Here’s an except from a recent interview with the artist and producer Mark Ronson & how me made himself ill trying for 6 months to get the international hit ‘Uptown Funk’ with Bruno Mars right:
‘We did 45 takes of it and I just couldn’t get it, it sounded like horrible bullshit, so we went to lunch, walked down to a restaurant. Everyone was saying: ‘Dude, what’s wrong with you? You’ve gone totally white.’ Because I was going on pretending everything was just fine; you don’t want to admit that you’re just not there, you’re not where you want to be. And I went to the toilet and just … fainted. I threw up, and fainted. They had to come and carry me out of the toilet.”
Reminds me of this famous quote from the American painter Chuck Close:
“Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work… All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.”
What have these two comments got in common? There’s this idea that for a ‘creative endeavour’ you have to wait for inspiration to burst forth lighting up your neural pathways. What these quotes are saying is that being creative isn’t really any different from doing a ‘regular job’. You get stuck in, and you keep getting stuck in until it comes right.
Can you imagine if you said to your boss, yeah, still haven’t started that spreadsheet you wanted last week because I haven’t been inspired? Good luck with that come pay review time…
No matter how we earn a living, the same basic rules apply.
THERE ARE NO SHORT CUTS OR UNDISCOVERED SECRETS TO SUCCESS.
Success is incremental, achieved through the consistent and persistent application of time, resources and trial and error. So if you are struggling with a project, don’t wait for inspiration to strike, just start, start anywhere. Even start with the end if that’s the only bit you know and work backwards.
Because somewhere within the the process itself lies the inspiration you are seeking.
Ian, the London Life Coach