with an ad – what would you do? What product would you use it for? What slogan can you see? Let your mind soar….

I recently got a chance to check out one of the newest twitter apps – Twollo – as well as speak with the creator, Paul Kinlan. He and I took our conversation out of the 140 character atmosphere, and chatted via email. I asked him a few questions about why he created twollo, the goal of the site and where he saw it going. Below is the information he gave me about his new site:

KW: Why did you start Twollo?

PK: I started Twollo because I needed to expand the twitter network that I was in. I was getting to the point where I was getting bored ( for want of a better word) and I knew that there must be thousands of user out there with interests that are similar to mine. I am a big fan of automation so I thought I should create a service that follows people for me whilst i am a sleep, at work etc.

I did some “Market research” and didn’t find anything that could do what I wanted. Obviously I am not good at Market research because there is a service with nearly exactly the same name doing a similar thing (but it costs money for the comparative service).

KW: So what were you doing beforetwollo?

PK: I run a company called topicala ltd (it is just me) that was originally based around a simple meta search engine at www.topicala.com after experiencing scalability problems I investigated the Google App Engine and have now developed lots of services on this; mainly www.eweri.com, www.atopical.com, www.thecompanything.com, www.thetopicthing.com, some others I can’t mention yet and now www.Twollo.com

KW: Where do you see this site going? and do you plan on making any big changes to it overall?

PK: Twollo itself is not very complex, the suggestion engine is very simple and I plan to keep it that way. One of the places that I see twollo going is that I now have a lot of information with regards to the interests of twitter/twollo users so the future will be less about mining twitter for data and more about connecting users through twollo directly.

Twollo is all about finding and following the conversations about which you are interested, and from that perspective I am the same I want twollo to grow and the only way that this can happen is if I am very active in conversation about twollo, which is why I am quite vocal on twitter at the moment.
Paul continued to say that he is always open for suggestions – and the best way to find out what is going on with Twollo is to follow him @twollo

For those of you who haven’t checked it out – here is my brief review of the site (both the good and the bad). Feel free to let me know what you thought as well!

1. The site is well organized and it is easy to see what is going on and the users it is finding for you. But, the UI could be a little wider, and possibly customizable for the user.

2. The name is quite cute – and fairly easy to remember (although there are about a million Tw— sites out there now…). The logo is great but I wonder about the rights to use the twitter bird?

3. It definitely gives you some quality people to follow – I have found some great new people in the niches that I am interested in. But, I would love to see a prequalification that he tweeters have made at least 100 updates and have 15 followers themselves. This might help eliminate a few of the spammers.

4. You get to fully customize your results, as narrow or as broad as you would like. I chose creative marketing as my tag, as well as my own twitter name – @kirstenwright, and the common misspelling -@kRistenwright (it helps as I missed a few new people who had responded to earlier tweets of mine)

5. As far as the autofollow – you can set it to find 10, 20, 50, etc people each day. If you set it low, the number of new followers really isn’t too much to check.

Overall – definitely worth checking out. You’ll never know who you meet until you try it

Finally, thanks to Paul Kinlan for his time.

We are not all the best. We don’t all belong on alltop.com. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get there someday. Yes, it would be great to be Steve Jobs or Michael Eisner without doing a thing. Be at the top of your industry, have everyone desire to have a company like yours. But that isn’t the reality for 99.9% of us. So, we work hard. Really hard. To get better at what we do, and to get more people interested in who we are. Someday, I plan to be on Alltop and a published author (Riding with Lucifer will someday get finished…). But I’m not going to get there just hoping. Right now, I am just mediocre:
 and proud of it. It is neither healthy nor beneficial to be unhappy with where you are. The best advice that I have is to be happy with who you are and where you are but to always be working to improve. I was told once, by a great business woman (my mother), that hard work is the only thing that will get you to where you want to be. Luck comes to those who know how to make it themselves.

What is the best advice you’ve been given in your business? Are you Mediocre and proud, working your way to Alltop?

 Aim’s (artists in mind’s) vision for a specialist centre for the documentation and storage of artworks by artists who experience acute and enduring mental health problems. We provide studio spaces, artists materials, mentoring by practising artists and professional support and development. aim also initiates and manages creative projects in prisons, secure hospitals, forensic units and in the community.

…even better than their message? The artwork. The level of hidden talent in the world is incredible, and I feel lucky to have found this site through twitter. To find out more about the gallery and the artist’s, visit http://www.artists-in-mind.org.uk/aimart.html.  

I am a big fan of stuff, but organized stuff. I may actually be a tad OCD (but I’d never admit to it!). In doing some furniture research for our *hopefully* new condo, I stumbled upon some very creative cabinets. Not only were they creative in the visual sense, but the thought process that it took to come up with some of these ideas shows a sincere dedication to creativity.

This stair storage was one of my favorites, because it makes use of something that most of us would never thought of for storage.

It makes you think: What everyday thing (or idea) will be your ’storage in the staircase’ idea?