014: Looking for Inspiration
Inspiration is a lot like luck—you have to figure out how to capture it.
I officially started the job hunt this week! It’s funny, I actually wrote most of this piece before starting the search. I came back to it today, and it almost feels like Past Wendy wrote this to encourage Current Wendy, who’s now dealing with the “luck” of applying to jobs.
Hopefully you’ll think of this post as a midweek pick-me-up too—it’s on luck, inspiration, and how I plan to create more opportunity for myself.
Written at Asha Tea House, sipping on (unsweetened) Asian pear oolong tea. It’d taste better at 20% sweetness but I’m still on my new year’s health kick, so… 🥲
One of my intentions this year is to write more, by:
Publishing my newsletter consistently (weekly)
Getting a piece accepted by a publication (literary journal, media website, or magazine)
In order to do any of these, I’d need to create the system to enable my writing habit. While I write fairly consistently now, I still pine for ✨inspiration✨, that mysterious wind that generates ideas to propel my words onto the page.
Whenever I’m not inspired, I create self-defeating excuses:
I don’t have any inspiration, so my ideas won’t resonate.
I don’t want to write today; I’ll just do it a different day when I’m feeling inspired.
How do these writers create such good stories? What inspires them? Why am I not like them?
Inspiration is a lot like luck
I’m starting to think that inspiration is a lot like luck—it’s what I want to blame when I can’t achieve a certain outcome or can’t find the right opportunity. “I have no inspiration” becomes an easy cop-out to continue doing nothing, just as “I’m just unlucky” can be used to justify a loss or rejection.
While I can control some things, I can’t just will inspiration. Instead, I’ve been reflecting on how to create an environment that will summon it more consistently, or a system where I can write without it.
4 Types of Luck
I’m reminded of what James H. Austin describes as four types of luck, which Marc Andreessen and others have written about in an entrepreneurial context. I like the way Naval Ravikant describes them:
1. Blind luck
The first kind of luck you might say is blind luck. Where I just got lucky because something completely out of my control happened. That’s fortune, that’s fate.
2. Luck from hustling
Then there’s luck that comes through persistence, hard work, hustle, motion. Which is when you’re running around creating lots of opportunities, you’re generating a lot of energy, you’re doing a lot of things, lots of things will get stirred up in the dust.
It’s almost like mixing a petri dish and seeing what combines. Or mixing a bunch of reagents and seeing what combines. You’re generating enough force and hustle and energy that luck will find you.
3. Luck from preparation
A third way is that you become very good at spotting luck. If you are very skilled in a field, you will notice when a lucky break happens in that field. When other people who aren’t attuned to it won’t notice. So you become sensitive to luck and that’s through skill and knowledge and work.
4. Luck from your unique character
Then the last kind of luck is the weirdest, hardest kind. But that’s what we want to talk about. Which is where you build a unique character, a unique brand, a unique mindset, where then luck finds you.
For example, let’s say that you’re the best person in the world at deep sea underwater diving. You’re known to take on deep sea underwater dives that nobody else will even attempt to dare.
Then, by sheer luck, somebody finds a sunken treasure ship off the coast. They can’t get it. Well, their luck just became your luck, because they’re going to come to you to get that treasure. You’re going to get paid for it.
Similar to entrepreneurs, writers often have to create something from just an idea, relying on a combination of hard work and “luck” to have their piece succeed. I don’t think I’ve found success yet, so I frequently feel like I’m hustling but not getting to where I want to be. How do we create and capture more luck for ourselves, then?
Austin writes a recap:
Chance I is completely impersonal; you can’t influence it.
Chance II favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment and explore.
Chance III favors those who have a sufficient background of sound knowledge plus special abilities in observing, remembering, recalling, and quickly forming significant new associations.
Chance IV favors those with distinctive, if not eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors.
Andreessen interprets this through a set of questions:
How energetic are we? How inclined toward motion are we?
How curious are we? How determined are we to learn about our chosen field, other fields, and the world around us?
How flexible and aggressive are we at synthesizing—at linking together multiple, disparate, apparently unrelated experiences on the fly?
How uniquely are we developing a personal point of view—a personal approach—a personal set of “eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors” that will uniquely prepare us to create?
