This is why you don’t feel inspired.

This video is sponsored by skillshare where I just launched a brand new class more on that at the end of the video.

The single greatest opening line ever written a novel can be found on page 1 of William Gibson's Neuromancer the sky above the port was the color of Television tuned to a dead Channel. There are certainly novels that I've enjoyed reading more than Neuromancer but no opening line has stuck with me like that one in a single sentence Gibson conjures this lonely Melancholy feeling it's familiar, but it's also strange and it has stuck with me ever since I read it when I was 15 years old..

From a cultural standpoint. The rest of this book is no less impressive. This was published back in 1984 back when the internet was barely a thing back when almost nobody had a computer and it is the book that put the cyberpunk genre on the map. If you've watched The Matrix if you've watched Ghost in the Shell, if you've played games like Deus Ex or cyberpunk 2077, you have seen and experienced the impact that this book has had and countless other movies TV shows books fashion trends they all Trace their Roots back to Neuromancer..

Sir, and reading through this book there is obviously a ton of Raw Talent on display. But beyond that there is a practice that allowed Gibson to create the imaginative World in this book to create the memorable turns of phrase that are on almost every page and it's the same practice that helps people like you and people like me when were feeling creatively uninspired and we're feeling drained. It's a simple habit, but it may be the single biggest differentiator between people who make Innovative memorable work and those who don't Gibson himself described it as creating a.

Personal microculture, but personally, I like to use just one word..

Steve Jobs once said that creativity is just connecting things when you ask creative people how they did something they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it. They just saw something it seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they're able to connect experiences. They've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences whether they thought more about their experiences than other people. I pulled this quote from interview the job stay with Wired Magazine back in 1996 and in the interview, he also expressed this frustration..

That most people in Tech don't have diverse experiences. And hence. They don't have enough dots to connect to create things that are better than average and as creative people if we want to make things that are better than average and if we want to be inspired with our work, we have to be collecting dots I've gone through enough periods of my life now feeling listless feeling uninspired with my work to know that one of the main reasons for that feeling is that I haven't been doing enough doc collecting. I haven't been reading widely enough. I haven't been trying new things..

Short I haven't been exploring and if you're in a period right now where you're feeling uninspired a lack of exploration is probably one of the main culprits for you as well. So today we're going to discuss three ways. You can make exploration a more consistent part of your life..

First one is to broaden the scope of what you in take the books. You read the movies you watch the people you talk to all of it, like job said creativity is just combining things and when you're learning from a wide variety of sources, you're building this vast Treasure Trove of pieces in your head with which to combine consider for a second the term cyberspace which was essentially coined in Neuromancer. If you want to get technical about it Gibson actually coined the term and a short story called burning Chrome from a couple of years earlier, but either way what fascinates me about this is that.

that Gibson coined this term and all the conversations we have around it and he didn't have access to the internet. In fact, he wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter because he didn't own a computer and the first web browser wouldn't even come until 1990. So Gibson's conception of cyberspace as this near ubiquitous daily destination for billions of people while it seems like an obvious thing today back then was a complete invention of fiction. It was something that he completely made up or rather cobbled together from many different sources..

Main one being as he says seeing kids in an arcade playing video games, especially the way they were transfixed on the screen the sort of trance and that mental image was combined with other mental images other experiences including a flyer for an apple to computer that he saw at a bus stop and this is how all creative people work. We bring new things into existence not by Conjuring from some void like the one behind me, but by combining the things that we learn and experience and the more you get out and learn the more you experience..

Hence, the wider that variety of things the better your creative output is going to be but you might ask. How do I know where to start? How do I know the things I'm in taking or actually worthwhile and are actually going to lead to better creative output. Well the main thing I'll say about this is don't think too hard about it. Don't try to force exploration because you never know what is going to contribute to your next piece of creative work. So follow your interests, we could talk a little bit about the whole garbage in garbage out principle. It's probably a good idea to be, you know, at least.

Spending some of your time in taking things that are challenging things that make you sort of work not just like, you know glossy popcorn stuff, but I will provide you with this one concrete suggestion study the people you admire in doing the research for this video. I went through all these magazine interviews some really really lengthy magazine interviews with Gibson with Steve Jobs with the design Legend George Louis and in addition pulling lots of quotes and insights that contributed to the script for this video. I also now have a list of a ton of stuff that I want to check out..

And it makes sense. If you like something then there's a good chance that you're going to be interested in the things that influence that things Creator. So whatever you like seek out the creators of it and look for either recommendations or maybe even just off the cuff mentions of the stuff that influence them you're likely to like it as well. But don't just stop at media consumption your ability to put out creative work to combine things isn't solely influenced by the media. You consume the conversations you have.

