Inspired! How to Be More Original, Insightful and Productive in Your Work

By Marcia Yudkin

What’s wrong with you is what’s right with you.

To get more done, slow down and sleep more.

When you don’t know something, believe what feels like a guess.

These are just a few of the eye-opening, empowering concepts in Inspired! How to Be More Original, Insightful and Productive in Your Work.

Grounded in psychological studies, historical examples and testing with frustrated writers and artists, Inspired! offers paradoxes that turn your creative blocks upside down and your hidden strengths right side up.

Whether you’re a struggling entrepreneur, a seasoned craftsperson whose productivity has lagged or someone who wishes you were more inventive in the kitchen, discover how to charge up your ingenuity and enjoy a bounty of results.

The book includes tips, anecdotes, research and advice on topics like these:

* Inspiration: Enjoy the help of the Muses whenever you need them.

* Talent: Claim your idiosyncratic strengths and sensory smarts.

* Intuition: Zig or zag? Confidently rely on your inner signals.

* Time: You have enough time! Trust your unique way of getting more done.

* Solutions: Profit from boundless ideas and beginner’s luck.

* Failure: Learn why mistakes are the portals of originality.

"In Inspired! Marcia Yudkin provides a myriad of user-friendly creativity catalysts, excellent tips and action steps, practical ways to access your inner knowing, and paradigms that get you on the road to mastery. The book also has marvelous vignettes of well-known creators who offer fascinating lessons for the reader. I had a hard time putting it down. Enjoy!" —Gail McMeekin, author, The 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women and other books

Author Marcia Yudkin’s 16 other books on business and communication include a Book-of-the-Month Club Selection and two featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show. She led creativity workshops for many years in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Wall St. Journal, Business 2.0, Entrepreneur and on National Public Radio.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marcia Yudkin
• Release date: Nov 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301737222

Marcia Yudkin

Creative marketing expert Marcia Yudkin has an unparalleled ability to find the right words for a message, an unusual angle to get folks to pay attention, and the promotional strategy that pays off handsomely for her clients.Her 16 books include 6 Steps to Free Publicity, Persuading on Paper, Web Site Marketing Makeover, Meatier Marketing Copy and Freelance Writing for Magazines & Newspapers, a Book of the Month Club selection.Marcia’s articles have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, TWA Ambassador, USAir Magazine and Business 2.0. For eight years running, she served as an official site reviewer for the Webby Awards and has helped judge the Inc. Magazine Small Business Web Awards.She has been featured in Success Magazine, Entrepreneur, Home Office Computing, Working Woman, Women in Business, dozens of newspapers throughout the world and four times in the Sunday Boston Globe, as well as on National Public Radio.Her clients range from grizzled entrepreneurs to nervous newly self-employed professionals, from software publishers and ecommerce startups to media companies, associations and independent educational programs.Marcia Yudkin holds three Ivy League degrees, including a Ph.D. in the humanities.

Book preview

Introduction

Centered in Italy and making worldwide converts, a slow movement recommends stepping off the 24/7 treadmill and reclaiming the joys of eating, relating and appreciating life’s pleasures. Carl Honore’s book, In Praise of Slowness, chronicles companies, cities and individuals that insist on taking the necessary time for leisurely paced medicine, child care, cuisine, travel and more.

Contrary to stereotypes, however, slowing down doesn’t mean you get less accomplished. A German lawyer quoted in Honore’s book explains the benefits of taking two hours to get to know each new client, instead of getting to work after a brisk ten-minute summary of the problem. The slower start minimized his need for follow-up calls or backtracking because he’d misunderstood something.

You’ll find many such paradoxes about productivity, thinking and trying here in Inspired!, supported by research and illustrated with anecdotes from historical figures and contemporary day-to-day life. For example:

* You’ll get more done by taking breaks – or even naps – than by driving relentlessly toward the finish line.

* Trying hard to solve a problem doesn’t yield results as well as sleeping on it.

* Reliable inner knowing may feel like a wild guess.

* Stupid ideas are sometimes the productive ones to focus on.

* Beginners may be able to do what stumps experts.

* Doing just one thing at a time boosts efficiency by up to 40 percent more than multitasking.

* Deciding to make boatloads of money isn’t the surest way to become rich.

Inspired! also proves to you that you are creative. You may not be expressing originality in your work at present, you may not be paying attention to the inklings that flash through your mind like lightning bugs, but the potential exists for you to develop. Inspired! provides guidelines for cultivating your intuitive and innovative capabilities, so that fresh ideas come easily and bountifully.

This book was written, compiled, revised and updated over a period of 20 years. My research on creativity and productivity began in the 1990s, when I wrote and published a subscription newsletter called The Creative Glow. I distributed surveys around the world and taught workshops in Boston and Cambridge on accessing and expressing creativity. I have incorporated recent research and perspectives into this edition.

