Letter #1: Why do we seek inspiration at all?

Goa, January 29, 2022

Dear friend,

I hope that January hasn’t been too mean to you.

This month, I spent time learning about ‘inspiration’. The kind which strikes us out of nowhere and brings with it a wave of clarity & new possibilities. The kind which is not really predictable, nor ours to be summoned. After all.. through all our conversation on fear and mind-blocks, one of the things we seek is inspiration.

For a long time, I’ve had a personal dilemma when it comes to this topic. (Tell me if I’m alone or you resonate)

When it comes to creating new work, I’m on team Dont-Wait-For-Inspiration. As a creative professional, who’s surrounded by many others of the same breed, I know that most creative projects have their beginnings in the identification of curiosities, an understanding of challenges, research, conversations and more. I’ve experienced how we get to doing good work through doing lots of bad work. And I’m not alone in believing this. Thomas Edison’s claim that “genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” remains undisputed among scientists and innovators. Even a look at the personal notebooks or original manuscripts of artists will reveal extensive revisions. And it makes one wonder - has inspiration’s role in the creative process been a bit overrated till now? Maybe we don’t really need inspiration to be creative. We need intentions, awareness and effort.

What if all this while, we’ve misattributed our creativity to inspiration! This much-celebrated mystical force might just be folklore, for all we know.

While my logic-brain agrees, I feel sad considering that possibility. The feeling of being inspired feels so enriching to the human experience. My heart doesn’t agree to devaluing it and grumbles, “How dare you say inspiration isn’t important, hmph? All the artists have celebrated it as a goddess and they can’t be wrong!”

Throughout history, we’ve valued inspiration a lot. Greek lore celebrated the Muse, a supernatural force being, which would share divine secrets with the poets for them to share with society at large through their writings. Contemporary creatives credit so many lovely things & beings as their source of inspiration - nature, culture, people, mentors, role-models. The list goes on. This gorgeous book, gifted by a friend few-new-years-back, is full of interviews with creatives from across the globe talking about what inspires them:

They share their works-in-progress and the spaces in which they create them, and we get visual cues on what must be inspiring them. But, like most of us, they're not able to put "it" into words that can guide the next creative. When creatives speak of ‘inspiration’, our descriptions are extremely individualistic, slightly vague and full of biases related to our memory and the impressions we want to create about our work. (I know how many times, as students, my friends and I have reverse engineered the ‘core concepts’ for our architectural designs a day before presenting to the jury). There’s also a historic conditioning in the creative fields. Every great writer or artist from the past seemed to have a Muse or great source of inspiration, and it only feels appropriate for us to have one.

All of this nudged me to break out of my bubble of creatives, and turn towards the scientists!

About three years back, I had stumbled upon a research paper called ‘Inspiration as a psychological construct’ written by psychologists who were specifically studying creativity. Now, it felt like a good time to head back to the world of psychology, through more research readings.

The research papers weren’t particularly thrilling to read. (I really struggled through the 3 lengthy papers, with some detours, in about 20 days) But they were rich in theory and in quantitative studies being done on up to 200 people for every hypothesis. It felt weird at first to read about “something as magical as creativity” through numbers and test results. But that was the intention, right? To learn about inspiration through a new lens and get something to balance out the romantic notion that I’d been consuming so far.

Well, after all that deep reading and multiple smol ‘aha’-moments, here is the biggest ‘aha’ moment of all:

Turns out… inspiration has more to do with our emotional-wellbeing than with the creative process after all!

In the second half of my letter, I want to share more about my learnings about inspiration’s role in our well-being :) This realization has made me really happy, as it helped me soothe some of my mind-blocks and resolve that dilemma of mine about the value of inspiration. My logic-brain and heart can once again see eye to eye now!

I’ve started seeing Inspiration not just as a gift, but as a whole frickin’ gift box with 5 gifts inside. As you continue reading, you might see how each gift that comes with Inspiration adds to our feeling of well-being in mostly relatable ways.

I’ll start with the first gift which fascinates me the most, possibly because the English word for it is so beautiful.

Gift #1: A wave of Transcendence

“One is inspired when one becomes aware of possibilities that transcend the ordinary or mundane.” This line is part of how researchers define inspiration. It absolutely has my heart.

