Thursday 10 April 2014

I is for Ideas & Inspiration

Ideas & Inspirations
Just last week in my B is for Blogging post, I mentioned that I'm great on ideas but pretty bad at following through with them. Today's post is brought to you with a whole host of other ideas I have bubbling away in my crazy brain, most of which will probably never see the light of day!

Inspiration strikes me at odd times - it may be a song lyric, a photo, a tweet or just an overheard comment in the kitchen at work  but for a few hours or even days, that idea will bubble & percolate in my mind, sometimes at the front but most often at the back - just seeming to spring fairly well formed from the jumble of my consciousness.

This blog is one of those ideas that got a grip and actually came to life but it took maybe 3 months to get from my head to the internet! I never intended for it to become a main blog and always intended for it to be for occasional posts only. I think I gauged that pretty well, judging by my serious lack of regular posts - until this month at least!

I gather pages from magazines for food photo ideas as well as recipes. Great advertising images also find their way into my small pile and I have a virtual pile for Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest links that inspire me. Lately I've been thinking I should make myself a Tumblr account to keep everything in one place! Yes, I am seriously contemplating starting yet another blog type thing!

But one thing stops me getting going and today I followed a twitter link to a fantastic post - Why Procrastinators Procrastinate and as I was reading it, I was thinking -this guy knows me! In the follow up article How To Beat Procrastination, I think I found out why I have so many ideas!
"Procrastinators are great visionaries—they love to fantasize about the beautiful mansion they will one day have built—but what they need to be are gritty construction workers, who methodically lay one brick after the other, day after day, without giving up, until a house is built."
That is so familiar to me - I have loads of half started projects, I'm known in my family as someone who rarely finishes anything before moving on to the next fad but reading those two articles made me wonder if perhaps all my ideas and randomness springs from the desire to not actually do the tough stuff!

So my next to-do list has to include some of the steps the second article described - breakdown the larger ideas into smaller, less icky tasks. I'm going to try some of his suggestions - this A to Z Challenge is a perfect starting place too - I've never blogged every day before so if I can do this on 26 random topics even when I don't feel like writing then I can beat this procrastination thing. I hope, anyway :)

In the meantime, ideas will undoubtedly continue to sprout and I'll never know which ones are likely to come to life until the inspiration hits me & I get going!

Where do you get your ideas from? What or who inspires you to do what you do? Let us know in the comments below if you feel like sharing :)


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2 comments:

  1. Thanks for the links. They're great.
    Visiting from AtoZ
    Katherine Walcott
    http://rodneyssaga.com/

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  2. I'm a lot like that. Ideas spring from all over the place. I try to keep something handy to write them down. Evernote's great if I'm near my phone or computer cause it keeps track of every idea and syncs between platforms.

    I don't know if you'd call it inspiration or drive... I like to think drive is what motivates me to do things and inspiration is what motivates me to create things; kinda like separating work and art. Drive is for the builders, inspiration is for the architect. But you have to have both.

    Thediydaily.com is another great site (aside from my own :D ) for encouragement and inspiration. The author/owner, Brian Thompson, is taking a break for a little bit while he writes a poetry book, but there's a great, huge archive of inspiring poetry, discussion and images. Just throwing that out there for karma's sake. Not trying to plug or endorse anyone.

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