Sometimes, starting without knowing the end in mind isn't such a bad thing
I mean it gets you started and that's more important than ruminating over a knowing that won't come. And as we know it's in the doing that often gets us closer to what's true for us.
So I say play. Enjoy finding your inspiration.
So much of being an entrepreneur requires us to tap into our own creativity. It's a highly creative pursuit whether you recognize it or not. Business building.
Allowing yourself to be inspired, and often, isn't just good for your mental and physical health it's good for your business. It keeps you grounded, grateful and happy and it gives you the power of insight, so you can connect with the purpose of your thing and those who need it.
Inspiration, the spark that keeps you going with effortless glee
I had a lovely post all typed up to tell you how much I love everything creative from cat-toes to random conversations overheard on subways and in cafes. I wrote two posts actually and deleted them both by mistake. Each time I rewrote the piece it changed, but I did it because I enjoyed the process.
Creativity, I thought, might just be what makes us human. I went on. At one point.
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I was thinking and wrote lots of brilliant things of course.
I was inspired to talk about my lurking tendencies and then noted how creepy that sounded when I saw it typed out. I had to tell you about my snorfulling too. Particularly around Instagram and Pinterest. And why I love lurking & snorfulling in any space that pumps out fresh creative numlets, often.
So Pinterest and Instagram.
I extolled the virtues of such meandering because it fills me with joy, no matter what and without fail. I am endlessly fascinated by pretty stuff and innovation and things that I guess just appeal, not just to the senses but the mind as well.
I'm calling that creativity and I like being near, in, around and part of it.
And I guess I also see it everywhere easily.
I like pointing it out.
In creatures, clothes, jewelry and coloured walls. It's pretty cool in the form of whimsy
and I love catching it in the lines where sidewalks meet the sky, where buildings are bisected by windows and when everything is cut in half by power lines.
I mean really, how cool is that?
I have a memory of a photo that I took. I am thinking it's of a street corner somewhere in Saskatchewan. I asked my boyfriend at the time to "stop the car"!
For the love of God I said just look at that, and he said what. And I said where's my phone.
It was the coolest display of lines at a special time of day.
The curved road at an odd intersection with a huge prairie sky, bright sun highlighting a crisp white line of paint around the corner where it met another, solid outlined clouds almost two dimensional lying on a perfectly spotless blue sky, and a sparse but almost mathematical arrangement of fence posts forming a perfect example of perspective towards 2 vanishing points.
This is my memory of that scene and the photo anyway. In reality, it was a pic from a road trip back from Detroit with a girlfriend. I was indeed, inspired by the lines and the beauty of intersections. But the story in my mind of the prairies, mixed with a prairie road trip was just as wonderful.
It was just a street. But it was spectacular I thought.
Near the middle of the post I originally wrote for you, I started to mumble something about creativity and my struggle to know how and when or why to include it in my work, as I do it today, with lots of that webby-techy stuff as I call it.
But then I'm human I thought.
And it's the stuff of all of us. And if it's in us, it's in our work. It's in our businesses, and I think we can use it any way we want.
Maybe I use it to share with you that the techy-webby stuff is just a way I use to help you reach a more meaningful goal.
Because it is.
The main story I originally set out to tell you was about an artist on Instagram because she shared a post about Post.
She'd created a bunch of handmade cards and asked if anyone wanted to pay a membership fee to get monthly deliveries of random cards. And she posted a photo of the second mailing she'd sent to the group who said yes.
They were beautiful, and I thought I'd like to get something like that in the mail. Then I thought I wonder how something like that might work in my business.
I bet it could.
It would even be fun to try to think of how it could work. I'd already subconsciously started to brainstorm and make maps in my mind.
The moral of the post I wrote for you, not just once, but twice before this one was something about looking outside your own niche for creative inspiration and a cure for stuckness and fresh ideas.
But hey I see now that it's about seeing the inspiration all around. In the street laid out before you and the bird that landed on your finger when your body threw it into the sky before you could think.
See the magic. All around.
More.
Seeing and fostering what inspires us is as important to our welfare and success in life and business as anything else I think. So let's take the time to nurture that part within us all. For everything we are and everything we do.
And for all the comfort and warm fuzzies lurking provides, let's take more action. Do something with your inspired ideas before inspiration flys away, as Elizabeth Guilbert says, to find someone else who will respect it and use its force for good.
xo
Some books that feed my inspiration:
- The Creativity Project: An Awsometastic Storie Collection This is just adorable
- Big Magic. Creative Living Beyond Fear
- Steal Like an Artist
- The Artists Way
- Writing Down The Bones