We confuse getting inspired with making progress

November 22, 2017 2:09 PM

Toffler predicted that the
acceleration of technology would leave people suffering from shattering stress
and disorientation aka, future shock.

A central tenant of his philosophy was the concept of information overload, a
term he popularized to define the moment when the amount of input to a system
exceeded its processing capacity and resulted in a reduction of decision
quality.

Understatement of the millennium.

Fast forward to the digital
generation, and mankind has now produced more information in the past decade
than in it has in the previous five thousand years.

Future shock, indeed.

My
question is, how does this impact the creative process? Because the job of the
artist, is to find inspiration in life’s daily occurrences that most people
take for granted, and burn it as fuel to make the world better.

That’s why there
are hundreds of applications, platforms and communities designed for note taking,
organizing, clipping, managing, curating and archiving the world around us.

Because we’re not only suffering from information overload, but inspiration
overload as well.

But here’s the problem. Inspiration is a critical part of the
creative process, but it’s not the only part. If we spend all of our time
collecting ideas to help us research how to enter the right mindset so we can
prepare to sit down and hold a space to motivate ourselves to create a plan so
we can brainstorm about how to visualize the possibility of eventually getting
started on doing the work, we haven’t done anything.

We’ve confused getting
inspired with making progress.

That’s not productivity, that’s pornography.

The
thirst for research, the obsession with consuming, the addiction of inhaling,
the opiate of organizing, these activities, while seemingly productive, are
actually expressions of procrastination and perfectionism.

Because they don’t
do anything to move the story forward. They only paralyze the characters.

I
once wrote a book about how
ideas are free, but only execution is priceless.

If you’re feeling too
overloaded to read it, allow me to
summarize all four hundred pages in one sentence.

You don’t need an
idea, you need an I did.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

What are you mistaking productivity for?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com