Thus, I’d like to do more to nurture these aspects in my life to nourish my brain and soul—my creative playground. I’ve decided to use these questions to guide some of my personal growth goals this year as I pursue becoming a better writer, thinker, and human.
Pursuing Curiosity
Here are a few directions I’m excited to explore:
Masters of the craft
I’d like to learn more what it means to master the technique and art of storytelling. While I enjoy beach reads as much as anyone else (and even like writing them), fiction written by notable authors teaches me the most. Here are two pieces I read this week that I loved:
Barn Burning, a short story by Haruki Murakami, about a writer who meets a man with a peculiar hobby. He’s a master of saying nothing and everything at the same time. This story tripped me up and got me questioning everything I just read.
The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir by Joan Didion, on losing her husband of 40 years. (I finally finished!) She captures a portrait of her marriage through memories that come and fade as she’s processing her grief. It depicts the unraveling of a famous rational mind, delicately and beautifully.
I get the most fired up when I read (or watch—I like TV and movies too!) something I find masterful. I’m left in awe afterwards and bask in the story’s halo, impressed and inspired. I never have explicit reading goals (I tend to favor quantity over quality when meeting goals 😓) but I’d like to have more of these moments this year. If you have book or short story recommendations, send them my way!
Becoming more open-minded
Ever since the 2016 election, the idea of living in an echo chamber has been one of my biggest fears. Ironically, I still subconsciously self-select into only accepting thoughts similar to mine—to the point that I’ve unintentionally shut others down despite believing that cancel culture isn’t good for society. I’d like to become more open-minded: someone who can listen to an argument and refrain from judgment and believe there’s something to be learned regardless of how I feel.
I read plenty of Internet stuff, but I also wanted to meet real people who’d expose me to new ideas. At the risk of becoming even more of an SF stereotype, I decided to join The Commons, a community that leads classes and discussions on a wide range of topics. Here’s a snippet of the course catalog this quarter:
A lot of these are outside my comfort zone, but I’m planning to sign up for a class or two to learn something new. I want to become someone who can think listen to new ideas, chew on them, and formulate what I’d like to believe only after thinking everything through.
Older, foundational texts
I recently started following several talented Gen Z writers on Twitter. Their problems sound very similar to ones I’ve experienced, and many people resonate with their writing. It made me wonder: are we all trapped in cycles of the same struggles, because we refuse to look and learn beyond ourselves?
James loves a book, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. It’s actually the personal diary of a former Roman emperor, likely the most powerful person in the world at the time. It’s baffling how relatable his problems were, which makes his diary so interesting to study—his thoughts, conclusions, and aphorisms still resonate centuries later. (This guy would have killed it on Twitter.)
It makes me realize how much content I consume has been created recently vs. in the past 500 years. Moreover, an audiobook binge of self-help/business books on our New Zealand trip made me realize how much modern content chases profit by regurgitating older wisdom in more simplified, pithy, Tweet-size chunks. (It further reinforces my belief that most nonfiction books can be distilled into a 10-minute TED talk, and only the ones that can’t are likely worth reading.)
I wish I had a more extensive library to borrow wisdom from whenever I struggle in life. However, I’ve mostly only consumed content made in the last few decades—so I’ll have to start reading more to build those references for myself. Until then, I’ll just share this motivational quote I like on the importance of reading foundational texts (again, from Naval Ravikant):
No book in the library should scare you. Whether it’s a math, physics, electrical engineering, sociology, or economics book… when you’re reading a book and you’re confused, that confusion is similar to the pain you get in the gym when you’re working out. But you’re building mental muscles instead of physical muscles.
I have people in my life I consider to be very well-read who aren’t very smart… they started out reading a set of false or just weakly true things, and those formed the axioms of the foundation for their worldview. Then, when new things come, they judge the new idea based on a foundation they already built. Your foundation is critical. When it comes to reading, make sure your foundation is very, very high quality…
If you start with the originals as your foundations, then you have enough of a worldview and understanding that you won’t fear any book. Then you can just learn.
I’m out of room this week, but I’ll continue on this topic next week as I write about building a discipline around synthesizing my thoughts and capturing what I’ve learned. Hope you enjoyed the discussion, and as always, thank you for reading!