I’m thinking about how my uncle inspired me to study architecture (a field which he himself hadn’t studied but knew enough about to inspire a 16-year-old). His words connected me to new professional and personal possibilities which I was oblivious to till that day, but felt like the perfect choice and totally doable once I understood what it was about.

Do any of your own memories come to mind?

Social comparison theorists tell us how cancer patients prefer contact with other patients who are doing better than they are, so that they can gain inspiration and coping information from them.

This transcendence that comes with inspiration really expands our understanding of what’s possible. It helps us envision a future goal which we see value in, striving towards which can bring with it a feeling of well-being.

Gift #2: A feeling of Gratitude

As is the case with any thoughtful gift, receiving a dose of inspiration brings with it a sense of gratitude (whether we recognise it immediately or not!).

Gratitude is a positive emotion that’s evoked because we recognise we’ve gained something and someone else is responsible for that gain. We feel acknowledged, understood and rewarded. So in the case of inspiration, our mind treats transcendence as a reward & feels grateful to the source of inspiration for bringing it to us.

Gift #3: The Element of surprise

While it’s possible to set up an environment where we’re more likely to be inspired, it’s unlikely that we can force inspiration through an act of will. One day it’s right around the corner, and then it vanishes for months at an end.

The reason is that our mind credits an external source for making us feel inspired - from the Greek concept of the Muse to contemporary acknowledgment of inspiring music, nature, poetry, mentors, role models and more. Even when the inspiration ‘comes from within’, it’s the result of unconscious processing of experiences in our mind, and something we cannot immediately identify with as our own. So yes, a surprise nonetheless.

And who doesn’t love a good surprise? Life, even when comfortable, would seem so dull if everything was predictable and never informed by such interruptions to routine.

Gift #4: Energy to act

Inspiration is not just something we receive but also something that we transmit. The deeply-inspired individual feels compelled to engage deeper with the idea, express and actualise it.

“I was inspired to…”

But because the moments of deep inspiration are so fleeting, the economy of expression is considered very important for transmitting it. Our friends, the researchers, noted that participants in their study would start writing very fast, often with several grammatical mistakes, when feeling intensely inspired. They call it ‘approach motivation’ and while it may appear reckless to some, it’s actually a very good thing - because it allows an idea to be captured in concrete form before the creative loses sight of it. In other words, before the moment of inspiration passes.

This transmission process is not just valuable for the individual to actualise their ideas, but also has socio-cultural significance.

I really like how artist & literary critic Meg Harris has articulated the purpose of creatives to “mediate on behalf of the rest of society and draw the culture forward towards more complex and thoughtful values”. How lovely is that!

And the last one, Gift #5: A Mirror to our unique aspirations

Our experience of inspiration is largely determined by our open-ness to influences. And given that we all have unique interests, what we consider inspiring is also unique to us. The best of popular role models can only inspire us when their story and successes are personally relevant and attainable for us. (I do have a hard time digesting that my closest friends don’t enjoy the same readings as me, haha)

Because sources of inspiration need to be the perfect fit for our existing inclinations, they’re rarer than we’d like them to be. And the rarity makes the experience of inspiration feel even more precious and exciting!

Finally… An invitation to explore:

The experience of inspiration is so deeply connected to our sense of identity, but the self isn’t easy to define. Here’s a fun prompt that can nudge us into grasping bits of our identity via metaphors and analogies.

(Adapted from a prompt that I really like by The School of Life)

(This image is printable on an A4 - incase you’d like to spend time scribbling and doodling in the squares)

Disha’s gift to us:

My friend and colleague Disha shared this link with us the other day. She’s a creative strategist and runs the food blog Cooking After Work (@cookingafterwork_ on Instagram).

Deck of Brilliance

I think it's a really fun resource for ideation and a kickass website in general. Passing it forward as a gift to you all, just in case it inspires a few.

If you have gifts to share with others in the Brain Food Club, please do send them my way (you can simply hit ‘reply’ on my email) and I’ll include them in the next letter.

Before I sign off...

I LOVE receiving your replies. My inbox is always open to your thoughts – about this letter, about my creative project, about YOUR creative project and all things creative.

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That’s it for today!

Take care of yourself :)

Love,

Nishita