Inspirations
Inspire — funny little word, eh? The cambridge dictionary defines Inspire as “to make someone feel that they want to do something and can do it” and “to make someone have a particular strong feeling or reaction”. How inspiration can help change the world is what I am going to talk about here.
Now let’s think about motivation for a second here. Motivation is what keeps us going. Makes us want to do things, accomplish something. Motivation is why you keep working hard for that promotion, it’s why you keep striving to get admission in that grad school, it is why you have those long late night calls with your significant other to make things work. It’s the desire to achieve a state you’re currently not in.
As we will dive back into the central idea, you’ll understand why we sidetracked to quickly recap motivation. To put it in 3 simple words — they are interlinked. Not like your ying-yang or a perfect equal parts ratio, but a very dynamic, unique & skewed ratio for every person. Think of them as two colours (say red and yellow) and the combination as your “power” meter. Now, if you select a sample set of 20 random human beings and put forward a well designed questionnaire asking them about motivation and inspiration, assigned the colour strength and mixed up the two to fill the meter, you’d observe that almost everyone has a different shade of orange and not everyone has the same level of meter filled in.
So, at points in life when you’ve felt low or like you won’t amount to anything significant, could you retrace the setting and gauge your “power” meter levels? Befuddled? I can understand the randomness of the question just put forward to you. But if you take a minute, and think hard; you’ll see that the times when you were super confident (remember that interview you nailed, that girl you asked out, or that toast you gave at your best friend’s wedding), you had this inner positivity. A glow to your personality. A natural smile on your face. Of course, a lot of it would have been circumstantial; but riddle me this — can you honestly say there was nothing in life that kept you motivated or inspired in that moment?
Maybe you can’t put your finger at the exact reason that kept you motivated or inspired in that moment and are inclined to say no. I’d request you to hold that thought for a bit longer. Now, try and think about the times when you cancelled plans with your friends over and over again, just stared at that job posting but never updated your resume (or skillset) to apply and the time when you felt being in a toxic relationship was better than being single. Can you guess where I am heading with this? All those events have something in common — your power meter was near (or beyond) “E”. Call it depression, anxiety or stress; all those factors kept slowly chipping away your motivation and inspiration till you felt like a useless blob of human flesh or something along the same lines.
Motivation and Inspiration go hand in hand. They complement and supplement each other. And not just within you. Social beings that we are, there’s always a ripple effect because of anything we do, around us. If you’re inspired by someone or something, you’d be motivated to get to that state. If you’re motivated to achieve something, you’d end up inspiring some folks around you who’d probably share the same aspirations, but weren’t inspired enough to be motivated & work towards it. Notice how so far, I have not used these terms interchangeably; for a very simple reason — they’re not. “Okay dude, what next?” is that what you’re asking? Good. I’m glad you came this far; because now I am going to talk about the very message I want to convey.
We are all burdened with information in today’s time & age. Anything that happens at the other end of the world is immediately relayed, to anyone who’s interested enough, in a matter of minutes. With this information overload, comes the baggage of the roads not taken. Ignorance is bliss. If you never knew that a super specialization course existed after completing your degree in medicine, you’d never wonder about the course you never did. Of course, there will still be level headed people who have it all figured out. Not many, but there will be. This burden of information can at times overwhelm you to an extent that you forget what inspired you and lose all your motivation. Or you get demotivated finding about some unfavorable circumstance and may or may not look for inspiration someplace else. And that’s when you start to lose yourself and become susceptible to mental health problems. Depression. Anxiety. To name a couple.
What can we do to counter this? Talk to people honestly. Be frank and open with them. Share our passions. Demonstrate our motivation. Discuss our inspirations. Let them know that they’re not alone. Everyone goes through the cycle of being unmotivated and uninspired to eventually come a full circle when they seem motivational and inspiring to others.
Be kind. Talk.
Motivate. Inspire.
Empower.
