The Inspiration Factory, part I

I'm writing this for a friend who asked, "How do you transform inspiration into action in regards to both beginning your projects, but also finding like-minded people to collaborate with?" 

I'll treat that question as two separate ones and focus my answer in this post on the first part.  I'll write about team building later, since it really comes from the foundation of the first one.

In one of the classes I took on poetry, my professor said, "Don't worry about dissecting a poem -- it's not a bird, you aren't going to hurt it by picking it apart."  However, in breaking down a system, it's easy to focus on the parts and miss the whole.  Sure, the wing is how the bird flies, but if you just have two wings and nothing else, you won't be traveling anywhere...

With that in mind, here's a breakdown of how I turn inspiration into action.

Don't Get Attached to Ideas
  

Ideas are not your children.  You have to be ready to orphan them if they don't work out.  I've experienced major creative block from holding on to an idea that needed to be left out in the cold.  If I grow attached to an idea and am afraid to show it to the world, I'll procrastinate or become defensive to protect it.  "It just needs more time; it needs to develop further; I'm not ready to show it just yet."  This is a dangerous line of thought, because if I'm afraid to show it to world, I am recognizing on some level that there is something askew with the idea.  Either it is too personal or it is flawed in some way.  Either way, I'm probably not being honest with myself.

Similarly, do not judge your personal worth by your ideas.  Everyone I've met has bad ideas, even the most brilliant of my friends.  If you cannot dissociate your ideas, every stupid idea you have will be one more hammer blow of self doubt.  The best thing you can do with one of your bad ideas is to identify why it's bad.  In doing so, you'll be defining what is required for a good idea.

 Branch Off As Needed
 

Time spent on an idea does not mean it's more valuable.  If I spend a hundred hours on an idea that's not working, does that merit a hundred more?  If there is no solution in sight, I usually try another idea.  More important: I don't call it "cutting my losses" because that implies that the hundred hours of working was lost. That work is still there, I can draw from that experience one way or another.  Really, this involves a reconceptualization of failure.  The worst mistake would be calling the time spent "wasted."

This came into clear focus for me the last two weeks.  I was working on Yore and trying to balance the different sets of abilities.  After a solid dozen hours of developing the new system and cards, I realized I had gone entirely in a wrong direction. I had created a balanced system that even I didn't want to play.  So last night I scrapped it, picked the best part, and started fresh.  It's intimidating to leave behind of huge amount of work and start anew, but you can always go back to it to salvage value, the ideas, and (sometimes) the content itself.  The result was great.  Had I not gone through the process the first time, the revision would not have been so robust.

Test First, Analyze After
 

Except for those with superb precognition, planning only accounts for the situations you can think of in advance.  Testing reveals what planning misses.  Testing also prevents attachment to ideas, since the process externalizes the ideas and keeps them from fermenting.  That's why testing early is so crucial.  The more feedback and data you get through testing, faster you can improve your ideas.  This is true of every design profession I've worked in.

Everything is an Iteration

From my years running track and cross country: if I focused on the finish line, the end was far away and every step insignificant.  Instead, when I focused on each step, the race ended quickly.  Of course, if I looked just at my feet, I'd run off the trail into a tree.

In design, setting milestones are key for accomplishing small parts of the whole.  They give the feeling of accomplishment needed to push through a project. At the same time, they set up structure so that you don't always need to constantly watch the larger plan.

The Big Picture
 

What does turning inspiration into action look like as a complete system?*  It's easy to say, "I'll give up on ideas sooner!" or "I'll test my ideas as soon as possible!", but those are merely the routines behind turning inspiration into action.  The system outlined above would give me nothing if I didn't already have a fundamental belief that my creations have potential.  That's the soul that moves the machine.  Someday, and it may take all my life, I will have created something of lasting value.  Without faith that I'll accomplish something from all my work, I would not even be able to start the creative process. 

*Some creative workflow disclosure: Originally, this section was a continuation of the opening parts of the bird metaphor, but in the process of writing it, I meandered off into indecipherable symbolism about flying over obstacles.  What you read is a complete revision.