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Get Ready for Inspiration

By Peter Lloyd

Certain things in life arrive as gifts from luck. Your genetic make up, for example, so critical to who you are and what you achieve, starts out like a crap shoot—chromosomes thrown at each other pair up by pure chance. When it's over, it's you, and you had nothing to say about it. Even what you do with what you're given is driven by what you've been given genetically and environmentally.

photoSo it goes with creative inspiration. Some ideas seem to fall out of the sky and drop in your lap. Whether you're ready for them or not. Others have to be hunted down, trapped, wrangled, beat into submission and squeezed hard to yield a drop of worth. Which points to the question—wait for inspiration or go hunt it down?

Novelist Colson Whitehead writes that you can't rush inspiration. In How to Write, he playfully offers ten rules—some serious and some flippant. Three of them echo the Supremes, who reminded us that You Can't Hurry Love.

Just as urgency drives love, it also compels creative artists, inventors, and innovators to chase after inspiration. But you learn eventually that you can't find or make love or inspiration happen. You can only prepare yourself for their arrival. Who am I to suggest what you do to get ready for love? I will suggest, however, how to prepare for the day the mother of all big ideas lands in your lap.

1. Get yourself in shape
Make sure you've got what it takes to handle inspiration when it arrives. When the big idea comes, it's going to need work. If you're a writer, keep a journal to stay in shape. An actor? Do improv or community theater. If you're an inventor, invent without intent. Tinker.

2. Prepare the environment
Not your desk or workbench, although that's not a bad idea. Rather, have ready all the external resources you will need to work on the big one. Don't stop networking with your colleagues. Read your industry journals. Keep your tools sharp. Stay subscribed to your research resources and in touch with your suppliers.

3. Keep your eyes on surprise
As Roger von Oech explains in Expect the Unexpected, really big breakthroughs pass unperceived under the noses of many before recognized by the creatively perceptive. Expect to find big ideas in places and situations that would surprise you as sources of inspiration.

There's some kind of correlation between expectation and event, but I don't know what it is. Positive thinking may unconsciously prepare and incline you to make decisions that favor the arrival of inspiration. I don't know, but what can it hurt? Certainly the opposite is true according to the adage, “If you fail to prepare you prepare to fail.”

“In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind,” advises Louis Pasteur. Some of us are alive today because of his preparations.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.

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