Let’s get this straight. Consider yourself lucky if you happen to randomly get inspired by someone. In all other cases, you will have to take care of that yourself.
What is inspiration? Oxford says this:
"The process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative.”
Why is the creative part important? Because if we are talking about our life, it is an experience that is ultimately creative, unseen, and unfelt before and something of our own making. So, inspiration is sort of action of emotionally reliving an instance when you felt that you can become/have/feel something with the help of stimuli.
We feel this emotion most intensely when we experience something cool. However, on a daily basis and on a journey to greatness, we don’t have the luxury of being inspired at all times when we need to. You cannot just wait around for someone to hopefully come and motivate you. So, inspiring yourself towards certain actions in purely a personal responsibility on a daily (or another timescale) basis.
The initial burst of hormones from seeing a strong and fit person of your age, a successful colleague, a traveler, influencer, anyone whose lifestyle, habit, the income you want to replicate will die very soon. It’s strong at the moment and it goes away just as fast.
One of the ways to preserve the initial motivation you got to do something and carry through with it is to introduce designed inspirations. It's not something that needs to be on the calendar, but you need to be self-aware enough to go to a pre-compiled folder of pictures on your laptop or a bookmarked video to recreate those emotions and remind yourself of where you were going.
It is so easy to get sucked into your routine, old lifestyle, and that of your surroundings. Your surrounding is likely not all advised of the ideal conditions you are aiming for: your university, job setting, etc. are places that you happened or chose to fall into. It does not necessarily possess the best qualities that you are inspired to have.
So..
How to do this? Basically, how do we artificially relive the moment of inspiration?
A pretty obvious one is to study content from an inspiring person (it can be just one feature of their lifestyle that you like.) Just make yourself see it and want it through videos (most immersive content type and therefore fastest for producing a strong emotion). Another one is to review your own writing/anything else you produced from the moment you were really inspired (requires you to have to produce that content). Lastly, you can go on a daydream "walk", which needs no extremal stimuli: just think intentionally about that "something". This one is sort of meditation but targetted at getting your thoughts together on a very particular topic.
Good example. An e-commerce millionaire who graduated from Vanderbilt came and gave a talk. It was really inspiring. I was like “Mariyam, this is very possible and you can definitely do it”. Seeing a real millionaire who was in your own broke-ass, student-minded shoes recently and changed his life is motivational. This started off a new epoch in my life. So, although there were multiple factors that went into my transformation, I can say that I was lucky to be at Vanderbilt at the time when this guy came. However, there are many people around the world who would be good at e-commerce who did not have this privilege. Good for me and bad for them unless they take this inspiration process into their own hands. Moreover, the initial inspiration dies off in like a week. Again, once in a while when I lose sight and start having thoughts inhibiting progress, I watch a video or surf the profile of a successful ecom entrepreneur to relive the moment of “Mariyam, this is very possible and you can definitely do it”.
🚨Watch out for:
*** Getting sucked into watching inspirational videos for pleasure or distraction rather than for a clear purpose ***
The inspirational state is an extremely useful tool. Learn to use it when you want and decide to and not only when the world miraculously decides to throw it at you.