How to Grow

When You Know You Need to Grow
I love to live simply. If I don’t see the need to grow my business, I won’t. For me, more money does not equal more happiness, especially if I have to work myself to death for it.

Define What You Love to Do

This will make you happier at your job every day—that much is clear. But how does it make you a better?
When you have to perform a task that you’re not interested in or inspired by, you do it very slowly, and the work day gets eaten up pretty fast.
Motivation is a driving factor, and without it your day becomes slow and inefficient.

Every day, we spend time doing tasks we hate, sometimes willingly, sometimes not. By minimizing these tasks, we can spend more time doing what we love, and by doing what we love, we get more work done because it doesn’t feel like work.
How do we figure out what we love? It’s not what brings more money or gets more clients. It is not even what you do well. In the context of a job, we love what makes us excited.
Don’t merely be content with what you’re doing; make sure you’re excited. What task do you do when you don’t have to do anything, that you don’t have to force yourself to do? What’s the one job that keeps you up late at night, without even realizing it?

Learn a New Technique
With the wealth of tutorials on the web, learning something new every day is easy.

Another great idea is to set aside time in your workday to focus solely on learning something new. It could be a new coding practice, design technique or business tactic.
Don’t rely on browsing, because therein lies distraction. Instead, decide ahead of time what you’d like to learn, and focus on that during your set time every day.

Collect Books, and Other Reliable Material
Collect books, magazines, articles, RSS feeds, tutorials and more to improve as a web designer. Both web and print materials are required to gain the knowledge you’ll need to advance.

One can learn technique after technique, but we never really grow without some good reliable resources that delve deep into the heart of web design.
In other words, a shiny new Web 2.0-inspired button won’t get you as far as a sound understanding of positive and negative space.
Solid design and coding principles last much longer, and help you improve as a web designer much more quickly, than “tricks.”

Keep an Inspiration and Motivation Notebook
As creative people, we’re always coming up with great ideas. The problem is finding our record of those ideas when we need them.

We have to find a way to call up that motivation and inspiration on demand. Keeping a notebook of ideas and encouraging thoughts is a great way to do this.

Build New Habits
When reading articles such as this one, we constantly discover new ways to improve ourselves and our business. The problem is that we don’t often apply everything we read. We are prisoners of our own habits.
To change this, don’t just find new things to do; rather, focus on forming new habits that will help your career.
For example, if you would like to sketch more ideas on paper for design projects, set a goal to do it consistently for the next 10 projects.
Setting goals turns your nascent habit into active steps, rather than leaving it as something “you’ll start doing someday.”

Studies show that a person takes on average 30 days to build a new habit. Yet different habits require different time periods to form.
For example, one group of participants took only eight days to form the habit of drinking more water every day, yet smokers took over two months to quit cigarettes. Different habits take different times to form; it depends on the person and the nature of the habit.

Re-Organize
Remember your first day at the office? The first thing you probably did was get organized, buy a bunch of new stuff and prepare pretty charts to track your progress and help you expand.

Wrapping Up
Growing is a never-ending process, so it should be something to look forward to.
One trick is to think of every business or personal advancement as a new beginning, where you throw all of your old career problems out the door.
Optimize, learn and grow if you want to succeed.

Written exclusively for WDD by Kayla Knight.
Everyone has gone through different stages in their career. Whatever stage you’re at, feel free to share some steps we can take to advance in our careers.

Source: http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/02/how-to-grow-as-a-web-designer/