13 tips to maintain & boost your creative inspiration

You may know that very frequently, I get compliments to the tune of, "Wow! How do you get so much done?" and "Torley, your stuff is amazing — and you make so much of it!" ("Stuff" referring to video tutorials, FREE textures, my music, Second Life photography, how-to guides, blog posts both in my personal & professional lives, etc.) I'm not ego-stroking here, just recounting personal experiences, and I'm going to share creativity-enhancing methods I've cultivated with you!

The following are straightforward and practical, and easily accomplished on a daily basis — which they should be. Good habits are a foundation of my forward momentum, and they certainly help my happiness. So you won't need any Nth-level übermonk training — what's important here is to regularly include these in your daily routine, and build on them as time goes on.
 

1. Write it down. This is such a basic truth. It's been repeated so many times on productivity-oriented sites. Jotting down what's in your head, be it ideas for what you want for dinner next week or a new hobby you'd like to try, will prevent the "passive loss" of forgetting to followup. It's funny how writing something down also tends to make it more vivid in your mind, so it's a double-win. Acclaimed film director David Lynch (who I'm fond of) often uses the analogy of fishing in relation to creativity:

Thus, noteworthy notions you don't write down might as well be "the nibbles on your hook that got away". You can have a recording device created from dead trees (AKA paper notepad), type it out on your computer, or even look forward to something like the Livescribe smartpen for a 21st-century approach. I use the first two and anticipate the third. Use tools that work for you, but above all…
 

2. Have a mini-reservoir of notes to fill the gaps in your day. Ever had 5, 10, 15 min. — even 1/2 hr. where you didn't know what to do? And you ended up burning the time doing nothing that advanced you towards life goals, or even smaller stuff like "something you wanted to get done today, but you forgot"? This the exact consequence of why "write it down" is so meaningful: at the very worst, it's a collection of "not yet" notions that you won't be afraid of forgetting, and at the very best, it provides a small "bucket" of tasks you can do in small-minute spans. For example, when I was out on the road, I remembered I wanted to edit some wiki pages for accuracy. Beneficial, small use of time. I noted that, and when I got home and was back near my computer while waiting for a supper cooked by my lovely wife, I checked my notes — and voila! I was reminded, and got it done. Other choice creative "slices" include "crop and edit photos", "browse jobs on Elance", "clean my desktop (whether it's physical or on your computer)", and "read a few pages of a book".
 

3. Read a book just about anywhere you are. Reading enriches your mind on-the-go, and gives you space to think. Find something on Amazon.com or a bargain bookstore that piques your intrigue, and get started. If you have a busy, hectic life, this is especially important. Since most people don't talk out loud on the toilet, reading and enjoying some calm while you answer the call of nature is a fine use of time. So's reading while waiting at the bus stop, and just about any other life situation where next actions aren't dependent on you, but you'd rather not be bored. You'll be learning in small increments which add up. As an example from my own life, I acquired these on Feb. 13, 2008:

• The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
• iWoz by Steve Wozniak with Gina Smith
• Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity by John Stossel
• You Can Negotiate Anything by Herb Cohen

I read them in the above order, have completed the first 3, and am 1/4 of the way through YCNA. All this while holding a fulltime job and doing many other things. I highly recommend these books because they have linked themes about overcoming adversity, shattering false assumptions, and being more aware of what you choose to believe in and act on. I'm not the fastest reader, but reading quality-in-quantity has helped me speed up, and I've grown to become consistent. What about that "Code of Humanity" you see? That's my preferred bookmark. Get a bookmark so you don't lose your place.
 

4. Take a shower. I shower 2, sometimes 3 times a day. When I wake up, after I'm done work, and sometimes in the middle of a workday if I've been bogged down by meetings and frustrating stumpers. I shower a lot not because I'm obsessive about cleanliness, but I find that showering regularly does make me feel fresh and ready to take on more of life's challenges or just relax! You may not have the luxury of doing this midday if you work at an office, but showering gives me both room to think (especially after I was reading a book while answering nature).

Sometimes, I have a snack in the shower too, like a Clif bar. Before you go "Ew!", I like how the humidity makes it more chewy. There's nothing wrong with my digestive system doing some work while I get clean, and at my fast-paced job (working @ Linden Lab), having energy-on-the-go is great for keeping myself in motion without "valleying out". If you're at home and wanting to create something but feel frazzled, a shower may be just the thing to reawaken and invigorate you with new perspectives.

I'm also fond of drinking Green Apple Jones Soda. It wakes up my brain and has a crisp, tarty taste. Find "anchors" that you can attach (more on that later!)
 

