Inspiration

A thought occurred to me recently, when seeing the usual raft of fanboy "I'm so inspired" replies to any given post by a reasonably famous indiehacker on Twitter.

Yes, I'm still calling it Twitter. I just can't let go of that. Calling it "X" is just so - clumsy.

Anyway, the thought was: "Inspiration without Action is meaningless".

I've been guilty of the fanboy material before. "Oh, this is so inspiring!" followed by the inevitable bookmarking, forgetting about it, and only seeing it again six months later when I go through my bookmarks looking for - it's true - inspiration.

I'm my own worst enemy.

I was also reminded about it in a recent Guardian ad for a series of articles, which led "Inspired by <insert recent film here>, these four journalists produced these articles on how they would handle the same situation."

Right there - inspiration that triggered action. The paper wouldn't have been able to talk about journalists who were inspired but did absolutely nothing about it.

This is as much as warning to myself as an observation. Inspiration without action is just an internal performance and it's worse if you dare to make it public without immediately following it up with "...and this is what I made in response".