How I am learning to recognize inspiration—and give it hands
For most of my life, I thought good ideas came from thinking harder.
When I had a problem, I attacked it with my mind.
Analyze it.
Research it.
Compare the possibilities.
Remember what happened last time.
Predict what might happen next.
Keep turning it over until an answer appears.
And to be fair, my mind is remarkably good at that.
What I call my ego carries decades of experience. It remembers successes and failures. It recognizes patterns and consequences. It can take a vague idea and turn it into a plan, a business, a website, a conversation or a decision.
I need that mind.
But lately I have noticed something interesting.
Some of my best ideas don’t seem to arrive when that mind is working hardest.
They arrive when I stop directing it.
The Ideas That Arrive
Sometimes it happens early in the morning.
Sometimes while driving.
Sometimes in the shower or sitting quietly at the cabin.
Sometimes during that peculiar transition between sleeping and waking, when the mind hasn’t completely assembled the day’s identity yet.
And sometimes an idea simply appears.
Not gradually.
Almost whole.
There is a quality to these moments that feels different from ordinary deliberate thinking. I don’t experience myself constructing the idea piece by piece.
I experience myself noticing it.
That distinction fascinates me.
One morning I stepped into the shower without attempting to meditate or discover anything profound. The warm water was running, the morning was quiet, and my usual internal narrator softened.
Then an entire metaphor appeared.
I imagined myself sitting in a theater watching the movie of my own life.
Scott was on the screen—working, worrying, building businesses, helping family, losing money, solving problems.
But suddenly I wasn’t only Scott.
I was also the awareness sitting in the audience watching Scott.
And then another possibility appeared.
Maybe I wasn’t merely the actor or the audience.
Perhaps I also had some participation in writing what happened next—not controlling the events, but choosing the spirit from which I responded to them.
I hadn’t gone into the shower trying to invent that metaphor.
It arrived after the noise became quieter.
That has happened enough times that I have started paying attention.
Maybe the Mind Never Stopped Thinking
Perhaps I have been making too simple a distinction between thinking and not thinking.
My mind may still be working when I become quiet. I am simply no longer telling it what to work on.
Deliberate thought gives way to something more receptive.
The brain certainly continues processing information outside conscious awareness. Memories associate. Problems incubate. Patterns combine. Dreams rearrange experience. An answer can emerge into consciousness without our having consciously assembled it.
I’ve experienced this in dreams as well. I’ve awakened with ideas or questions that seemed to have been developing somewhere outside my normal conscious attention.
Even the idea behind 10KGuarantee came to me through a dream.
So perhaps these moments are simply unconscious processing becoming conscious.
But I remain open to another possibility.
Perhaps consciousness has dimensions I don’t yet understand.
I don’t know.
And increasingly, I am comfortable saying those three words.
Whatever the source, though, an insight still has to earn my trust.
I don’t have to decide where inspiration ultimately comes from in order to learn how to recognize and use it.
What I Call the Soul
Throughout these writings, I have used the word soul for a quieter, wider mode of awareness I have increasingly learned to recognize.
I don’t hear a literal voice.
There isn’t a little spiritual Scott whispering instructions into my ear.
It feels more like the field of awareness widens.
My ego tends to ask:
What does everything I already know tell me this means?
What I call the soul seems more inclined to ask:
What else could this mean?
That’s an important difference.
The ego is extraordinarily good at prediction, but prediction is necessarily constructed from information already available to it.
It examines the dots.
The soul, as I use the word, steps backward far enough to notice the picture.
Sometimes that wider perspective arrives before I can logically explain where it came from.
We have many names for experiences like that.
Intuition.
Inspiration.
Insight.
Creativity.
Knowing.
Perhaps they are moments when unconscious processing delivers something useful to conscious awareness.
Perhaps sometimes they are something more.
Again, I don’t know.
But I am learning to recognize the experience.
The Muddy Pond
A metaphor that keeps returning throughout my writings is the muddy pond.
When water is constantly stirred, sediment fills it and visibility disappears.
