Uninspired but willing.

If you want to grow an audience, you need to create consistently. To create consistently means that you need to question your discomfort during the very act of creation. So, for example, I did not feel like starting this video. Why am I recording? Because I know that I will feel glad that I did at the end. And that is how you know that you are in a moment of personal growth. You are stretching beyond your comfort zone. And of course, you don't feel like stretching beyond your comfort zone because it's comfortable here. You don't feel like it, and yet you stretch anyway. And afterwards, you feel glad that you did. Then you know that you have just experienced personal growth. So many of us have this illusion. I don't know where we got the idea. Well, I think I do know where we got it. It's from Hollywood that the creative person is the one who is, like, inspired. I mean, this is what we see in the movies, that we see those rare. I mean, that's what we see on screen, right? We see those rare moments of inspiration. You know, the. The actor goes, you know, get struck by lightning, metaphorically or literally. And then they go in, and then we see scenes of them madly creating some. Making some invention or creating some piece of art. And we grow up those images with those ideas in our head. So we think, well, you have to be struck by lightning, metaphorically, hopefully, before you can create. Well, I have this secret that I share with many other creators. When I say creator, I mean writers, video makers, artists, business creators, inventors. The secret that I share with many of them is that I don't feel inspired to create until after I start working for a while. So, for example, I am just starting to get into feeling inspired to make this video. Not quite there yet. You'll see the difference. Those of you who watch my longer videos, the ones that are usually 20 minutes or so long, 20 to 30 minutes. You'll notice that my energy shifts throughout the video. Take note of that, because you'll notice that I get more and more inspired throughout the video. And by the end, towards the end of the video, well, maybe there's a kind of a. An arc like this. Like in the beginning. I don't feel inspired. And right now, I'm still in that state. I'm observing myself. I'm still making myself talk. Yeah. Did you think that I'm just naturally. Before I start the camera, I'm just, like, going around spouting wisdom or whatever you want to call this? No, before this, I had just gotten up from a nap. I nap right here. On the. On the office floor, you know, you don't see the message right behind me because I'm clever. While you see the dog bed right there. But there's two dog beds. One one. This one big one is usually used by the cat. So the dog is, like, backing off there. So that's why we have this smaller dog bed for the bigger dog. Dog is bigger than the cat. But anyway, so I just got up from a nap, and then I'm like, all right, it's time. My schedule says that it's time to publish my blog post and make a Facebook Live video. This is done on Facebook Live. And so I just simply and humbly try. That's all. That's all I'm asking of you is to simply. If you wonder what that was, it's just a cloth that I put on. Cloth that I put over the table to absorb sound. Just some logistical stuff for making videos. Just try to have fewer flat services. Anyway, I just simply show up and try. That's it. This could be one of my mediocre videos. I'm not trying to make it mediocre. I'm trying to show up for you and to share some kind of energy and wisdom that could actually help you move forward. That's what I'm here to do. Now, what helps me is that at the beginning of each creation session, at the beginning of each work session, I do my energy reboot practice. If you have followed my content for a while. You know, I talk about the energy reboot a lot because I do it very often. I did it right before I made this video. And before I made this video, I was finishing some, you know, that blog post that. That's associated with this video. And I did my energy reboot before I started editing and completing the blog post. So I do the energy reboot practice as often as I can throughout the day. It's usually at least twice an hour. And if a task is difficult, I will do it, you know, every five to 10 minutes, I do the energy because it only takes 30 seconds, usually less than 30 seconds. If you don't know what the energy reboot is, just go to Google search energy reboot, and you'll find my article and video about it. All right? So I simply and humbly show up to what my schedule says to do. If the schedule says to write a blog post, I simply and humbly show up and I try. And like I already told you, it can take me five writing actually takes me quite a bit of time to get into feeling inspired. Feeling like I want to do it. Yeah. Usually when I look at my schedule and it says this afternoon I have to write, I feel some dread. I do. I. I kind of dread my schedule. My. Oh, I gotta write later. Because I don't think I'm a good writer. I don't. And you might say, george, that's a negative affirmation. Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, it could be. But here's the. Here's the weird thing about it. Sure, you might feel more inspired if you use positive affirmations and, you know, but I just am trying to be honest with myself. Yeah, I'm sure I'm a harsher critic of myself than anybody else. Maybe. Well, because I'm with myself all the time. Because I know my mistakes. Right. But I. I don't think I'm a good writer. I still don't to this day. Now, you might say, george, I beg to differ. Your posts are getting a lot of likes and you're only seeing my 10 to 20% good stuff. You don't see. I mean, most of the time, because I've written over a thousand social media. Well, over a thousand social media posts and blog posts. When I say social media posts, I mean, it could be like a short blog post. And a blog post is a bit of a longer one. Anyway. I've written over a thousand pieces of writing over the past, you know, seven years. Over a thousand. And so you don't see most of those thousand these days. Because I've written so often, I now post mostly the best of my past stuff. Did you think I was brilliant, like, all the time? No, you're only seeing my best 20%. You don't see my. The other 80% that went nowhere. I posted it and barely anybody liked it because barely anybody understood it. So this is what happens when you are uninspired but willing. You show up. You just try. And in that period of trying, that period of just trying to write something, oftentimes something. I mean, usually when you try writing something or when you try speaking something. This video, by the way, for some reason I'm still not feeling inspired by it, but whatever, I'm still here, right? But, you know, usually I feel inspired within five or ten minutes of a video. But let's continue on and see what happens. But like, with, with writing, you know, I had a hard time. And those of you who have read my blog post about writer's block, I have had a writer's block most of my life. So with writing, I show up not excited to write, not interested in writing, not inspired, but I just say, well, I'm going to pick a topic now. You might say, well, where do you get your topics? Okay, so this is the part where inspiration comes in. I'm inspired, like 1 to 5% of the day. So when, when is that usually, like, if I'm walking, when I'm walking the dog, when I'm taking a shower, when I'm working on some other project, I might feel inspired about something else. So it's 1 to 5% of my day. Suddenly there's a moment of, oh, there's an idea. Ah, there's something I could write or speak about. Oh, that's a business idea I could build into my business. Or what? Like, like, like a short, short percent. A small percentage of the day I'm feeling inspired. And when the ideas come, I quickly write them down on my phone. So that's what I do with inspiration. I try to capture inspiration as quickly as I can. If I'm in the shower, I will memorize the idea, and then when I get out of the shower, I will write it, write it down as quickly as I can. And then when it's time for me to work, I then go to my list of ideas that came in the 5% of my day that sometime in the past, I wrote it down. So when it's time to work. So, for example, when the schedule says write a blog post, I will go to my blog post ideas, and I will see which one seems most energizing to me at this point. Even though I'm still not excited to write because the writing process is hard, for some of you, the writing comes easy and you should feel very blessed. And I hope you write much more than most of us do. But for a lot of us, writing comes hard. Starting from an idea and finishing a piece is hard work. Now, hard work doesn't mean we have to suffer. Pain doesn't mean we have to suffer. Pain is required for growth, but suffering is optional. The pain I'm feeling right now, not being inspired by this video, I think I can tell you why I'm not inspired by this video, to be honest. I've already recorded this video two other times. Because the first time I recorded this idea of uninspired but willing was probably, I don't know. I made one in 2019, I know that, But I might have made another one in 2017. I've recorded this idea of uninspired but willing several times already. So at this point, I'm doing it because I'm about to republish my joyful productivity book. So I'm kind of updating the chapters and Uninspired but Willing was one of the chapters. So whenever I update a blog post, make a video to go along with it. It's just my rhythm, right? So this is like the third time I've said this same. And not just the third time. I've already. I've also said the same topic dozens of times in my client group over the years. And so I'm not feeling inspired about this topic anymore. It's. It's like an old, old hat for me. And I'm just saying it because it's part of my blog post to have a video. And so but I'm still here and some of you are hearing for hearing this for the first time, this uninspired but willing idea. And so I'm here for you who are hearing for the and some of you are hearing it for the second or third time. And hopefully it'll remind you and give you some energy and some reason to create more consistently. That's my hope. So like I said, the tiny percentage of the day when I'm inspired, I write down the idea as quickly as I can. And then at the end of each day, I categorize my ideas into the appropriate buckets. I have another blog post called Capture Categorize Calendar. Capture Categorize Calendar. That's how I work with ideas. So you can look that, you can google that and find it. So I capture ideas when they come to me as soon as I can, and then I categorize them at the end of the day, meaning, oh, this idea is a blog post idea. Okay, I'll categorize that in blog post ideas. Oh, this is a idea to improve my marketing. Okay, I'll categorize that in marketing improvement ideas. Oh, this is a blog. This is an idea for talking with