what motivates you?

when times are financially tough, as they’ve been for the past couple of years, your motives for starting a business, growing a business, or working for someone else’s company become increasingly apparent. if your motives for any of the above is to make tons of cash, go on sweet vacations, have a gold-plated ipad, or become famous, you’ll find yourself becoming frustrated and bitter (which, ironically, leads to making poor business decisions) when you’re not accomplishing those goals. however, if your overall purpose is to improve a group of people’s existence, positively affect the environment, or generally make the world a better place, then you’ll only become more passionate, sincere, and driven because all of a sudden, when you or your business is making less money, it’s not just effecting you, it’s negatively effecting an entire group of people or the planet.

a while ago, we decided to use our resources to help take down modern day slave trading by partnering with International Justice Mission. so when business is slow and our cash flow decreases, we don’t get upset because we’ve got to cancel a weekend vacation in tahiti, we work harder knowing that there is a group of people scattered all around the world that continues to suffer. when our business does well, we work harder knowing that we’re making a larger positive impact. our success is directly tied to their success.

detaching personal wealth and ego from your work can be the best thing for your career and/or business. try it. decide to make positive change and see what happens. the world will thank you for it.

5 great resources for creative entrepreneurs

a lot of my time lately has spent thinking about how awesome these following sites/companies are. often, the only time organizations get any kind of review or mention is when people have a beef. so, i like to make an effort from time to time to shine a light on groups that are getting some good stuff done.

1. the behance network. twitter; @behance
if the behance network was useful before, it’s even better now that it has made some nice updates. among my favorites are;

• the ability to add folks to your inner circle OR follow them (twitter style). i don’t want to have everyone and their mom in my inner circle, but there are some killer designers out there that i want to keep tabs on.
• better compatibility with twitter. new projects can be automatically posted to twitter upon publishing
• overall more intuitive UI

2. cloud app. twitter; @getcloudapp
one of the most useful internet services i’ve come across in a while. it runs in the background on your mac. you can set it up to automatically upload screen shots when you create them. you can also push any file from you finder, any song from itunes or any photo from iphoto (as well as a few other things) simple by highlighting the item and executing a lickety-split keystroke. cloud app then automatically pastes a url for the file to your clipboard. it’s perfect for sharing concepts and revisions with collaborators and clients.

3. drop box. twitter; @dropbox
also a file sharing/collaboration service, but different from cloud app in some key ways. drop box is essentially on online file folder. the nice thing is that it looks and acts just like any folder in your finder would, but all the files are online. so, you can access them from anywhere, and that is handy-dandy if anything ever was. the free account is 2GB with paid accounts coming with more space. however, you can earn 250MB for each referral that opens an account (up to 3 extra GB. i’m at 4.5GB total).

4. mint.com. twitter; @mint
mint.com has single-handedly changed the way i think about finances. really, what good is all that pretty design that you make if you can’t seem to hang on the paycheck for more than a week? mint.com keeps you in check with budget planning tools, spending notifications and more.

5. ally bank. twitter; @allybank
probably the only bank i’ve ever really loved. ally has interest checking, no penalty CDs, reimburses all ATM fees that you incur (which was the deal maker for me) and is one of the few companies that uses the color purple well (no reference to the color purple of oprah winfrey fame).

mark wagner

mark wagner is making his money work for him. check out his extensive collection of dollar bill cut and paste art. he’s also got some other great art mixed in. like this booklyn chapbook cover design. i just got that new york city poems book a week or so ago, and had planned on making a post about it. it’s kinda strange that i stumbled across the book’s artist at random.