5. Don't waste time on meaningless social interactions. Ever found yourself in an awkward conversation that you wanted to escape from? Ask yourself, "What am I getting out of this?" and consider if the following are true:

• You're bored.
• You're not learning anything relevant.
• Your creative juices are being drained.
• You're certainly not turned on (e.g., flirting).
• It may've started out OK, but is now dragging on. (Business meetings!)
• Is the other party rambling on and on while your eyes zombie out?

Cut this crap out now! After all, as the saying goes,

"After all is said and done, usually more is said than done."

Well, you don't need to be rude, but you do need to respect yourself. Treat your time preciously and make sure others are aware and not impeding you: being weak about how valuable your time is will make you sad and regretful later. Spend your time on memorable convos that make a positive difference, like a deep discussion with an artist whose work you admire.

I understand some people are hard to cut off mid-conversation, so here's what I suggest: make a loud, punchy sound like a *CLEARING OF THROAT*, or if that doesn't work, hum quietly and gradually raise the volume of your voice. This allows you to transition it into a sentence when the other person realizes what you're doing and briefly pauses. Then say (remix this for your personal style),

"Pardon me, thanks for sharing, but I've got to go."

It's terse and effective, and void of lies (e.g., "I enjoyed our conversation" when you really didn't, don't do that — it's soul-sucking!). If the other person is particularly persistent and interrupts you again, state a reason, like this:

"I need to go now because I've got work that must be finished on time."

The word "because" is potent! Also, the emphasis on "time" communicates the urgency of your leave. Only an asinine boor would still keep you from leaving at this point, and if so, you have every reason to exit hastefully without guilt.

You can adapt this principle for instant messaging programs and online worlds too. I have. It may be hard at first, but don't think so much about "offending" the other person, and think more about all the things you could do in your life… if you just had the time! That'll frame it in-focus.
 

6. Memorability matters: if you don't remember it, it didn't happen. People talk so much about what their memories mean to them: photographs on the wall trigger stories of travels together, awards won, when a baby was born, and more. (Incidentally, writing down notes also triggers memories — this is all connected!) Critics often use words like "forgettable" and "unmemorable" to slight and slam movies they don't appreciate. Ancient warlords sometimes made threats of erasing a civilization by not just razing their villages, but destroying their written history so future generations couldn't recognize their heritage. People don't want to be forgotten when they grow old (e.g., neglected in a nursing home), then die (e.g., inscription on tombstone). All this means that experiences you have, especially the positive ones but also learning experiences where you made mistakes, should be remembered.

This is also true when you create art: it's a good exercise to think,

"What would someone who never experienced this before remember most…"

and then add,

"if they were exposed to 30 seconds of it?"

Setting time constraints is important in what is all-too-often a fast-paced world, and it's a decent acid test for "catchiness": whether a song, Flash animation, or "viral" video will be remembered later to be shared with friends.

Another personal example: it's nearly impossible to forget my watermelon colors — even those who don't care for them instantly must associate pink + green with Torley! (How's that for branding?)

Memorability helps you with both input and output, and a specific way I apply this to my creative inspiration is going to popurls, browsing through much of the many already handpicked media there, enjoying it, then letting it gel. I bookmark the standouts and learn more about them in the next few days (and this relates to the next tip, as we'll see).

Marketing companies invest millions upon millions of dollars on "mindshare" and forming an attentive awareness in viewers' minds. Different companies' styles and approaches will clash and there's no single right way to "make an impression", but memorability always matters.
 
7. Go on a tools binge, then purge what you don't use. There's no shortage of computer programs to assist you with your flow. It can be overwhelming, but I browse sites like popurls, Lifehacker, Mashable, and OnSoftware. For visual resources, BittBox rox. The key thing is to write (there's that word again!) a list of your needs, and be very conscious of these when looking for tools: you want to find apps that can fold many steps into one or a few (macros, automation), saving your time and smoothing your pathways.

For instance, I often need to rename files sequentially. It was taking me too long to edit each one, and I thought to myself,

"There's gotta be a better way to do this!"

Indeed, there was, and after searching, I found out about ReNamer. The other day, I wanted to find a way to share my preferred watermelon color palette, and Adobe's Kuler and COLOURlovers got that done, too. Previously, I've blogged about "Ten Terrific Utilities I use… a lot!", which you'll want to see for more actual examples.

Research judiciously but not too strenuously (keep your options open but trust your gut), then download a lot of tools. Some of them are bound to be web applications — even better! Webapps can be the "cheapest" to experiment with, often only requiring a simple signup process and nonintrusive install. And with full software suites like a.viary cresting towards the public, there's a lot to like.

By "tools", I also refer to social networking and online communities which help you have more fun, get more done. I like Flickr, YouTube, Clipmarks, and Twitter a lot, and I've also been sprucing up my MySpace and Facebook pages!