this client when I see them next time. Okay, I'll categorize that idea in client notes for that client. So, like, I get inspired, I capture the ideas, I categorize them at the end of the day. And whenever my calendar says to do something, let's say it's to write, I look at, I go to that category, blog post ideas. I choose an idea and then I do the hard work of writing. Now, when I said we feel pain, those of us creators feel pain. Pain is normal. So this is what I hope you will normalize. You're supposed to feel pain when you create. I'm going to say it right now. And by pain, I don't mean physical pain. And like emotional agony doesn't have to go that far. That's when you have given too much energy to the pain and you're now in the land of suffering. Right? Pain. I could see I'm using the word pain. We can easily use the word discomfort or uncertainty or doubt. These are all pains, right? The feeling of doubt is painful, right? It's not fun to feel doubt. The feeling of uncertainty is painful. It's not great. I hope I feel uncertain about whether this thing is going to be successful or not. Nobody wants to feel uncertain. Everyone wants to know, oh, if I, I'm working on something that I know that's going to impact a lot of people. Everyone wants to feel that. Everyone wants to feel that way. But the reality of the creation process is painful. There's uncertainty, there's doubt, there's self, you know, judgment, there's frustration that the thing isn't quite coming together. Just like I said, this video isn't coming together the way I hoped it would. There's lots of, yeah, mental and emotional blocks. Those are all pains, right? I, you know, those are all feelings of discomfort. And if you thought that you're not supposed to feel those things when you create again, you probably, you know, were raised by Hollywood images of inspired, joyful creators and they're always joyful. And that's Hollywood. You know, in any movie there's that sequence, like I told you several times in this, you know, in a movie about a genius, oh, it's so great. But the reality is when I sit down to write, I don't know if I could even write a few sentences about that topic. I've got the topic. Okay. I've got the idea. I don't know if I'm going to write a few sentences and if I write more than a few sentences, I don't know if people are going to understand it. If it, if it's just all in my head, how do I structure this thing so that it makes more sense? Should I add more? Should I write, those are all doubts. And those doubts are painful. But what I've learned and practiced over time, and this is the practice, the practice is to go well, to do my energy reboot in the beginning. And if my uncertainty, doubt, self punishment or self judgment and frustrations start to reach a level of suffering, in other words, when I'm starting to give more energy to those negative emotions and thoughts than then needs to, then I catch myself and go, I'm starting to spiral. Right. I do manage your reboot. Again, and that resets me to at least. At least a little bit higher, higher up the spiral of creation rather than spiraling down into suffering and, like, quitting and things a little bit higher up where, like, there's a possibility here, I'm doubting, but there's still a possibility that this might work out. Okay. I still have some optimism and hope, some. A little bit. And that's when I continue to work. That's when I continue to write another sentence or try editing that previous sentence or try starting another, you know, paragraph with a different idea that's related, and maybe I'll be able to put this somewhere else. The writing process is like that, right? Same thing with any other process of. I know a lot of you, if you. If you're working on building your business, you have to work with technology. And a lot of you don't love working with tech because it didn't. You didn't grow up with it. You think doesn't come naturally for you, right? So when it comes to working through a technological problem, like trying to figure out how to run Facebook ads or trying to figure out how to automate a particular business process, again, it's the same pain, is there the pain of not knowing whether you're doing the right thing, Feeling like, oh, I don't. Maybe there's. Maybe I'm at a roadblock, right? So feeling a little bit. A little bit of despair, all those pains, what do you do with it? Do you let those pains. Do you focus on those pains and thereby go into the land of suffering and thereby quit? Right? Or do you catch yourself sliding down that spiral into. Into hell, essentially? Right. Hell on earth is your emotions when. When they are spiraling into. Into fierce negativity, right? Do you find yourself spiraling down and you catch yourself and go, oh, oh, I'm giving a lot of attention to this negative, These. These mental negativity. I'm giving a lot of attention to it. Catch yourself and then do whatever practice you need to get back and reset to that smidgen of optimism and hope and thereby positive action to keep looking for a solution, to keep trying to work with what you have. What do you do? I'm curious. When you are uninspired, what do you do to get back to the point of willingness? Right. Uninspired but willing is how I work through my whole day pretty much now. The exception is when I'm in a meeting, when I am talking with one person, when I'm helping one person, then it's so much easier, isn't it because the other person's requests and the other person's energy naturally inspires you to do