Trying harder to see by stirring harder only makes the problem worse.
Stop stirring, and the mud begins to settle.
Nothing needs to be added.
Clarity returns on its own.
Perhaps inspiration sometimes works the same way.
I don’t necessarily have to create the insight.
Sometimes I need to stop disturbing the water long enough to notice what is becoming visible.
That changes my relationship with stillness.
Stillness isn’t necessarily doing nothing.
Sometimes stillness is listening.
But Inspiration Has a Problem
Listening, however, isn’t enough.
I could sit peacefully at the cabin receiving magnificent insights for the rest of my life.
If nothing happens afterward, they disappear with me.
This is where I once misunderstood the relationship between my soul and my ego.
I thought spiritual development might mean quieting or transcending the ego.
Increasingly, I think that is incomplete.
The soul needs the ego.
The insight may arrive whole, but somebody still has to type it.
The business idea needs a plan.
The relationship insight requires a conversation.
The inspiration needs implementation.
And that is precisely where the ego becomes magnificent.
Give the Whisper Hands
I am beginning to imagine the relationship this way:
The soul opens the window.
The ego builds the door.
The soul imagines.
The ego organizes.
The soul sees possibilities.
The ego evaluates them.
The soul inspires.
The ego constructs.
The soul asks, What wants to be expressed?
The ego answers, Okay. How are we going to do it?
This is very different from declaring one part of myself spiritual and the other inferior.
I need both.
Perhaps it is more accurate to say:
The soul offers possibilities.
The ego gives them form.
One notices what might be.
The other figures out what to do with it.
Learning to Catch It
I am also becoming more deliberate about capturing inspiration when it appears.
I don’t assume I’ll remember it later.
If I awaken with an idea, I write it down.
If something comes to me while walking or sitting outside, I dictate it into my phone.
If an unexpected connection appears between two ideas, I try to catch it before my practical mind dismisses it.
Then I bring the analytical mind back in.
Now examine it.
Challenge it.
Research it when necessary.
Ask whether it makes sense.
Separate metaphor from fact.
Find better language.
Turn the insight into something another human being can actually understand.
This is increasingly how these writings themselves are being created.
They often begin as flashes, questions, experiences, dreams and metaphors.
Then the machinery goes to work.
Inspiration provides the possibility.
Intelligence gives it structure.
Don’t Believe Every Whisper
There is an important caution in all of this.
An idea feeling inspired does not make it true.
Human beings are perfectly capable of having terrible ideas with enormous conviction.
A dream isn’t evidence.
Intuition isn’t proof.
A powerful feeling isn’t necessarily revelation.
So I don’t want my ego to surrender its critical faculties to everything that emerges from stillness.
Quite the opposite.
This may be another reason the partnership matters.
The soul can say:
Look at this.
The ego can respond:
Interesting. Let’s examine it.
Pure rationalism can reject possibilities before they are explored.
Pure intuition can mistake imagination for truth.
Together, perhaps they can do something better.
Receive openly.
Examine intelligently.
Act deliberately.
Inspiration May Be Everywhere
I used to think inspiration was something exceptional—an occasional lightning bolt available to artists, inventors, mystics or unusually creative people.
I’m beginning to wonder whether inspiration is actually quite ordinary.
Perhaps what is unusual is becoming quiet enough to notice it.
Maybe ideas are continually forming beneath conscious awareness.
Maybe consciousness itself is vastly more creative than the narrow narrator occupying the front of my mind.
Maybe something deeper is involved.
I don’t know.
But I know what I can do.
I can create space.
I can become curious.
I can notice.
I can capture what arrives without immediately believing or dismissing it.
Then I can invite my capable, experienced, practical ego back into the room and say:
Look what I found.
What can we make from this?
Perhaps that is the partnership I have been trying to understand all along.
The ego doesn’t have to manufacture every idea.
The soul doesn’t have to build anything.
One can listen.
The other can construct.
And somewhere between the whisper and the work, something that didn’t exist yesterday enters the world.
The soul inspires.
The ego gives inspiration hands.