Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it. – Jack London

People don’t worship the idea of inspiration as much as they used to, but as my friend Ron Drotos says, “Inspiration is real!”

Sometimes artists are inspired. When they talk about how inspired work they say, it hit me like a bolt and I knew exactly what needed to be done. The first draft was perfect and finished in record time. It was as if a divine force was guiding my hand the whole time.

That’s amazing and I believe them. However, it has never happened to me. Everything I’ve ever done has been hard work.

I’m willing to bet that’s not the case with most art and design. Most creation is an informed guess at what’s going to work.

You can make that guess better with sustained effort, practice and using your talents in the best possible way. But, no spiritual being can take credit for what you did, you worked hard to develop the tastes and abilities to make it happen.

Be grateful for inspiration when, or if, it occurs, but don’t depend on it. Don’t wait for perfection before you begin. No, as Jack London said, you have to go out hunting for it. And you know, you may never find actual inspiration.

But, you’ll find something that looks remarkably like it. In fact, so much like it that you can’t tell the difference between inspired work and what you’ve done. Your hard work is completely invisible, even though it was a struggle to finish.

So, don’t lay back waiting for an idea to just occur to you. Go out and hunt it down. You don’t need to use a club. In fact, I prefer to use a net when I hunt for inspiration. That way I can let it go when I’m done. It’s a kind of creativity catch and release. It’s much more humane, and someone else can catch it use it as well.

Stuck for what you should do next?

Focus on making one person happy. Buy them a gift. Feed them. Sit and listen to them talk without offering any advice, only support. See the movie they want to see with them.

If they want to, let them do something in return. Letting them do something for you will make them happy. What did they do for you? Can you return the favor?

Anticipate a need they don’t even have yet and offer them a solution. Do something completely weird and unexpected that they can tell as a story to their friends. Take them on an adventure to a place that makes you happy.

After you’ve listened carefully and seen how they react to the things that you love, why not invent a product, a recipe, a song or a short story just to appeal to that one person? At this point, you’ve got a pretty good idea about what they really like.

When you are looking for what you should do next, why not focus on making one person happy? I bet, after all that effort, what you do would make more than that one person happy. In fact, I bet it would make a bunch of people happy.

Focus on an audience of one first. Build from there.

When things are shaky and nothing is working, we might realize that we are on the verge of something.

-Pema Chodron

We’ve all felt the frustration of working on a project and reaching a point where you don’t know where to go next. Whether the world has provided a difficulty or it comes from inside your own head, you are unable to move forward. You are creatively lost.

What if instead of reacting with frustration, we could react with excitement? That irritating feeling that you don’t know where to go next means you are in a new area of the map. You’ve entered into a place you’ve never been before, no wonder you feel frustrated.

It’s as if you had made an anniversary reservation at your favorite restaurant and arrived to find it closed because their plumbing broke. You could cancel your whole evening at this point. Give up angry and complain to all your friends about the injustice of it all. Or, you could try that new restaurant down the street. It’s so new there aren’t even any Yelp reviews yet. It’s a style of food that you’ve never tried, and it might be terrible, but it will be an adventure.

What if our blocks and creative frustrations mean we are in new territory? Should we turn around and try to make our way back to familiar ground or should we start to add to our map and expand the area where we feel comfortable?

Getting lost is scary and frustrating, but it also means we’re someplace we’ve never been before. And isn’t that what creativity is?

Do what you want.

If it’s terrible, never show anybody. If it reveals too much about you, save it to a folder called “inventory” so no one will ever look at it. Just don’t waste time worrying about what other people think when you’re alone.

If there’s nobody looking over your shoulder, the stakes for experimentation are very low.

Do what you want.

Don’t try and please your family and your friends. Don’t imagine a person who wouldn’t like what you’re doing. Please yourself. Make the thing that makes you happy.

There’s no law that says you have to show anyone your first draft or your second draft or any draft. You decide that.

If you never had to show anyone your work, what would you do?

Read about the theory of obscurity here.

One of the rules of writing advertising copy is that a story is always better than a statistic.

Statistics have their place in copywriting (four out of five dentists recommend this gum), but only when they’re backed up with a story illustrating the statistics. One picture of a starving child motivates more people to give money than a sentence saying there are millions of starving children in the world.

Why not challenge yourself to take a statistic you use all the time and turn it into a story?

Especially if your story goes against the grain of the statistic.

One of my favorite things to do on Yelp is to find the exceptional (4.9 stars!) restaurants and businesses and read the one-star reviews. They often tell the story of why they’re such a successful business. They eject someone loudly talking on their cell phone during a meal or a reviewer didn’t like that the person taking the order didn’t speak perfect English and they had to repeat themselves. 

Look at a statistic somewhere and think about it from both sides. Tell a story that grows from just looking at the numbers. Put the empathy and emotion back into the statistics that were drawn out of them when they were turned into a graphic for a CNN story.

Who is the dentist that won’t recommend sugar-free gum? Why would someone vote for a candidate that doesn’t represent their interests? Who doesn’t want to move out of a neighborhood when the real estate prices are so high they would triple their money? 

Every statistic is really just a boring package wrapped in brown paper filled with interesting stories just waiting for you to unpack them.

This ClickHole article is a perfect example of the subtext of most one-star reviews.