You Don’t Need to Be Inspired, You Need to Be Bored
“Why don’t you write anymore?”, — my wife asked me. — “What would inspire you to do it again? A trip to Europe? An evening in a nice restaurant? Your own study?”
For years I struggled with those questions. We took several trips to different amazing countries, dined in the finest restaurants and bought a new flat, I felt incredibly inspired, but still — nothing came out of my pen.
Maybe I just didn’t want to write anymore? Maybe I lost my talent? Maybe somehow I needed to be even more inspired?
Today while taking a long and boring road trip I think I finally got it.
For a long time, I’ve been thinking I needed more inspiration, but actually there is time to gather stones and there is time to throw them; there is time to collect sensations and impressions, and there is time to turn them into ideas and words. I didn’t have problems with the first part of that equation — I had problems with the second one.
First, you need to understand two things:
- Your brain hates boredom
- Your brain is incredibly lazy
So when your brain is bored, it nags for some time, and then to fight the boredom it starts to generate content — ideas, images, stories; however, it doesn’t happen right away, you need to wait and feel bored for a bit.
On the other hand, you have an infinite source of content you can feed your brain at any minute. It is the Internet.
Since your brain is lazy, staring at the phone screen is what it will always prefer unless you consciously decide against it.
Have you ever noticed that you reach for the phone every time you feel the tiniest bit of boredom? When you wake up, when you wait at a bus stop, even when you wait for a traffic light to change.
You actively avoid boredom by consuming content, but you can’t really consume and generate it at the same time.
No matter how many new and exciting ideas you gather on your inspirational trip to another country, that won’t help you unless you give yourself time to develop them. It’s sort of like with cooking: no matter how many great ingredients you collect they won’t turn into a delicious meal unless you cook them.
Push yourself to boredom. Embrace it. Walk the same long and boring route every day; drive wherever you need in the longest and least picturesque way possible. Allow you some time to be bored into thinking.
And most important of all — notice the time you spend surfing social networks or entertainment websites or watching edutainment TV or web shows and put a conscious limit to all that.
If you have a writer’s block, put down your phone.
