Episode 62: Inspired vs. Forced Action

Transcript

I did an episode on this topic or sort of related topic much earlier in the show's run.
I'll link to that in the description.
The general point of that episode was I was talking about how to get into, how to make
personal progress with certain things in life.
And the approach that I was outlining was really kind of like, well, for lack of a better
word, it's sort of like grinding at it, right?
And the approach I outlined there was really that if you set aside a certain time every
day to do a thing, and then that becomes, and you do that long enough, it becomes a habit
and it sort of takes over where it feels almost awkward not to do it.
And the example that I was giving, I think in the episode was around, I was talking about
how I've never been like a huge read for pleasure kind of person.
And I had been working on that for the last couple of years.
And essentially what I did was I set aside a certain time every day, right after the kids
went to bed, I'd read a chapter of a book.
I would do it even if I didn't want to.
And over time, that builds a habit.
And I do this with a number of things in life.
I mean, I did this.
This is sort of how I approached getting back into working out years ago.
A number of other things.
The pro side to this sort of approach to things, the benefit is that it does in fact build the
habit.
And if you can almost just sort of force willpower your way through the initial, whatever, a couple
of months of doing it, the habit will take hold.
The con of it is that it's very grindy and you can end, if you do too many things in this
way, you can end up with a life dynamic where essentially you're just grinding through habits
to either build new habits or keep existing habits going day after day after day after
day.
And life can almost sort of, the days can kind of almost blur together because you're
just sort of doing the same group of things over and over again.
Because if you think about it kind of mathematically, right, if you spend 20 minutes trying to learn
or trying to reinforce one habit and 20 minutes reinforcing something else and an hour reinforcing
something else and your day can get chewed up very quickly or at least your free time
for whatever that, you know, whatever kind of free time you have.
I wanted to revisit this topic because I heard some terminology around this and did a little
bit of extra looking into it just to, you know, kind of research a little bit.
Another, the other side of this coin, right, is sort of the feeling inspired to do something.
And one sort of dichotomy of terminology that gets used is inspired action versus forced action.
And I thought that this summed things up pretty well, but I think there's also like an interesting
offshoot here.
So this would be sort of, you know, if you're a creative person, a lot of times you're, you
might be sitting around waiting for inspiration, waiting for that sort of moment to strike where
you feel inspired to go do whatever it is that is the creative endeavor that you like
to pursue, you know, be it painting or I don't know, making a game or, you know, whatever
the thing is that, that you're passionate about every day of the week.
You might not feel super passionate about that.
And so you're kind of sitting around waiting in some cases.
And then when inspiration strikes, it's like, you can't put it down.
You know, you might know this feeling of like, oh, I had this brilliant, this great idea.
And, and, and I just can't not do it.
Like, and you just want to spend like 35 hours a day doing it if possible.
That's that type of inspiration.
And it's similar to like a flow state or, you know, just extra motivation and those sorts
of ideas.
The opposite of this is the forced action.
It's where you're pushing yourself through something to, to, you're pushing yourself to
do something, even if at that moment, you don't feel particularly inspired to do it.
Um, and you hear advice on both sides of this fence, right?
Um, I think the example I used in that episode was around like Stephen King, who famously is
more of the forced action type.
He gets up every day and writes X pages.
It doesn't matter if they're good pages.
It doesn't matter if they get used.
It doesn't matter if they were, if he feels inspired or not.
That's just how he views it.
His, his, his authorship, is that a word?
His authorship is, is a job, right?
And he, he essentially grinds through it even when he doesn't want to.
And I'm sure there are days where he feels very motivated.
And I'm sure there's days where he feels very unmotivated.
And I think most creative people can relate to that.
And I definitely go through these sorts of things.
And the reason I wanted to revisit this topic was because having the framing around forced
versus inspired action is kind of interesting to me.
What I've realized is that at least for me, and this is something that I'm trying to find
an approach to work on better, when I have an inspiration for something, like I said,
I will drill into it so hard.
I will not put it down.
However, what I've noticed over the course of my life is that, that, that inspiration,
unless I can, unless it is a concise project, like a, like something that is fairly small
in scope, I find that inspiration burns out quickly.
And so on the other hand, when I'm doing things that I have to almost push myself to
grind through, I will typically see them through for much longer periods of time because that
habit gets built and the habit just sort of takes over.
And so I've been thinking about this from sort of two angles.
The first one is that I would love to find ways to better convert, right?
So the idea being feel that inspiration to do something, but then recognize that this
inspiration will sort of be like a, like a, you know, burning piece of paper.
Like it will, it will engulf itself in flames and burn out fairly quickly, at least for
me.
And, and maybe you relate to this, maybe you don't, but I've seen this in other people
as well.
So that inspiration is great for like that initial, like kind of almost like Eureka, like
I, I, I'm, I just can't put this down and you'll just plow through for a while.
But I, I want to work on converting that from an inspired action sort of thing into a more
forced action.
And I, I want to do a better job at trying to figure out how do I recognize that I, I
mean, I recognize it usually.
It's just that when you're in the thick of it, I always think to myself, oh my God, I'll
definitely finish this and then I don't, and I can't, and I imagine that that is a
common thing, especially for like creative style endeavors.
So how do you take, how do you in the moment recognize, I'm not going to feel this inspired
forever and then come up with a strategy to convert essentially your, the way you're
approaching it from an all encompassing inspired action over into a forced action or a habitual
action where you're going to grind, you're going to convert from being inspired to grinding
at it to see it through.
So that's one aspect I've been thinking about this is how can I go about converting from one
to the other?
The other angle I've been thinking about is what, because inspired action is great.
You feel great about it.
It's really, again, kind of all consuming.
You feel very creative about things.
So you should take advantage of that.
So what's it good for?
I think it's good for small scope, concise style project kind of things.
So again, how do we, how do I go from recognizing this is, I am inspired to do something.
How can I take the scope and reduce it to its absolute minimal components in that moment so
that I'm not trying to use inspired action to do something that's going to take me a year
and a half to execute?
You know, how do I get that time down to like, it's only going to take me like a week because
I think you can stay inspired, but only in short bursts.
And over time, you either need to convert it to kind of a grind habitual kind of thing,
or you need to be able to finish it before your inspiration runs out.
So as always, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Maybe some of this resonates with you.
I know that I go through this all the time.
I can't tell you how many projects, like I can look around my room that I'm sitting in right now
and view at least a half a dozen projects that I started, maybe got halfway through
and then moved on to something else or dropped it or whatever.
And there's plenty of things that I do complete as well and see through and all that kind of stuff.
But it would be nice to have strategies to convert from one to the other.
Because I think there's a lot of research around, or maybe that's not a fair statement.
I have heard and seen a lot of people talk about how do you take something grindy and
kind of push yourself to feel inspired about it.
But I haven't seen a whole lot about the reverse, about how do you go from feeling inspired
to making it a habit where you can see it through without needing to feel that inspiration throughout.
I hope so.