2 ways of doing - inspiration & motivation

Here are two fundamentally different ways to do things.

1. mode of action - motivated action

This is the probably the most common one. It starts with an intention. You want something, and then you act to get it. Most of the time, you also know why you want it.

If you look closer, the structure is actually very simple:

I → A → Z → G

• I = Intention

• A = Action

• Z = Goal

• G = Feeling
  

At first, it looks like we act to reach goals. But if you keep asking “Why do I want this?”, the answer is almost always about feeling. Probably if we wouldnt feel, we just couldn´t care.

• You eat → to stop hunger → to feel good

• You seek safety → to avoid stress → to feel calm
  

So the idea is:

Z ≈ G

Goals are just placeholders for desired subjective experience.

You could even go one step further and say:All motivated action is about improving your internal state of subjective experience.

2. mode of action - inspired action

The second mode works very differently. It doesn’t start with a clear intention or goal.It starts with something much smaller, which I call

→ a spark

A moment of interest, curiosity, or excitement. From there, action begins almost automatically.You don’t fully know where it will lead. There’s just a direction, a feeling you follow, guided by intuition.

Instead of planning first and acting second, it feels like:

S → A → Z

• S = Spark

• A = Action

• Z = Goal (emerges over time)
  

Usually the goal is usually not defined at the beginning. It is rather a rough direction that we are drawn to, and as we follow it up, usually something more and more specific crystalizes.A very good example to illustrate this is probably how most people started Parkour, or any other passion. They saw Parkour somwhere, and then there was a moment of „boom“, and it´s clear to them that they want to try it. Yet, this spark must not always be a „boom“, it can also be just a sort of mild interest – yet, I would say it is the same sort of feeling, just differing in intensity.

But either way, the quality is different from motivation:

• It’s not driven by a predefined need

• It’s not about fixing something

• It’s more like being pulled than pushing
  

It looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck… but is it a duck?

At the point, where something specific in the inspriation process has crystalized, the process starts to look very much like the the first mode. Since very often you are inspired to do things that you simply cannot do yet – so you start figuring it out and work for it. Yet, the starting point was very different to motivated action, and the outcome is too.Also the way how that „workiung towards“ feels like in these two modes differ quite a lot. Motivated action can quickly become arduous since evidently you are only doing iot to get the outcome. Whereas the inspired action is lead by a continuous interest.

That is why Parkour to most people, doesn´t really feel like hard work, even though objectively they are kinda working hard. Yet, in the end it is rather fulfilling, than exhausting.

Keeping inspiration alive

Now I have found in my experience that the inspired mode of action is the by far more fun way to train, and do things in general. And if we manage to shift emphasis to that mode, inspiration stays alive and fresh, and therefore also the joy of the activity.But this requires practice, to really understand and feel the difference of these two modes, and also feel which mode is switched on when we are training.I think this is really a meta-grid in which all your training takes place. So it doesnt make sense to give this aspect of training less attention than for example the mechanical aspects of learning a trick.Culturally we are very much trained in the first mode of action, and the second is neglected. It feels like it is written off as some strange capability of rare creative individuals, that just do stuff differently.Yet seeing the simple structure of inspired action, I am convinced that that is just fariy tale we grow up with. I think we just live in a time which places all importance on thinking, and has neglected intuitive feeling – which must be a most natural thing.