Stop waiting for inspiration
Making art requires showing up even when you don't feel like it.
With the new year on the horizon, you might be thinking about what you want to accomplish over the next twelve months. You’re beyond making silly resolutions, but what about actual goals you want to achieve? How can you set yourself up for success?
“It’s simple. If you don’t work when you don’t want to work, you’re not going to be able to work when you want to work.” —Twyla Tharp, on Master the Creative Process with Andrew Huberman
You can’t rely on motivation to fuel you
What I love about this quote from Tharp is that she’s saying you can’t wait for motivation or inspiration to fuel you. Motivation is fleeting. It’s an unreliable way to gauge whether or not you should take action. One day you might feel motivated to write and the next you don’t. If you only work when you’re motivated to, then who knows how often you’ll end up at your desk.
Behavioral scientist BJ Fogg, author of Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything, and founder of the Stanford Behavior Design Lab, offers an alternative approach to motivation. He suggests riding a motivational wave, as a way to take action and drive habit. Since motivation ebbs and flows, if you can catch yourself in a moment where you feel driven to take action, you can use that feeling to do that difficult thing (like go to the gym or start writing). Once you do the difficult thing once, it can help to drive you to repeat the action again, ideally continuing the habit long after your motivation disappears.
It’s not about perfection, but consistency.
Start with small, achievable goals
Let’s take writing a novel. Say you only have an hour, four times a week to dedicate to your project. Start by giving yourself an achievable word count per session. Maybe for you that’s 400 words. Make it small enough that you can realistically do it (the key is you need to be able to actually achieve this goal).
Every time you complete the goal you set out for yourself, your brain’s reward system releases dopamine, which makes you want to engage in that activity again. Even better, if you take the time to congratulate yourself on your efforts (maybe with a sparkly sticker, money in a jar, or for every X number of sessions you treat yourself to something like a new book), it not only becomes easier to engage in the habit, but you’ll increase how much dopamine gets released every time you do it.
Schedule your writing time
Again, this is not sexy, but you need to set aside dedicated time to your craft. Once you set your schedule, it’s imperative that you protect this time like it’s gold. You might only have an hour before you head to the office or after you put the kids to bed, so don’t waste it. There are a thousand other things your brain will try and convince you is more important. Ignore your brain. Ignore your to-do list. Ignore the pile of laundry in the corner of the room. If necessary, turn off your phone and computer Wi-Fi. This time is sacred. Treat it as such. When you hit that word count, trust me, you’ll be very happy you did the work.
Get back on track when you fall off
You’re a human, not a robot, so you will eventually fall off track. You can’t let one small (or big) set-back get you out of the habit. When your next writing session comes around, write. It’s not about perfection, but consistency. Chances are you’ll have days where you didn’t hit your word count, you got distracted, or missed the session altogether. What matters is coming back to your work, again and again.
Find an accountability partner
Telling someone else about your goal will increase your chances of completing it by 65%, and having a specific accountability appointment with that person will increase it by 95%, according to a 2015 study done by the Association for Talent Development1. A 2024 study looking at gym attendance published by Management Science found that pursuing goals with a friend makes it more attainable, while a 2015 study by a psychology professor from the Dominican University of California, found the people who wrote down their goals and shared them with a friend were 50% more likely to be successful than those who kept their goals to themselves.
It can be scary to share your goals with other people, but all you need is one trusted friend to confide it (even better if they’re also working on the same goal). And then get those check-ins scheduled to up your chances of success.
Don’t wait for inspiration
Do you have an overly romantic sensibility around making art? Some people don’t want to be told when to create or find ways to improve their habits. I get it. It’s not sexy. It’s dull and feels capitalist. The problem is, if you’re an artist who is making a living from your art (or wants to), then you have to learn to create when conditions aren’t optimal. This is distinctly different from forcing yourself to create when you’re creatively drained, sick, or burned out. But it’s important to recognize the difference between depletion and avoidance. Are you not creating because you’re not in the mood or because you genuinely need to replenish yourself? Only you know the difference.
This romanticized perspective that you can only create art when inspiration strikes can prevent you from doing great work. Sometimes you have to push through feelings of discomfort and boredom to reach a feeling of inspiration. Often this will emerge as you work. You can’t always rely on your mood to dictate your output. It’s the same way a professional athlete trains versus someone who’s doing a sport for fun. They show up every day even when they don’t want to.
Keep going
All of this to say is that the most important part of creating something is to keep showing up. Show up when when it feels good, when it feels bleh, when you don’t want to, and even when you don’t know what you’re doing. Eventually, you’ll find the finish line.
Those Vanity Fair photos of the White House by Christopher Anderson. A masterclass in photojournalism.
Holiday cards of famous artists curated by The Rose Period. One of my new favorite Substackers who shares gorgeous art and stories from the art world.
Jennifer Lawrence’s wry wit shines during her Actors on Actors conversation with Leonardo DiCaprio.
This article about how you can trick your brain into making life feel longer
Watching a movie in the theatre. I saw Marty Supreme on Boxing Day and was reminded how much I enjoy seeing film on the big screen
I can’t find the original study, so I’m not sure how involved it was.