8 hours & a lunch

the motivation muse (creating inspiration)

Last week, we talked about how we often 'wait for inspiration', as if it is the elusive muse we need to begin our work, our project, whatever it is we desire to change in our lives, or if it’s more about motivation. 

Inspiration Motivates, But It Can Pass You By

 

Have you ever been inspired to try a new technique or further develop your skills when you’ve seen someone else’s work?  But then fell back into doing what you’ve always done?

How many times have you run into that old friend, the one who lost 30 pounds, looks great, and has more energy than before, and walked away inspired to get back to your own workout routine?  Did you bound out of bed the next morning and hit the ground running, literally?  Or did you hit the snooze button?

How about that job that has been draining your energy so much that it’s weighing you down in all the other areas of your life?  Did you feel inspired when you heard about someone leaving their 9-to-5 job to strike out on their own?  Did you take any action or just continue going back to the daily grind?

Have you ever had an idea for a book?  Or for a painting?  Ever get a ‘flash’ of new choreography?  And did you ever have that flash of inspiration but never get around to doing anything with it?

Inspiration often gives us a new vision and motivates us, but it doesn’t guarantee we’ll do anything with that new idea, dream, or goal.

Maybe You’re Just Bored

Yes.  People who love what they do get bored too.  

If you’re designing yet another website for yet another company, of course you’ll neither be inspired or motivated.  

If you’re writing another article for another magazine, who would want to do that? 

Have yet another presentation to give the power-that-be in that corporate gig?  

I know.  

Yawn.

Take Five Minutes

Don’t want to work out?  How often have you heard ‘just get started, commit to five minutes’?  You know what happens.  You drag yourself to the gym, telling yourself you’ll cut yourself some slack and just do ten minutes on the treadmill.  Ten minutes in?  You’re headed for a full workout.

Start your project.  Just start doing it, challenging yourself as you do.  

Look for the new angle, the different light.  Look for a different way to use that design to represent the company you’re building that website for.  

Take five minutes to start working on that resume or researching business ideas.  

Let It Be Bad

Often, we’re afraid that what we’ll write or the work we’ll do or the business we’ll build won’t be any good.  

No one will want what we’ve worked hard and put our heart and soul into.  

To get started, allow yourself to try a new approach and let it be bad.  Because here’s the thing.  

First of all, whatever idea you’ve had is probably not the worst idea ever.  But even better than that?  No one ever has to see it.

You may have the worst business idea in the world at first.  That’s okay.  You don’t have to tell anybody.

Or maybe you try something new and take the worst photograph in the history of photography.  Your five year old nephew could take a better picture with a disposable camera.  So what?  

Keep challenging yourself and get better.  Then you can share your work, your idea, with the world.  

Challenge Yourself & Get Going

Do the work of getting curious and finding new techniques, new ways to challenge yourself in your work.  

And get started.  

Relax, have fun with it, and let the early efforts be as bad as they need to be.  

The inspiration will come, which will feed the motivation.  And the cycle begins.  But inspiration won’t come without getting motivated and getting going.

What can you commit to taking five minutes to get started on today?

All the best!

deb

P.S  Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed in the right hand sidebar.  And sign up for the djo Creative newsletter here.

monday morning links, inspiring stuff, and something to think about

My friend Hiro Boga wrote a wonderful post on refusing gifts, as in the gifts people try to give you of their own negativity.  Or when you notice a pattern in a relationship of you doing all the giving, while they're doing all the taking.  It's a beautiful post on what to do in these situations.  

Taking this idea further, the fabulous Michele Woodward went on to give steps on how to reflect the gifts of negativity, anxiety, and fear back to people who you have to be around (like a co-worker).

All this talk of refusing gifts, there are times when re-gifting is a good thing.  As in, when you receive encouragement, support, joy, love from someone (and you know it's okay to receive those things, right?), those are perfect gifts to re-gift to others in your life. You receive generosity from someone?  Pass it on.  

Photography Inspiration

David DuChemin - If you're not familiar with his work, check it out.  It's amazing - and vibrant.  Plus, his blog is informative as well as inspiring.  And he's just announced a 'Within the Frame' workshop in Italy next year.  

Daniel Sroka - I just discovered Daniel's work last week.  Macro-photography isn't usually 'my thing', neither are 'botanicals'.  But Daniel's "fine art abstracts of nature" are gorgeous and intriguing.  On his site, you can see his work, get pricing, and also check out his blog where he talks about what it's like trying to make it doing the thing he loves.  

