Coffee Contemplation: Waiting for Inspiration
The best ideas come from doing.
Audio narration by David Marlow
Transcript:
David Marlow-Here's this week's Coffee Contemplation, Waiting for Inspiration, The Best Ideas Come from Doing.
It is the fifth anniversary of my early retirement from corporate life. And because of that, this week I've been reflecting on some things and I want to share this with you because it's both something I've learned through living it and also wish I had understood it better five years ago.
It would be splendid if the clouds would part and a voice from the sky would tell us exactly what to do, wouldn't it? If you wait for something like that, though, before you work on your life, what we might call your art, you'll not get much creative work completed.
As world-renowned artist Chuck Close said, “All the best ideas come out of the process. They come out of the work itself. Things occur to you.”
I like the Chuck Close quote and I use the picture of Chuck Close, that's his self-portrait, along with a retired Dave, my icon that I created many years ago on my "first" day of retirement.
I'm going to talk more about that on the Sunday musing, so I won't say anything more right now.
What I want to share, though, is if you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. If you get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that maybe you reject will push you in another direction.
Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You might feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work. I find that seldom the case.
Our art, our life, and our Ikigai are uncovered by starting, by moving, by doing, by trying. There's no way that five years ago I would have said that I would have completed my first book for a publisher. No way. I couldn't see that. I couldn't have envisioned that. I might have wished for it or something like that. But even then, I didn't have that on my radar at all.
It was through writing and editing and connecting with people and doing this newsletter and things like that which gave me the interest, the skill, and the means to do this. It was through writing on LinkedIn and the newsletter and all of it that got the attention of a publisher and said, "Hey, you want to write a book for us?" I could never have planned that.
So that's what I want your coffee contemplation to be, is what could you do today to just get started, to explore, to uncover something about yourself, because you never know where it might end up.
Quest well.