It's also maybe even more influenced by the experiences. You have diverse experiences. And I think one of the main reasons that so many people feel so listless. So uninspired is that they are in sore need of some new experiences a lot of us get set on a path by our parents or by a teacher or we stumble across something that works and then we just keep exploiting that thing again and again and again partly because there are material rewards for doing so but partly because we're afraid to try something new. This is often called the.

the exploration exploitation dilemma. Do we continue exploiting the thing that we know is working or do we divert some resources towards trying to seek out something that might pay out even greater rewards in the future. Well as creatives we need to be constantly exploring even if something is currently paying out right now if we keep sticking to just that one thing eventually the well is going to run dry and far before it does it's going to become uninspiring if that's all we're doing as creative people. We need to be constantly taking on new opportunities..

Seeking out new experiences and I realize that it's this mindset that actually led me to doing the work that I do today to being fortunate enough to make videos for a living a few years ago. The folks at Luther College asked me to write a talk for they're sophomores about my career path and in preparation for that talk I sat down and I tried to draw this map of my career path and what I ended up with was this critical path with my college major and the internship I did but also all these little branching off shoots experiments different things that I had tried and the most interesting offshoot from.

entire exercise was a small summer gig that I took during the summer after my junior year the aerospace engineering department on campus needed somebody to shoot a bunch of videos for a project and then edit them together and I really didn't have a whole lot of experience with doing that but they said they would teach me if I was willing to learn so I took on the job and in doing that I learned how to do complex editing. I learned how to set up lighting for interviews. I learned how to shoot b roll and my original motivation for taking on that gig was because I wanted to make some extra money during the summer and it seemed like an interesting enough gig.

But now I realized that experience among all others is the number one thing that the basically enabled me to become a YouTuber. So the next time you're presented with an opportunity and you're tempted to say no at least pause and ask yourself, what are my reasons for passing up this opportunity? Because while it's true that you can't take on every opportunity that comes your way without stretching yourself too thin most interesting opportunities have something to teach you something that you're going to be able to combine with other things you learn later on something that can help. You become a more creative..

Person and you don't want to let fear or this feeling that you need to stay in one place and exploit what you have now be the only thing that causes you to pass that opportunity up. Finally. We need to talk about labels. I feel like there's this metaphorical Burmese tiger pit that I'm always tiptoeing around as I've built my personal brand online as I've grown my audience for the past 10 years. I have acquired a label of sorts. I am the productivity guy or at least one of them and with that label comes a certain pressure I feel this..

Fresher to act in alignment with that label in my personal life. I feel like I need to have read all the latest productivity books. I feel like I need to have experience with all latest productivity apps and because time is limited that creates pressure for me to reject certain experiences certain learning opportunities that come my way. Even if there are things that interest me and you might feel this kind of pressure as well maybe from several labels your profession your gender your age in one way or another each one of these labels Whispers stay..

In your lane. Well, we might feel safe. We stay in our lane. We sure as heck. You're not going to feel inspired. So as you explore and as you pursue things that interest you don't allow labels to give you tunnel vision. Don't let a label push you away from something that interests you a label can be useful as a communication device. It can help guide your audience potential clients potential employers to you that can help you to find your Niche, but it can also put your mind in a box if you let it so if you can avoid doing that if you can keep pursuing the things that interest you if you can keep broadening..

Array of experiences and learning sources, you're going to find the quality of your creative output going up. But moreover you're going to find yourself more inspired and more often getting lost in the work that you do before you go. I've got a brand new class on skillshare called productivity for creatives. And if you enjoyed this video and you're looking for additional ways to boost your creative output to boost your inspiration. I think you're gonna get a lot out of this class exploration is a huge topic and creativity which is why I put so much time into the script for this video, but there's a lot more that we can do to boost our abilities as.

Natives especially pulling from the realm of productivity and that is what this class is all about. So if you want to learn how to build your inspiration muscle if you want to learn how to more consistently do creative work on a daily basis and get inspired by the creative work. We talked about that in the class. If you want to learn how to reduce the friction your work how to automate certain things how to build templates that help you speed up your process we talked about that as well. And because it's on skillshare at the cost for the class is very low just an hour of your time and your attention because if you're one of the first 1,000 people to sign up with the link in description,.

Down below you're going to get a free trial which means that monetarily speaking you get to take my class for free and you also have unlimited access to every other class on the platform, which there are thousands during that trial and afterwards skillshare a still a very affordable platform with their plans and less than 10 bucks a month on the annual basis. So it is a hugely valuable service to have access to they've got classes on graphic design the classes on video editing even got more classes on productivity. In fact my good friend to finial Drew just launched a new class of his own. So definitely check.

that one out after you watch my class. Once again use that link in description down below and if you're one of the first 1000 people you're going to get that free trial and as always big thanks to skillshare for sponsoring this video and supporting my channel. If you like this video, I put a ton of time of the writing in a wood. Hugely appreciate hitting that like button to show the YouTube algorithm. What's up, if you didn't like it. Well obviously don't hit it. That's totally cool. Maybe telling me that I have a weird face in the comments. I'll also have a subscribe button right here. So you can click that. If you want to get notifications of new videos when they come out and a couple of additional videos that have already.

Ready come out. We're going to be floating around the screen here and here. Well, they're probably not going to flow but they might look like they're floating. If I do this with my hands anyways, smash your face into your phone screen and watch from those four extra style points, and I will see you in the next one..