The Tipping Point: How to Stay Inspired in the Face of Uncertainty

Imagine this, you are close to completing a project you have worked on for years, but you become stuck with no direction on how to move forward. Your team morale is low, the inspiration stopped flowing and throwing in the towel sounds like a good idea at this point. You have reached a tipping point: either you are going to scrap or finish the project. How do you stay inspired? We will answer this by examining three foundational pillars that are critical to the sustainability of any project and see how to draw inspiration from them. These three pillars are vision, creativity, and support. 

Vision 

Your vision is the cornerstone of any project you create. It is what keeps your project focused and centered on the goal you want to achieve. Simply put, this is a reminder of your project’s “why.” It reminds us why we have put all this time, energy, and resources into it. Picture this, you plan on creating a gratitude jar with notes of encouragement inside for a dear loved one.  The understanding from the beginning is that this will help them through difficult times in their lives. But about halfway through writing your notes, the words stop flowing. This persists for weeks. The jar starts to collect dust in the corner, and you wonder if this is even worth creating. Before you throw the jar in the trash, an image of your loved one comes to mind. In this image, they are saying thank you and that they needed this. After imagining this image, inspiration hits and the words start flowing out again. This example shows us that we never know when we will need to rely on our vision for inspiration. But what we always know is that it's vital to the life of our project.  

Creativity 

From a young age, we are invited to explore our creativity, yet we are not exposed to the power of it until we start our own creative projects. Creativity is not just words colorfully arranged on a kindergarten class wall. It is a gateway that allows us to cross the different domains of knowledge and combine ideas to form inspiring thoughts that propel our projects forward. For instance, let’s assume you have a young nephew who loves racecars, their birthday is coming up and you do not know what to give them. By utilizing your creativity, you can come up with ideas that have a similar theme but utilize different domains of knowledge. Some ideas could include giving them a racecar toy, taking them to a racecar event, drawing them a picture of a racecar, and the list goes on. Each of these ideas requires you to think outside of the box, allow inspiration to flow, and allow yourself to explore the different possibilities out there in the world.  You should be inspired by this because there is an abundance of inspiration flowing through the world. It just takes a little creativity to see it. 

Support 

Most of us underestimate the idea that another person may have the piece that we need to finish our masterpiece. We are so hardwired as a society to “figure it out” on our own, but most of the time that is not the case. For example, let’s say you have this story you have been working on for years and for some reason it seems flat. You allow your friend to read it over, and they point out that your main character does not have a flaw to learn from. After taking in their suggestion, you rewrite the story giving the main character a deep and complex flaw and finish your story. I know we are not all authors here, but the core of the example still applies to any project we work on. We need others to give us different lenses to see the inspiration that is staring us in the face. This only comes from talking to another human being about the problems we are facing. The inspiration we may need to finish our projects may be just a chat away.  

Conclusion 

Vision, creativity, and support are readily available for us to use. These tools not only allow us to complete our yearlong work projects, but smaller daily home projects as well. As you feel yourself approaching the next tipping point in a project, ask yourself the following questions. Why am I doing this? Where can I find inspiration? Who can I go to for advice?  How do I stay inspired?