Food for Thought

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, gave a TED talk on creativity and play.  And he explains why it's important for your company as well.  Check it out below (RSS readers will need to click through.)

Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Tomorrow, we'll talk about how the question 'What Have You Been Working On' can be frightening for creative types and entrepreneurs.  And there's other stuff planned for later in the week that I hope you find useful.  In the meantime, enjoy Tim Brown's TED talk.  

All the best!

deb

who inspires you?

Speaking of inspiration.....

With the passing of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, much has been written about what an inspirational life she led.  It turns out that she was inspired by her sister, Rosemary, to begin the Special Olympics.  This, of course, is one of the many contributions that Eunice Shriver made to her community and to the world.

With the release of the movie Julie & Julia, many people are sharing their memories of ways they (or at least, their cooking) were inspired by Julia Child.

Who Inspires You & Why?

Who inspires you?  What attributes do they have, what things have they accomplished, that moves you?  Are these attributes you'd like to cultivate more in your own life?  Are there clues to what you'd like to do?

I'm inspired by my friend who has led an extraordinary life, but who also handles divorce, cancer, and the loss of dear friends with grace, a great attitude, all while managing to stay in gratitude.

And while I'd love to say that Julia Child has actually inspired me to finally get into the kitchen and be a better cook (let's not go too far, shall we?), she inspires me in that she didn't even begin cooking lessons until later in life.

So who inspires you?  A well-known figure?  Your mother?  Your brother?  Your best friend?  Someone you barely know?  Why?  

The Best Part

Have you told them lately?  Maybe it's not possible to tell the 'well-known', or maybe someone has passed on.  But even then, you could whisper a 'thank you' to them, couldn't you?  

Why not tell someone that they've inspired you today?

All the best!

deb

P.S. Don't forget to subscribe to the RSS feed, and signup for the newsletter in the right sidebar.  

(Photo taken by Deb at a local Special Olympics.)

waiting on the muse (inspiration)

Thanks to Dee Wilcox at Creative Perch, a wonderful blog I recently ran across, I saw this post “On Inspiration” in which Andy Rutledge argues that designers are not wizards who need to attribute their work to inspiration.  Between his post and her reaction, it got me thinking.......

Of course, I have had those moments where words seem to flow through me, seemingly from nowhere.  But inspiration?  Inspiration is one small part of the entire creative process, or of life in general. 

It’s the ‘aha!’ moment.

We see it in children all the time as they devise a new game using nothing more than a box, some string, and some crayons. 

It’s the “I know what we’ll do!” moment.

And often, it is something we can trace back.  We can see the connections of things we’ve seen or heard or experienced in the past, coming together in what seems like a lightening bolt and the feeling of, “Yes!  That’s it!” that accompanies it.

And yes.  There are scientific explanations for how this happens in our brains.

Turning What Creative People Do Into Myth, We Devalue Craft

We often talk of inspiration as if is an ever-elusive, super-spiritual, special dispensation from the gods that has worked through us as we create something that mere mortals can not produce.  

And yes.  Andy is right.  This is one reason people often become frustrated working with creative professionals.  (Although I suspect it ranks higher than no. 14 on the list of reasons why.)  

We forget that architects and artists study the elements of design.  Writers study language and structure.  We ignore the work and study involved, and the practice.  

And we ignore that inspiration can be cultivated.  It can be sought, and found.  

It doesn’t always strike when we want it to.  That’s true.

And sometimes we do find ourselves having to wait for it, or being struck by it at inopportune times.  

But still, attributing too much credit to inspiration alone can have it’s downside.

The Dangers of Attributing Everything to Inspiration

For one thing, we don’t live inspired 100% of the time.  You’ve had those moments of realization.  You know they’re fleeting.  The moment when everything comes together, and you suddenly know what you should do.  Or the idea suddenly occurs to you.  

But sometimes, we’re chasing that feeling, waiting to feel inspired before we actually do anything, and we should then call this by it’s right name:  procrastination.

It can also become something that we use to avoid the responsibility of our lives.  “Yes.  The article I wrote was awful, but the inspiration just wasn’t there.”  (As opposed to the truth, “I kept putting off sitting down at the laptop until the last minute.”)  

What if we all waited until we were ‘struck by the muse’ to go to work?

Would you allow your kids to stop going to school because they weren’t inspired?

