Inspiration Yields Efficiency

Hack your productivity by living an inspired life

Photo by John Fornander on Unsplash

Have you ever been in a really good flow state? That feeling of gas in your mental tank is pumping and you’re just powering through some task. It could be writing a blog post, hammering sales emails, creating a new website. Flow is domain-general.

Flow is a superpower. It helps you get stuff done. It helps narrow your focus down to just the task at hand. It ignores time. It pauses the outside world and gives you a pleasant work environment.

One thing I noticed about myself is that when I’m acting out of inspiration, I can achieve flow easier. I can find that rhythm when I know exactly what I’m doing. Inspiration can direct you toward an answer more quickly. If you’ve ever sat in front of a blank screen and thought, what should your new website look like, that answer is super hard without any reference points.

If you’ve ever been stuck like that, you know that the answer feels almost impossible at that moment. That’s where inspiration comes in. Sometimes when you hit that roadblock you need to take a step back and look at what others have done.

Inspiration by analogy

Elon Musk says you should reason from first principles, rather than by analogy, but analogy is sometimes the answer. As someone who constantly challenges the status quo, of course, his framework seems to work well for him, but that doesn’t mean that analogy is worthless.

If you’ve ever been excited after reading something or had a conversation with someone you want to be like, you know that there is some kind of analogy at the core of that excitement. You can see their path and you think, well I can do that too because we are analogously positioned.

I’m someone who struggles with visualization. I think in a linear fashion most of the time. That’s why I rely on inspiration boards to organize my thinking around a problem. Inspiration, not only helps create concrete mental visualizations, it can literally show you the answer. One of my own principles is to seek inspiration in the time of roadblocks because it helps you see the path through the jungle.

So what can you do?

• Listen to your favorite podcast
• Read a biography of someone successful
• Create a mood board using are.na
• Go for a walk
• Travel
• Talk to a mentor
• Ask someone who has done it before
• Go to an art museum

Hack your productivity by hacking your inspiration.

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Isaac Newton