The Illusion of Inspiration

Struggling to reach your goals? Why you shouldn't wait for inspiration to strike.

It is exactly 8:38 PM on a Monday, and after a full day of work, I'm exhausted. There are only two things my brain and body want to do:

(1) Veg in front of the TV for a couple hours. This will take exactly 1 hour of scrolling through titles on Netflix to pick something to watch, and another hour to actually watch it.

(2) Find the nearest pillow and Rip Van Winkle my way to next month.

This is an ongoing struggle on work nights. When winter days are short and it's dark by the time I get home, I automatically go into hibernate mode - whether I've got important things to do or not. After all, it takes far less energy to find yummy make-ahead meals on Pinterest than to actually march into the kitchen and prep homemade lunches for the rest of the week.

But does my attempt to conserve energy actually result in feeling re-energized, more motivated, and inspired? The answer is a resounding no. Unfortunately, being a couch potato almost always ends up making me feel even more depleted and lethargic...not to mention guilty at all that wasted time. Before I sound hopelessly lazy, let me just say that I usually fare better on weekends, especially on warm, beautiful days. That's when I feel most energized by the intermission from my work week and the sunshine that draws me outside. But that's exactly the problem, isn't it? If I have to wait for that perfect window of opportunity to get things done, I'll never upload and organize all those old printed photos, get that certification, or head to the gym.

Feeling inspired feels good. It's energizing and euphoric. But it's also just that- a feeling. It's unreliable, contextual, and fleeting. And that's why we shouldn't wait for inspiration to strike before we start moving toward our goals. Relying on a steady stream of inspiration to get us through our goals is like expecting to live in a perpetual state of bliss. It just doesn't work that way.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where everything around us is camera-ready. What I mean by that is, social media is full of snapshots of people's lives that have been cherry-picked, filtered, and condensed into a pretty feed for our quick consumption. When accomplishments are shared on those platforms, what we often see are other people's polished outcomes, scrubbed clean of the blood, sweat, and tears it took to get to that finished product. And what took me 30 seconds to read and 'like' may have taken that person hours, days, years, or decades to achieve.

Even when we see photos or posts with a more gritty behind-the-scenes view, what our subconscious minds actually pick up on is, "Look at how awesome or interesting this thing is!" For example, an artfully-positioned stack of textbooks placed beside a Starbucks cup, combined with the woeful caption, pulling an all-nighter before my final!, seems interesting and even glamorous in a way that detracts from the grim reality of that person's true experience. Success is most often the result of sustained hard work and mental grit, and the substance behind that is nearly impossible to convey inside of a single post of 140 characters.

And that's why I constantly have to remind myself to let go of the false belief that being productive, and especially being creative, should always feel good. It often doesn't feel very good. Usually, it just feels like work. Boring, unexciting, tedious, difficult work.

But something surprising often happens if I force myself to get off the couch and work out, play music, file away that stack of mail, or fix that leaky faucet - which admittedly takes a little extra effort to get started. If I force myself to start doing any of those things, I'll almost always end up feeling more energized. And that's not all. Steadily grinding through the hard work builds momentum, is more likely to trigger a state of flow, and even encourages greater creativity and feelings of inspiration. So stop reading, and start doing. Stop waiting to be inspired, and start being inspiring.

#goals #motivation #inspiration #hardwork #grit