Giving Thanks for My Local Library
I know you may have heard me say this before, but I’m gonna say it again—I am a huge fan of my public library. And folks, you may not know this, but your library card may be one of the only cards in your wallet that can literally save you thousands of dollars a year.
The following are five ways and reasons that I use my library. Check it out. [Get it? Library pun.]
1) Ummmm...Check out books instead of buy them. Your library carries multiple copies of bestsellers, and also offers you a free and easy way to get books for your eReader as well. Now, if you like to collect books, fine. But, if you read as much as I do, you could save yourself upwards of $1,000 per year by borrowing instead of buying.
2) Take a class. Your library offers computer literacy, financial management, and all kinds of children’s programming— all for free. Some libraries have author events, local history presentations, movie nights, and even cooking events.
3) InfoUSA. For free, from home, with just your library card and a login, you can access more than 16 million businesses in the United States. You can look them up by size, ownership or geography, and download the details 250 at a time. Did I mention this is free?
4) Redbooks. You can look up any company in your area and find out who its advertising agency is, what products it sells, and what it spent on all different kinds of advertising.
5) Job searches, foreign languages, and genealogy. I’m lumping these together to save space, but yes, you can get live job coaching, learn a foreign language, and do ancestral research all from home and all for free. Man, I love my library.
Here’s my final $.02. Reading makes you smarter, which makes you more interesting. I just finished a book about Frank Lloyd Wright’s three wives and that book inspired me to check out a couple of books about his architecture. Now, if I stumble across a client who either is an architect or is interested in architecture, I will have more to talk about with him/her. And my library makes that easier on me.
If you don’t have a library card, please go get one. Your tax dollars pay for it, so you might as well get some bang for your buck.
A big thanks to all my librarians. They help me find books and information. They make my life easier. And my library is my favorite quiet escape, where I can sneak away to read the latest New Yorker. I am very grateful to them.
Blogger, author, consultant, coach and all around evangelist for the graphic arts industry, Kelly sold digital printing for 15 years so she understands the challenges, frustrations and pitfalls of building a successful sales practice. Her mission is to help printers of all sizes sell more stuff. Kelly's areas of focus include sales and marketing coaching, enabling clients to find engagement strategies that work for them and mentoring the next generation of sales superstars.
Kelly graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in Political Science and, among other notable accomplishments, co-founded the Windy City Rollers, a professional women's roller derby league. She is also the mother of two sets of twins under the age of ten, so she fears nothing.