It's a rewarding exercise to set aside 1-2 hrs., then signup on one tool after another and try each briefly. Don't invest too much just yet; the most useful tools become self-evident in retrospect, and the others fall away naturally — this is part of the "purge" I'm referring to. Don't feel pressure to gravitate towards tools you don't find useful, even if your friends use them — this has to come from you. But do experiment, and since most tools have free accounts or a free trial, it's low-risk, with high potential for rewards. Wikipedia's a big help: look at articles like "Comparison of raster graphics editors".

The other part of the "purge" is uninstalling programs from your computer that you haven't used in a long time, and likely never will again. Free up those resources and clear some clutter. Being organized also helps remove distractions so you can be more creative.
 

8. Enjoy an immersion onslaught. One of my favorite things to do is to open up my web browser with many tabs — a different site in each one — and travel from one to another, absorbing the incoming knowledge. They may be thematically linked, they may not, but they need to be worth my time and tell me more about something I want to know. I can usually make that decision in the first 5 seconds of scanning a page, and if it's not what I'm looking for, I close it and move to the next.

I love to overwhelm myself with multimedia, and going from link to link on wikis, video-sharing sites, and photo-browsing sites are all solid ways to do this. I love to saturate myself intensely, then give myself a break, and let things gel out later — as I alluded to before, it's the most memorable goods that survive, a process of natural selection.

I also find this is effective because while it's not the most prolonged concentration, having a rich diversity of awesomeness expands my mind, has me thinking about how all these little pieces are connected (even if they weren't meant to be), and leads to synthesizing ideas borne out of all this inspiration.

Even if you're in a funk, there's low-effort utilities like the Flickr Related Tag Browser which can help you both unwind and stimulate your consciousness for when you're in a more energetic mood.
 

9. Be brave about exploring possibilities. Don't be afraid to get something right on the first try. You either will or won't, but that ultimately doesn't matter because you'll look at it differently in the future: months from now, you'll hopefully have evolved to a level where it makes your old art look like crap. And that's good! As I'm fond of saying, we (meaning "healthy humans") don't beat up babies for not being able to walk out of their mothers' wombs. We give love, patience, and nurturing, and are optimistic about what a child will become.

So it is with art and accomplishments in general: the steps you make/take today, as mild as they may seem, are the first measurable progress towards bigger goals to come. And you'll never get there if you don't begin. If these "first steps" still seem too intimidating, you can "trick" your mind by thinking of this as:

"A journey to multiple places instead of a single, definite destination, and that wherever you go, it's good, but you need to travel."

This'll put less psychological pressure on you, and more importantly, encourages freeform, "sandbox"-style exploration with few or no constraints.

Afterwards, you can decide what you like best. And by then, you will have already created something.

When I made the first batch of my Torley Textures, I was inspired to do them because I didn't see anything else like it in Second Life, or even trawling 'round the web. I like painterly, sketchy, surreal stuff and wanted to cook up some swatches I could share with others for their pleasure. I didn't think to myself,

"OMG I HAVE TO BE THE GREATEST TEXTURE DESIGNER IN THE WORLD IN 1 MONTH OR IT'S ALL OVER!"

No! That'd be too much pressure.

I started simply, and wrote down themes:

• What if a zebra was crossbred with a watermelon?
• What if Charlie Brown was crossbred with a watermelon?
• What if a kilt was crossbred with a watermelon?
   
  Ookay… too many 'melons? How about…
   
• What kind of flooring would I expect to see in an alien starship derived from the samurai of feudal Japan?

Really wild, crazy stuff you see. Some call it brainstorming, others call that non-PC, and I call it "seeing the forest and the trees". Textures are great this way, because each is like a mini-painting. And some didn't turn out how I expected, but some were even better than I thought they could be. I didn't lose anything, and certainly gained a lot of experience through subsequent texture packs:

Notice how they've matured and look a lot more aesthetically impressive than my earlier efforts, yet don't negate the fact that without my first volume, I wouldn't have been enroute to later endeavors.

Things don't have to turn out exactly the way you envisioned. Leave some room to be flexible. But, they do have to turn out, exit the confines of your head & heart, and be birthed into the world.

And just like real babies, you won't beat 'em up. These are your idea-children.
 

10. Go forth and multiply — be prolific! Not all lasting artists have a copious output, but notice how many of them are? From Mozart (600+ compositions) to Isaac Asimov (500+ books), there's something to be celebrated about abundance. Not all of it will be "your best" (how can it be?), but you always have the luxury of picking-and-choosing from a larger selection.