things. What's usually uninspiring is working by ourselves. When we're not in a meeting, we're not helping somebody when we're not teaching a group of people or whatever. That is the superpower that I hope you will practice and develop. Because if you do your whole business and your whole work is just responding to other people, whether it's being in meetings and responding to other people, or responding to people's emails or social media posts, you're only responding to others. Sure, you might be a brilliant or helpful responder, but you are not practicing the area of value creation that is that all of us self employed people need to eventually practice, which is working by yourself when nobody is asking you for anything. Nobody asked me to post this, right? Nobody asked me to write about uninspired. Nobody did. I thought, you know what, one day I got this idea, uninspired but willing. I wrote it down. I didn't really know what more to say about. But then when I sat down to write, I started writing more and it's like, well, let me think about what I could say about this, right? And then this became like, like this blog post and this video. So the superpower to practice is to work by yourself when there's nobody asking you for anything or requesting anything to create value that you then deliver to others and whether or not they find valuable, you keep creating day after day. Now one thing that does help me to get into the process I mentioned, you know, my energy reboot. I said that. But also Focus Mate. I point Focus Mate because I have an old phone that I don't use anymore and I put on a tripod. This is, this was like $20 I bought years ago, this GorillaPod and this is my FocusMate station. So it's always next to me, my compute. Pretty much the only thing I open on this phone is the FocusMate website and I schedule a session and I, you know, I do focus mate as often as I can whenever I'm not in a meeting during the day, I'm usually on FocusMate and I recommend that you give it a try as well. So long story short, remember, the only doubt you should be doubting in your creative process, whether you are writing, making videos, building your business, inventing something, you know, or working with technology, or any process that helps move your goals forward, the only doubt you should have is the, the only doubt you should have is that discomfort is not right. That's what I hope you will doubt. No, no. You should say to yourself, no, no, no. Discomfort is evidence that I am stretching beyond my comfort zone. It's literally how you grow. If you never stretch beyond your comfort zone, you know, you would still be a, you know, baby or I guess an adult on the floor not knowing how to walk or talk, right? Thank goodness, as a baby, you didn't have these self doubts, right? Thank goodness we weren't born with all these doubts about, oh, I can't walk, I can't talk, right? Babies just, just try to talk and then eventually, mama or papa, right? Eventually the right words come out. We get praise, right? But all those other words, all this, you know, gobbledygook, the babies say, oh, that's cute, that's nice. All right, whatever. Oh, walking. How many times did you fall? I don't know. All of us babies, right? We had to. But thank goodness. So go back to the beginner's mind, the mind of a baby that. The part of the mind of a baby that doesn't have any doubt and just says, I'm going to try walking, I'm going to try talking, I'm going to try writing, I'm going to try making a video. I'm going to try working with this tech that's previously frustrating for me. I'm going to try improving my marketing, I'm going to try reaching out for clients or for collaborations. I'm going to try, even though I'm uninspired, because now I understand that discomfort is supposed to be normal in the creative process. No matter how many affirmations you do, no matter how spiritual and holistic and enlightened you are, discomfort is the definition of getting outside your comfort zone. Something you haven't done before. And so you might fail, you might make a mistake. Normalize that feeling of discomfort. When you normalize it, then you realize you don't have to slide into the hell of emotional frustration, confusion, doubt, self punishment, self judgment. You don't have to slide down there anymore because you're, oh, it's normal to feel this way. But I can go back. I can go back up with my energy, reboot, practice, whatever. Practice helps you to get back to a little bit of optimism and hope and possibility that, ah, I just need to work through this discomfort to the other side, which is value, which is having created something that may or may not help others. But at least you tried and thereby you grew. Because when you stretch beyond the comfort zone, it's not comfortable during the process, but afterwards you go, look at me. I did that. Don't know what the result's going to be. That's beside the point. That's a different topic. But I showed up, sat here, worked through it, did my energy reboot or whatever to reset myself, to not go into negativity. And I've created. This is what I hope for you. So go forth. Understand that you know we are all with you on this journey. When you feel uncomfortable next time because you don't know how. How something's going to turn out, keep creating, knowing that all of us are doing the same along with you. All of us creators. Yeah, we're here with you. So keep going. Start something today or keep creating. And I look forward to hearing how it goes. Be well, Take care.