(The full, non-chopped off version of the above quote):
‘Inspiration is a word used by people who aren’t really doing anything. I go into my office everyday that I’m in Brighton and I work. Whether I fell like it or not is irrelevant.’
– Nick Cave
How many times have you heard someone say something was inspiring or inspirational? A person? A speech? A song? A mountain? A documentary?… And how many times do you see nothing get done as a result of it?
Inspirational things are just that. It’s got little to do with action. And what does the word even mean anymore – what power or significance does it have anymore?
Each inspirational thing we see or hear is a call to action, but most of the time, we just store away the inspiration in the the inspiration back shed of our brain. There it lies like a heap of crap just like the Ab-Blaster 2000 we all bought off the tv at some point, looking supercool at first but never to be used or accessed again, collecting inspirational cobwebs and inspiring dust until we see the next inspirational thing, that is another call to action that we also don’t act on.
I’ve been guilty of this too. A lot¹. But we need to get rid of inspire, inspiring, inspired and inspirational, or at least replace it with something much more practical and productive. Motivation, for example, is much more useful than inspiration. I don’t know about you but you can keep your inspiration, buddy –I’d rather be motivated by something than inspired.
You can get inspired all you want by countless people reminding you in one way or another to ‘Chase your dreams’, ‘Find your passion’, or ‘Just go for it’. But what’s really going to count is if it motivates you, drives you or shoves you over the brink to do that thing that you’ve want to do but have been afraid of.²
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¹I searched ‘inspire’, ‘inspirational’ and ‘inspiring’ on this very site and in 85 posts I got 8 results.
² ‘Shoving’ instead of ‘inspiring’? hmmm… let’s try it out. e.g. ‘Dude, you gotta hear their new single. It was so shoving.’ Yep, I think I just coined my first term.