Create your own inspiration
don't wait, go grab it!
creating cool sh*t is less about being **inspired** and more so about pulling yourself together to do something (anything) before life passes you by.
someone recently asked me: “what do you do when you don't have deep and constant inspiration?”
my answer is noted in detail below. read at your own will, if you’ de like.
Before we dive in, if you want daily posts about these sorts of thing: to help you create more cool sh*t, follow your curiosity, & live a better life… then make sure you’re following my new twitter account! (the old one was starting to smell)
a lack of magic
There is no magic key to create things. Inspiration is by large perishable. If you don’t act on inspiration promptly it will fade, and when it does fade (which it always does) you will have to continue on without your light regardless.
If inspiration was our guideline or main source of light to get through doing things then we wouldn't have gotten anywhere near where we are today.
The truth is that inspiration is not light at all, it’s a spark at times that may help us see there is indeed a path surrounding us, but it is not a large enough light to keep us on the path.
The thing that guides in the dark is a why. The guide is the reason, or rather: the purpose for doing something. After all is said and done you will only feel like doing something worthwhile some of the time, the other times you must grit through.
The easiest way to grit though is to have a why, or a reason.
In the middle of the night you don’t want to leave your cozy warm bed, but you have a really good reason too…
You have to pee!
The why is stronger than the comfortable state you’re in, so you break out of your comfort to ease the discomfort of having to pee.
This analogy isn’t perfect, but neither will be the circumstances when you have to do something you don’t want to do.
“timing” & making waves.
There is no perfect timing coming, and waiting for inspiration is a sunk cost most of us could wait our whole lives waiting for. The truth is I don’t think inspiration comes to us, most of the time I think we create it.
So to answer the question again “What stuff to do when you don't have deep and constant inspirations of doing something?
If you lack inspiration you must shuffle about in hopes of creating some more of it.
When you shuffle about or rather (just do something) you tend to end up on one of two paths:
The first path being that you just did some stuff and you don’t feel particularly inspired about it all, but you did some stuff and it’s something you wouldn’t have done if you had been paralyzed about your own lack of inspiration.
The second path is that you did some stuff, you shuffled around, and you caught a bit of inspiration along the way too (lucky you!) This inspiration caused you to do some more stuff.
On both paths where you started with no inspiration, you still managed to [do some stuff]. And that’s really all we can aim for in my [friendly] opinion...
To do some stuff means that you’re making waves, you're making noise, and in this way people can find you, or you can find more of yourself, and in turn you will be able to find more inspiration and make more progress.
My experience with inspiration
If I’m lucky, 1 day every week I’ll wake up and feel inspired to create some things, to do some stuff.
On all the other days of the week I have to just do some stuff and go from there. I have to just get started (I've written about this in depth too)
To put my views on inspiration simply: we cannot wait for inspiration, life will end up passing us by all too quickly, we must instead go and make some noise, we must do some stuff, and create inspiration for ourselves.
A final note for this reality is also this: You may not always feel like doing stuff, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to push yourself to do something. Maybe you genuinely don’t need to do some things. So take note of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, then you can evaluate whether the stuff you are resisting doing was worthwhile in the first place. To best evaluate these things you will need to first know what you want, and then zoom out. All of this final note is easier said than done, so I’m just going to leave it here as a gentle reminder.
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your friend,
jack ♠️