It used to be so hard to, you know, do things.

There was a time not so long ago when we were all bound tight by the twin chains of proximity and imagination.

You could travel just about as far as your American Express Platinum card could take you, and the fuel for your creativity was mostly mined from your family, friends and neighbors.

How times have changed ladies and gentlemen. The web has blown apart the old limitations and given us more knowledge than we could use in ten lifetimes and access to hundreds of millions of people to help us find ways to use it well.

No doubt we spend more time than we should huddled around the aquarium staring at our reflections, but at least some of the reason for this is that we’re not quite sure what all this potential really adds up to.

What should we be doing?

There is no cut and dry solution, but here are a few options.

Teach

We have the talent to build soapbox’s that can reach anywhere on the planet, and most of us are experts at something, yet we balk at how rare it is to find anyone who understands the web, marketing, PR, programming et al, never looking to ourselves for solutions. Why not help to fix the problem? Write up a tutorial, host a webinar, show one of your less web savvy friends the ropes — share your knowledge.

Instead of mindlessly consuming information, or pushing it back out to people who are already saturated, try to bring a few new faces into the fold. Nothing improves perspective better than new blood and few things are more valuable to information workers than perspective.

Teaching isn’t limited to the intellectual detritus that you pick up on the web either, think of all the specialized knowledge you have gained over the years. How many people around the world would be made better if you made a hundredth of that available?

How easy would it be for you to share some of it?

Collaborate

There isn’t a thing in the world that a proficient Internet user can’t accomplish. We go on and on about how all media is social, so why not start using it to do something interesting? Do you need an illustrator for a project? I bet you know one or two. A programmer? Probably on a friends list somewhere. Do you need to find a hotel in Burma for a video shoot? A friend of a friend could probably help you out. While conversation for its own sake has value, a beautiful thing happens when you use that conversation to build something bigger; when you pool resources to create tangible work.

Think bigger.

Look around, discover that most of the people you know are extraordinarily talented and many are willing to help if you’re hitting a brick wall. Collaborate with those who care and resuscitate some of those still-born ideas.

Learn Something New

Need to learn Python? Need to brush up on your French? Neglected to read the complete works of Plato? There is somewhere on the web where you take a crash course in any of these. There is a least one place on the web to learn just about anything. If you can’t find it yourself, someone you know can. That’s the beauty of all this knowledge — it never goes anywhere. The Internet never forgets. As long as someone, sometime wrote about a subject it will be available for you to consume.

We spend so much time wallowing in the skills that we are comfortable with without recognizing that the first lesson we learned as children was that we are capable of learning. Just think, we spend hours pouring over pages and pages worth of the most buzz-word laden, obscure material available to modern man with relative ease.

Why then would it be hard to use these same tools to pick up a more well established skill?

What do you want to know? What do you wish you could do?

Help

Help someone, anyone. Even if it is just answering a question on Twitter, or sending out an invite to some BETA release, do your part to make someone else’s life a little easier. Social Media gives us thousands of opportunities a day to do the little things that in aggregate help to change the world. Surprisingly, an inordinate amount of our time goes into bickering. There is a lot of low-grade enmity floating around the web — petty feuds, indirect insults, and general nastiness all coated in a fine glaze of snark. Instead of joining in every lynch mob, or turning your attention to every little slight, focus some of that energy on fixing the world you’re upset at.

Make someone else’s life better, have an impact on the world, put something out there that you are proud of and you’ll notice the returns.

Closing Thoughts

Kick yourself in the pants today, do something hard, change the way you look at the web and try to transform it into something that feels less like a waste of your time and more like an extension of whatever it is that makes you tick.

If you think this little world of ours is boring it’s because we aren’t bleeding enough to make it interesting. Great work requires blood and sweat, and if you don’t feel like you’re pushing your limits you might have just found the source of your distress.

Don’t get me wrong, you don’t need to change the world, but you should be changing something.

Don’t cripple yourself by splashing around in complacency.

(Images) (News Room)