You sound like you do the work of 12 people is a comment I often get at workshops or by email. Before you now stretch the secrets of how I and others accomplish that feat, and how you can, too. Enjoy!

Marcia Yudkin

www.yudkin.com

[e-mail]

Contents

Introduction

Part 1: Surprising Routes to Greatness

Prevalent Myths about Creativity

Goals: No Magic Galvanizers

How to Access Your Hidden Wisdom

For More Breakthroughs, Break Some Habits

The Five Percent Club: Why Success is Easy

A Fresh Start Without Resolutions

Part 2: An Abundance of Ideas

Discover How You Get Good Ideas

Kids as Creative Helpers

An Inexhaustible Flow of Ideas

Lots of Creativity from Lots of Ideas

Get Clever with Dumb Questions

What’s a Meta-Phor?

Part 3: You’re Intelligent – Differently, Perhaps

Smarts: 1,001 Varieties

Discover How Your Mind Is Screwed On

Sensory Modes and Productivity

Claiming Your Creative Strengths

Synesthesia: Blessing of the Stars

Relaxed Concentration

Creative Memory Tricks

Listening With All of One’s Senses

Part 4: Talent, Expertise and Experience

Several Myths about Talent

What is Expertise?

Creativity Remains Safe from Computers

Rhythmically Challenged Musicians at Mid-Life

Learning from Experience

Advice on Advice

Lessons from Habitual Entrepreneurs

Creative Lessons from Edison

Part 5: Mighty Motivation

The Mysteries of Motivation

Respecting your Motivational Rhythms

Ever Feel Under the Weather?

When Motivation Flags, Try Tom Sawyer Tactics

Do What You Love and Will Money Magically Follow?

Create a Helpful Prison

Part 6: Interpersonal Creativity

Charisma: Not Just for Extroverts

The Light and the Dark Sides of Charisma

Break Down Barriers With Creative Listening

Beyond Win-Lose Communication

Advice on Advice

Fostering a Creative Atmosphere for Others

Part 7: Intuition Unmasked

Boost Your Intuitive Powers!

Commonplace or Mystical? Theories of Intuition

Guessing Counts

Woman’s Intuition: Myth or Reality?

Luck: Intuition in Action

Divining the Future Without a Crystal Ball

Your Personal Signals of Inspiration

Part 8: Reconstructing Your Use of Time

Introducing Upside-Down Time

Time Sickness and Time Sanity

Doubling Up=Double Trouble?

Time’s A-Wasting – Or Is It?

Hidden Benefits of Procrastination

Time-Effective Research

Part 9: Overcoming Stress – Easily

Creative Stress Engineering

Understanding Burnout

Dimensions of Energy

Unwind with Joy Bursts

Controlling High-Tech Stress

Skydivers Always Pack a Parachute

Part 10: Solutions out of Nowhere

Brainwriting for Problem Solving

Problem Solving’s Limits

Engineers’ Problem-solving

Resource for Resourcefulness: A Russian Treasure

Spotting Opportunities for Fulfillment and Profit

It’s a Fuzzy, Fuzzy World Out There

Part 11: Valuable Mistakes and Lucky Blunders

Serendipity Doodah!

The Oops Factor in Success

Never Underestimate the Power of a Novice

Creativity For Good – or Evil?

For Optimal Creativity, Lighten Up

Serious Facts about Humor

Part 12: The Right Place for Creativity

Your Creative Work Environment

Changing the Pace of Your Space

Organizing Your Office the Creative Way

Environmental Factors: A Checklist

Place and Learning

Fun at Work for Productivity

About the Author

Part 1: Surprising Routes to Greatness

Prevalent Myths about Creativity

Years ago, I collected hundreds of questionnaires about creativity as part of my research on the subject. One brief response registered more deeply than those questionnaires filled with fascinating detail. In answer to the question, What puzzles you about creativity? one woman wrote, Why I don’t have it.

This woman, I believe, spoke for many others who are convinced they lack the ability to bring new phenomena into existence. What a pity she and they don’t recognize their potential for one of the most enthralling experiences life has to offer! Chances are, they’ve swallowed one or more common myths about creativity. Have you?

1. I’m not artistically inclined. But creativity encompasses much more than the traditional arts. When your spontaneous joke gets others laughing, when you continually devise new product displays, when you think up ways to satisfy your boss, you’re being creative. In their index that rates people’s involvement in innovation, Harvard Medical School researchers Ruth Richards and Dennis Kinney include everyday leisure and work activities like gardening and preparing reports. More than 70 percent of the hundreds of people they studied showed at least some creativity in some aspect of their life.

