What keeps you inspired?

Ashley (@ashhmarketing) asked me this today and my answer didn’t quite fit within a reasonable amount of tweets.

I don’t worry too much about keeping myself inspired. I will often just go on without any stimulation until I feel sufficiently uninspired. I think that’s a good thing. Then I know that it is time to seek out some new stuff.

This happened recently. About a month ago. My primary source of inspiration was my weekly newspaper, which I still love as a ritual, but I wasn’t quite getting enough new ideas, yet I wasn’t fully realizing to either. When my dear friend Farah suggested a book (Leadership and Self-deception) and even went on to gift it to me as an ebook, I borrowed my wife’s Kindle and read it in ~24 hours. That’s when I knew it was probably time to explore a few more things. Next up was Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations which took me a few weeks, and which I also enjoyed. I also began listening to podcasts, which I had honestly never really done before. One Radiolab episode was about Oliver Sacks, whom I remembered reading in my early 20s and I immediately had to buy some other book from him so right now I’m reading Musicophelia.

I expect that this mental bombardment of my mind will eventually become too much. Today I wanted to create a newsletter that simply captured an idea about how frustration can make us more creative, which I heard in a podcast. I may still do it, but I don’t want my own creativity to be crowded out by being over saturated with other people’s ideas. Once I feel fed up with new ideas I will probably take a break from podcasts and ebooks and let myself become bored and uninspired once again.