Manhole cover advertising.

Grass advertising.

Scholarly books at Starbucks.

Urgent appeals against public urination. (The sign reads: “PLEASE Respect the house of God! Don’t paint this wall. Don’t post bills. Don’t urinate on this street. Thank you.”)

How serendipitous. A friend of mine sent an article that contained a link to the very story I had been wracking my brain to recall for some time.

It’s about a college student who drops out, but chooses to follow his whimsy and takes the odd class in calligraphy. He never finishes college. Years later, however, all that time spent learning about the intricacies of script and type pays off. The dropout helps create the world’s first typography friendly computer, the Macintosh. If you haven’t guessed, the dropout is Steve Jobs. He tells the rest of the story in his commencement speech at Stanford: “You’ve got to find what you love.”

It’s a post for another day, but I just love stories that demonstrate the importance of going with your gut and pursuing your interests, despite conventional wisdom. Heck, if I had followed the CW, I’d be a financial planner now. And I’ll bet somewhere out there a financial planner is wishing she’d pursued creative writing…

No idea where I found this, but it amused me greatly:

“Sergio Leone, who directed Eastwood in his breakthrough role in the Man With No Name trilogy of spaghetti westerns, said he liked the actor because he had only two expressions: ‘one with the hat, one without it.’ “

Bonus: “Clint Eastwood,” by Gorillaz

We recently decided to give our business a reboot. As any Windows user knows, a reboot is sometimes necessary to clean out the memory and bring the system running back to peak performance.

Not that our business hasn’t been successful and all that. It has.

But perhaps symptomatic of a deeper funk, we’ve been struggling for three years to revamp our old 2002 web site. (Embarrassing, but true!) Our perpetual “web refresh” has been one of those projects from hell that never reaches completion.

And then a couple weeks ago, I stumbled onto Robert Middleton’s More Clients Blog, where he had a post on getting “unstuck”. His definition of being “stuck:”

Stuck: Being constricted, limited, fearful, avoiding

The qualities he lists very much describe how I was feeling about having to write the copy for our new site. It wanted the site to be clever and engaging, yet honest and not the least bit hyperbolic (a quality I dislike in business web sites). Those expectations, that pressure to get it right, froze me in my tracks.

At a deeper level, “stuck” was also a fair description of where things were at with our business in general. We had been playing it safe, sticking with what had worked in the past, not venturing out and taking the chances that are necessary for growth.

By contrast, Robert’s description of the qualities of being unstuck were downright liberating.

Unstuck: Being expansive, unlimited, fearless, engaged

And sometimes that’s all it takes to get things rolling. Within days, we had an inspired plan for rebooting the business, including that pesky web site.

Our plan — not your typical task-oriented plan — went something like this:

1. Embrace action — Taking action and moving things forward is more important than getting it 100% right. To wit, within three days of getting together, we had a new web site up an running. Is it perfect? Is final? No. Another version is already under construction. The important thing was getting off the dime and being in motion — and being okay with the associated risk.

2. Embrace risk and mistakes — Without taking risks, trying new things, having some failures, how can you learn? I don’t mean bet the entire payroll on a startup kind of risk. But deliberate risks that stretch you personally and professionally. Thanks to Web 2.0, there’s never been a better (or more accepting) time to be experimental. For us, this means making good on something we’ve always wanted to do — to develop product offerings that bring in an income stream unrelated to billable time. The first product is slated for July.

3. Be open and honest — If you do take risks and learn from them, what good is the resulting knowledge if you don’t share it? We’ve given ourselves permission to start blogging openly about our business — what we’re trying, what’s working, what’s failing fabulously — as well as any non-business topics of interest. I find this to be especially liberating, as I’ve suffered from blog anxiety — the irrational believe that you can only post when you have something important and deep to say. Being deliberately clever is exhausting work! So, forget about trying to look smart and just be yourself. What’s more, risk is at the heart of blogging — if you want to have an impact and build a community, there’s no choice but to be authentic.

4. Be connected — This tenet requires a pinch of faith — faith that if you “put it out there” and write honestly, like-minded and appreciative people will find their way to you. That people who don’t like what you’re writing will simply go elsewhere. Isn’t that’s the definition of networking? 1) Find people you like. 2) Work with them. 3) Repeat.

Our particular plan for rebooting might not look anything like yours would. But if you’re fatigued, uninspired and wondering what’s next for you in your life as an entrepreneur, rebooting might be just the thing!

I’d love to hear from other entrepreneurs who have been stuck. What’s been keeping you from going forward? Have you tried rebooting? How’s it going? If you have any thoughts, please leave a comment!

Photo credit: Reset button inside, uploaded by pwbaker

Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, said in an e-mail message that online articles are eligible for the awards, but they must have been published on a weekly or daily newspaper’s Web site.

“A freestanding Web site does not qualify,” he said.

Simple solution #124: Name your downloadable files something that makes sense to the user. Hm, I don’t know, like maybe “Avery_template_8373_landscape_back.doc”

Via BoingBoing.