2. I’m no genius. So what? There’s no Nobel Prize for satisfaction in life. Being creative means you can solve problems more resourcefully and express the uniqueness within you. Remember too that absorption and enjoyment have worth even if the results don’t win praise or rewards. According to Kriegel and Kriegel in The C Zone, so long as you have moderate amounts of both challenge and mastery, you can create with calm, focused pleasure regardless of how others would rate your ability.

3. I’m too old. Educational reformer John Holt wrote Never Too Late to debunk this myth with reference to music, where it’s particularly rampant. In his forties, despite very little musical background, he began learning to play the cello. Once he reached the point of being able to play in chamber groups and community orchestras, he delightedly kept on going, practicing several hours a day. Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals when he was 78 years old. At age 62, Frances Lear started Lear’s Magazine, which lasted for years.

4. Creative people are weird. Yes, some are. Modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan would stand immobile for hours, waiting for contact with the music of the spheres. Contemporary computer designers often show an amazing disregard for whether it’s night or day. Yet it’s not as if creativity inevitably infects you with eccentricities. T.S. Eliot kept a responsible job at a bank while writing poems that transformed modern literature. You can always apply your creativity to seeming to conform while secretly going about your business the way that works best for you.

5. Creativity depends on inspiration, which is beyond my control. It’s true that you can’t order up a revelation the way you can a size 42 jacket from a catalog. However, you can create conditions conducive to a solution. Just setting aside time for creativity increases the odds that originality will flow. Southern writer Flannery O’Connor put it this way: I’m never certain when inspiration is going to come. But I do know that if it arrives any day between nine in the morning and noon, I’ll be sitting at my desk ready and waiting for it.

From the Archives of Creativity: Correction Fluid

Bette Nesmith Graham was a clumsy secretary desperate for a neater way to correct her errors. When she helped decorate her bank’s storefront windows for Christmas, she noticed that artists painted over their mistakes, instead of erasing them. Applying the principle to typing, she brewed a concoction of white stuff that painted over mistakes on paper. Within a few years, the demand from other secretaries turned her into a basement manufacturer of what she called Mistake Out.

Goals: No Magic Galvanizers

Imagine a device the size and shape of a small sauna, designed for procrastinating painters, wheel-spinning innovators and dreamy, lethargic entrepreneurs. Into a control panel you type a phrase describing a project you are stalled on, then latch yourself in and lounge in privacy on warm wooden slats. For 20 minutes a fragrant, sizzling electromagnetic gizmo infuses you with motivation. Then chimes sound and you charge out of the box transformed. Instead of dillydallying or quitting, you now work relentlessly to execute your idea. Achievement follows, as inevitably as you continue to breathe.

If such a machine truly worked, without harmful side effects, who wouldn’t want to take a turn getting fired up?

According to certain creativity advisors, magic galvanizers do exist, perfect remedies for the inability to start or finish creative projects, to withstand resistance or to set fruitful priorities. These galvanizers are not physical machines but mental technology – goals. Goals focus or even generate motivation, they claim, and keep the person who uses them consistently speeding along on track.

In the past, I bought their line on the power of goal-setting. After finishing major projects or just before a new calendar year, I would create page-long lists of goals and faithfully visualize selected ones according to the guidelines of Anthony Robbins (Unlimited Power) or Robert Fritz (The Path of Least Resistance). Once I began to work with blocked creators, however, and study the careers of innovators I admired, I began to notice numerous limitations and even dangers of goal-setting. Consider the following drawbacks if, like me, you’ve been a devotee of New Year’s resolutions and goal lists at other times of the year.

1. We don’t always consciously know what’s best for us or where our true talents lie. Like millions of other writers, I put a lot of energy toward my goal of publishing a novel to great critical acclaim before my fortieth birthday. Much as I hated to admit it, though, I had adopted that as my goal partly because that’s what real writers did. Also, trying to invent convincing stories forced me to distort or suppress my desire to share life lessons I’d learned. I’m actually much better at helping people communicate creatively, which I now do easily, naturally and successfully. Goals don’t serve us when the mind that plans is misaligned with the whole person who creates.

2. The unconscious rebels if goals conflict with hidden preferences, doubts or fears. A Harvard Business School professor I once worked with became stymied again and again as he tried to finish the book he’d been told he had to complete to receive tenure. Eventually he realized he resented the school discounting his acclaimed teaching and reputation in his specialty. His lack of progress, he saw, signified his need to finish the book on his own schedule.

In other cases I’ve seen, procrastination, loss of motivation or even illness and accidents crop up – the unconscious’s attempts to hamper a journey it can’t endorse. Goals may galvanize us to mediocrity, self-punishment, dissatisfaction with our achievements, wrong destinations and self-sabotage unless they are attuned to real needs, perceptions and passions.

