Happy 2007! I’m sure as you prepare yourself to get started on those New Year’s resolutions make sure you check out a recent article on the Contract Worker. Freelancing can be an incredibly rewarding career choice but somewhere in those resolutions make some room for building long term value:

As we make a living through contract work, we should strive to reach a point where our hard-earned money works for us. One way to do this is to create money-generating assets along the way, so that when the time comes to retire, we’ll be certain of our financial future. That’s not to say that freelancing is a dead-end career path. In fact, I believe freelancing provides greater oppurtunities to attain true wealth because being control of your own schedule makes it easy to pursue lucrative, asset-building opportunities.

These opportunities could be as simple as creating a successful blog brand to a self-published bestseller capturing your unique wisdom. These are the things that continue to bring in steady income while you pursue your larger flights of business fancy.

What are your resolutions for 2007? More importantly, what long term value are you building?

Have a big presentation at your next get together but don’t have a projector? Take a page out of Ken Krugler’s playbook. From ValleyWag:

“The Krugle co-founder, at a perl hackathon in Chicago, wanted to give a demo of the company’s code search engine. No projector. No problem. According to a tipster, he dashed out to Office Depot, bought a projector, and returned it after the show. Krugler calls it borrowing.”

Resourceful if not sustainable… of course if you hit every single office supply, electronics, and big box retailer you could probably get away with this for quite awhile.

‘Unconference’ is another name given to events where people get together to collaboratively share what they know. However, just because there’s no pre-existing agenda doesn’t mean these events don’t require work. On Scott Berkun’s management blog he offers a lengthy post on just how to run a great Unconference Session. For example:

“Create both a topic and an angle. It’s one thing to say ‘lets talk about AJAX’. It’s another to go with ‘AJAX war stories: the good and the ugly of real AJAX development’. It’s the same basic topic, but a theme calls people to action, or opinion. It lets everyone know what thoughts to stew over before the session begins, increasing the odds people will have interesting things to share.”

Lot’s more great stuff on the page. Check it out before your next get together.