Inspiration Is Inspiring

I do believe inspiration is necessary.  We see it in areas such as science, medicine, or technology, as well as the creative world, leading to advances and inventions that improve our lives.

In life, we hear stories of those who have overcome adversity, and are inspired to improve our own lives.  If Tina Turner can leave the jerk and end up so much better off, so can we.  

So yes.  Inspiration is important, and fun.  

We just need to remember that it’s only one part of the equation.  

After all, even in those times where the words, or a story, seems to come 'from out of the blue'?  Rarely does it end up on the page perfect and whole and complete.  

If creative work is so infused with the divine and simply flowing through a person, wouldn't it come out perfectly in an instant?

Aren’t We Confusing Inspiration with Motivation?

Sometimes.  But what we’re really after is deeper than inspiration and/or motivation.  And it occurs in areas other than the creative fields.

But there will be more on that later.  (Check back!)

In the meantime, what inspires you?  Do you cultivate it?  

In your life?  In your business?  

Where do you find it?

All the best!

deb

P.S. Don't forget to subscribe to the RSS feed, and signup for the newsletter in the right sidebar.  

P.P.S.  And if you're feeling less than inspired today, maybe this will help:

 

Anchored from lindsey olivares on Vimeo.

elizabeth gilbert on creativity

Elizabeth Gilbert, 'Eat, Pray, Love' author, describing creativity and genius. I'll admit to not having read Gilbert's book, but find her thoughts on 'genius' and the creative process engaging and thought-provoking.  (Hint:  Yes.  Beginning the week with this video is a clue as to upcoming posts.  So watch, and check back.)  

All the best!

deb

are you a loser? (how do you define success?)

In his TED talk, Alain de Botton makes an entertaining argument for discovering our own definition of success.  (RSS readers will need to click through to view the video.)  How do you define, or measure, success?

Measuring in Years

Some people measure their success, or others, in years.  How long they’ve been married, how long they’ve worked for the same company.  

About 16 years ago, I attended 50th wedding anniversary celebration.  I overheard one person asked the wife in awe, “What’s the secret?  How did you last 50 years?”  Her response?  “He was never home.” 

Hearing this, my first thought was, “Um.....what?....Oh.....Huh.....” 

(Apparently, despite being in mid-twenties and having gotten married myself, I hadn’t yet started thinking in complete sentences.)  

The truth was that the response had simply startled me for a moment until I realized that her husband had, indeed, spent the majority of their marriage on the road for work.  

And for me, I thought that sounded awful.  But of course, that’s me, and my thoughts simply reflected what a successful marriage would entail for me in my own life.

Then there are those who have ‘been at the same company for 30 years’.  That person might have only done an ‘okay’ job for all that time and never been promoted or seen much in the way of increases in income, but they’ve been there for a long long time.  

That person views their success in terms of attaining ‘years of service’, and so that’s fine for them.

Other Possibilities

Given the society we live in, many people define their success by the ‘stuff’ they accumulate or the car they drive.  

They may define it by the status or title they achieve or, of course, how much money they make.  

Others look at whether they’ve been published or reached a certain level of notoriety.  

Some base their definition of success on whether they work for themselves or are ‘location independent’ or if they do work they love.

Where It Gets Tricky

The tricky part is when we let others define success for us and our lives.  We begin to measure using someone else’s yardstick.   

We let our friends, our family, and even people we don’t know (society/marketing) tell us what we should be working towards in our lives. We let them tell us what success looks like for us.  

And even if we do define success for ourselves, sometimes we measure it all by externals.  We might measure based on the car we drive or the job we have or the house we live in.  

We forget to consider the friendships we’ve forged, the relationships we’ve maintained, whether our life was filled with happiness or peace, or whether we made positive contributions to other people’s lives.

And so we work hard to have the things we’re told we’re should have and behave the way we should behave and do what we should do, and then turn around years later and find that we’re living unfulfilled lives.

Write Your Own Definition

Whether it's your life or your business, are you working towards your own definition of success?  Or have you let others define it for you?

Have you considered success in terms of externals only?  Or does your definition include meaning, purpose, and contribution?  

When it gets late in life, what are the most important things you’d like to look back and say that you have done, had, or been?  

All the best!

deb

P.S.  Don't forget to subscribe to the blog using the RSS feed - or to sign up for the newsletter.  Both can be done in the right-hand sidebar. (Or follow me on Twitter:  @DebOwen)