3. Goals obscure the importance of inner timing. Appropriate directions seldom become clear exactly when you’ve decided it’s time for a goal-setting session. In Growing a Business, Paul Hawken, who founded one of the first natural foods stores in the United States, describes how the subsequent idea for his highly successful garden tools mail-order company crept up on him almost unnoticed and demanded he go for it. Neither company sprang from his thoughts, conscious intentions or will. I’m slow on the uptake and I have to let a situation sink in for some time before I feel I have grasped it, he writes. Hawken was wise to idle his engines and remain alert for that sense of being compelled.

4. Without rigid goals, we can more easily recognize and capitalize on unplanned opportunities. Like Hawken, Body Shop founder and environmental activist Anita Roddick admits that she had no advance notion of creating a multimillion-dollar empire. In her first cosmetics shop, she had customers bring back used containers for refill because she couldn’t afford a big enough stock of bottles. Because some of her products were bizarre, she made up postcards explaining what was in each bottle, where it came from and what it would do. Only afterwards did she make a virtue out of necessity, and put into place principles like recycling and full, honest information, which helped fuel her company’s phenomenal growth. At that time I had only one thing on my mind –survival, she recalls.

If you’re seeking satisfying, powerful creativity rather than mere achievement, then goals are hardly ideal galvanizers. Instead of focusing on clear expected outcomes, attune yourself to your system of inner signals. Then you’ll access the choices you can most easily commit yourself to. As Paul Hawken puts it, instead of driving yourself, you allow yourself to be pulled. Making an ally of your unconscious means less conflict and self-sabotage, while sensitivity to your natural resources and rhythms helps you through your projects without artificial revving up. When you use intuition for guidance, authentic approaches develop more readily. The following four-part program will get you started.

Harvest ideas implicit in what you’re doing. Often people explore new directions first and later realize the distinctive value of what they’ve been doing. Some people even create a living body of work without acknowledging what’s new and important about it. Although verbalizing ideas may come last for you, putting what you’ve done into words helps crystallize and preserve your unspoken flair. Video or audiotaping yourself in action, keeping notes of the steps you’re taking or asking others to describe what you do all provide new perspective on what you know but haven’t yet found a way to articulate.

Respect your intuition. Messages from the part of you that knows what’s best may arrive in images, words or sensations. These often point toward decisions or courses of action that you might never have consciously thought up. When Faxon Green of Lexington, Massachusetts, heard a voice some years ago telling her she should quit the consulting company she had co-founded, she obeyed, even though she hadn’t a clue what she would do next. Unpredictably, the subsequent move through chaos transformed her ability to help dysfunctional organizations.

Beware of what makes sense. At a networking meeting, I watched several well-intended people try to convince a graphic artist that she should design customized invitations in addition to brochures and marketing materials. The artist/entrepreneur pulled away from the advice-givers, broke eye contact and showed other bodily signs that the suggestion just didn’t click with her. When she replied verbally, what she said reflected her visceral lack of enthusiasm, which doesn’t always happen. Career consultant Deborah Knox says, When we come to understand our strengths, skills, personality and style, we know how to be selective in adopting suggestions. Our truest motivation goes toward things that come easily to us or that fit into a larger purpose of ours.

Follow your energy. When you’re charged up to do something, how does that state manifest for you? What are the signs? Perhaps you find yourself always thinking about the topic, you work on it for hours without a break or you receive repeated images of the project. Instead of ranking tasks on a to-do list by urgency or importance, try simply being receptive to where your energy most wants to go at that moment. When I’m patient, I’ve found that even tasks I usually dread, like cleaning up my office, eventually have moments when they are charged with appeal. (Really!)

From the Archives of Creativity: Blank Verse in Reverse

Back when poetry always rhymed, poets expressed what they wanted to say, then rearranged and substituted words until line endings had matching sounds, right? At least once, however, Alexander Pope composed in reverse order. His manuscripts at the New York Public Library include pages with dozens of pairs of rhymed words running down the right side of the paper, with the rest of the page blank.

How to Access Your Hidden Wisdom

In The Search for the Beloved, Jean Houston writes about a visit she made with her father, a comedy writer, to Edgar Bergen, the ventriloquist. As they entered Bergen’s hotel room, they heard him conversing, not rehearsing, with his dummy, Charlie McCarthy. He was asking questions like, What is the nature of love? What is the meaning of life truly lived? According to Houston, Charlie was pouring out pungent, beautifully crafted statements of deep wisdom. When Bergen noticed the visitors, he admitted that it was his voice and his mind coming out of Charlie. And yet, when he answers me, it is so much more than I know.

All of us know more than we know that we know. Like Edgar Bergen, though, we may need some special technique to gain access to our inner wisdom. Here’s an exercise called Q&A that helps many people discover surprising insights about themselves and their work that were somewhere in them all along. Try it yourself in a spirit of play and exploration.

First, formulate a question. It should be a question to which you