Where to find inspiration?

“I haven’t created anything new in a while, I can’t seem to get inspired”.

 Is that you?

I know that has been me some times and it sucks to be in that situation. Staring at a blank page, hyper aware of the sounds around you, and every little spark of an idea that comes to your mind looks like complete crap.

You want to create, you crave it, but you feel imprisoned, knowing that the key that will unlock your mind is nowhere to be found.

But is it? You just need a little inspiration to get you started and you wish you know how to create inspiration.

So you might be wondering: Is it possible to create inspiration? Can you set up the conditions that will allow you to experience inspiration more often? Where do you start?

The responses to those questions are the following: no, yes, and keep reading.

First the bad news: we can’t control inspiration.

Psychologists have found out inspiration can’t be forced by will. Whether you understand it as an internal trait (something you have because of the way you are wired) or as an estate (as something you experience in response to your environment), inspiration is always something that happens to you.[1]

The basic understanding of inspiration is that the brain establishes connections at an unconscious level and then brings them to your awareness to consider and act upon them.

If you want to think it simply: it is not a switch that you can turn on and off when you need it. It just happens.

The good news is, we can create conditions to make inspiration more recurrent in our daily lives.

That is because inspiration doesn’t exist in a vacuum. In the Montessori education approach there’s an understanding that kids acts derive from (1) their drive to experience the world, (2) the recordings of those experiences in the unconscious mind, and (3) how they integrate those memories to solve problems. [2]

If we understand inspiration as “a sudden realization of a way to solve a problem”, and if we reverse engineer the Montessori theory, we can surely realize that inspiration depends on how much we allow ourselves to experience the world around us in the first place.

In other words, this is where you start: Inspiration requires you to be open to experience the world around you. The moment you allow yourself to do new things you are providing your unconscious mind with the ingredients that she will later combine and bring back to you.

Inspiration is not a thing you do, is the result of all the things you’ve done previously. You can’t force it, but you can nurture it.

Murder mysteries are a fun way to see it. Throughout any episode you have a setup scene, an unexplainable death, a series of suspects, and then, obviously, an investigation. Detectives collect evidence, interview people, do research on their suspects’ backgrounds, and at some point when they are doing a completely innocent activity, or having a conversation with a friend, something is said that is linked with all the previous evidence and suddenly the case is solved.

But imagine if the same detectives don’t collect evidence or research anything. If they just sit in a chair thinking. They don’t have any evidence to link. They can blame an unsolved case to their lack of inspiration but truly the case would remain unsolved, in a murder mystery story, due to lack of diligence.

This is what you can do in order to be struck by inspiration more often, approach your work as a detective in a murder mystery case: Gather evidence. Then experience new things. Expose yourself to novelty in all of your senses. And let your brain make the connections.

The keyword here is EXPERIENCE. We need to live beyond our screens and actually DO stuff.

From crazy simple acts like using your non-dominant hand to draw, to more challenging ones like starting conversations with strangers who think different than us. From trying foreign food and hiking on places you’ve never been before, to getting involved with a non profit or with your local government.

If you want to be surprised by inspiration more often and live an inspiring life, start by exploring the world around you.

Inspiration is out there. Go find it.

[1] “While the focus of these earlier studies were on inspiration as a trait (how people differ from one another in inspiration), in a later set of studies, Thrash and Elliot focused on inspiration purely as a state. Regardless of who you are, you can experience inspiration and the associated outcomes that come with that particular state of being.” https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beautiful-minds/201110/why-inspiration-matters

[2] “Simply stated, there is an inner, unconscious drive to experience the world (horme), to record those experiences in the unconscious mind as engrams (mneme), and to integrate the engram to solve problems (association of ideas).”

https://www.montessorica.com/montessori-key-concept-the-unconscious-mind/