My mindspace often works best when I need to create a "batch" of something. Not just one, but not one million either — I feel compelled to create a series, move onto something else, then come back and revisit an earlier "thoughtline", as I like to call them. Yesterday, I posted 7 "new" solo piano performances, building on a host of previous output. Here's one:

Notice I've gone through phases:

• "Torley on Piano" - Unedited video where I was very talky and explanatory. Like a warmup session.
• Several works where I post-processed the video to appear more glowy/fancy.
• The infamous "MELON SNOW" parody -Riffing on popular culture can be a convenient "bridge" to experimenting with ideas you might normally not consider.
• "Such Great Sadness" - Noir-tinted, horribly depressing at parts! (You can share the hard times in your life too, it'll empower you to be more vocal and open about your expressions.)
• And those 7 I mentioned earlier - Improvisations with no talking, but lots of visual effecting.

Also linked to my empirical experiences, the story of how my video tutorials came to be.

Over time, all that adds up, and you don't need to do it all in one day. Set aside some time, and get started.
 

11. Small chunks are easier to get into. Intimidated by thoughts of "creating a great masterpiece?" Well, the good news is you don't have to be concerned. If you're a budding author, opt for scribing short stories if you think your attention span might not hold for a novel (or even a novelette). If you're a musician, riff some brief (2-3 min.) tunes. And doing visual art? Think of my textures above!

Similar to why makeup spot-testing is a smart move to check for allergic reactions and how it might look without risking your whole face, working with tiny pieces and assembling them later is savvy.

This low-commitment, high-yield (LCHY) approach makes taking those first "baby steps" simple, so you can build confidence and then move onto bigger things gradually. And by then, you'll likely have built up confidence and experience, so "bigger things" won't actually seem all that grand to you.
 

12. Combine the best of what you love. The wheel doesn't need reinventing. But observe where you see wheels: they're hardly alone (save for broken ol' wagon wheels), and a part of something bigger.

A lot of brilliant inventions have come from the simple question,

"What if… ?"

including,

"What if I put X and Y together?"

and

"What if I actually did something about this?"

Idea synthesis can lead to a remarkable taste sensation in the culinary arts, a scientific breakthrough, or even a work process that'll shave some minutes off of your daily goabouts.

Here's a worthwhile exercise:

• Make a list of your heroes, influences, and inspirations, and write what you specifically admire about each one of them, and what they might all have in common.
• Then, take a moment to imagine what it would be like if two or more of your "idols" collaborated on something which actually isn't real, but could be. For example, a neo-graffiti extravaganza combining the talents of Banksy, Keep Adding, and featuring a soundtrack by The Flashbulb.
• Next, think to yourself: "What can I do to make this real?" You may not possess all the skills of your heroes, yet are almost certain to wander into strange, new territory they haven't traveled. This is a good thing.
• Do your best to make that "imaginary collaboration" happen (in small chunks as necessary), and you may pleasantly surprise yourself.

I have, many times.
 

13. Even when you don't feel like it, make something. Our moods can be such a tyrant, such a frustrating blocker to achievement. I've often heard people say

"I don't feel like doing something,"

as if it's this impenetrable wall that depends on someone's emotional state and can't be surpassed otherwise.

It's so crazy, because when you look back, you may think,

"I can't believe I was feeling that way!"

Back at the turn of the century, I went through not just one, but two phases of deep depression. You wouldn't guess it now unless I told you, but I kept telling myself I'd look back and think of this time as not a waste because I had my music, I was reading (transhumanist and cyberpunk literature), and I was keeping myself busy. Boredom permits the mind to be its own worst enemy, as solitary confinement cells have shown, so keeping yourself active — physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually (if you're into that), etc. — it's really all tied together as affecting your overall outlook!

Let's look at this sensibly: is there something that'd make you happier, that would shift your feelings towards creative? My wife likes her morning coffee and to look at the plants growing around her desk. She's come to associate these simple pleasures with being at her computer and doing her art. Designating "anchors" such as these ("go to your happy place!"; it's not lame, it's true) are a realistic way to remind you why you're here, and what you must do. You're an artist, you create!

Donald Trump views real estate as an art, and altho I think that's unorthodox, I certainly agree with his approach of keeping a box with favorable news clippings, photos, and other reminders of what he's done. (See How to Get Rich for the full anecdote.) Keep those "anchors" close at hand, and you won't stray into the depths of discouragement. But you need something to put in your box first, so even if it's a few doodles, or a note from a friend thanking you for a handmade gift, you're on the right track.

 

I know this was a long read and thank you graciously for your time — if you got goodness out of it, it's more than worth it. I use all of the above principles regularly in my life, and if you have any questions or tips for how you maintain & boost creative inspiration, please let me know in the comments!

Tagged as: Better Lives, General, The Web