Are you suffering an inspiration drought?

By Jessica Albon

This post is the introduction for a new series on business inspiration, Making it Rain Inspiration .

You’re as tired as I am of all this talk about the economy and what it means to small businesses, no doubt. And I bet you’ve rolled your eyes at that “60% of Americans think a depression is likely” statistic that’s been bandied about (and more or less made up/misquoted).

But that doesn’t change this fact: you might be mired in your own inspiration drought. I was. And many of my clients are. So, know that if you’ve been feeling a lack of motivation and enthusiasm in your business, you’re not alone.

The economy is hugely different today than it was in 1929. And these days, feeling inspired (and creating from that place) matters far more than it did back then. Face it, when people worked in factories, they didn’t exactly have to be inspired to do their jobs each day. But, as more and more of us work as creative professionals, our wellspring of creative, new ideas becomes a key commodity.

In many ways, this shift is amazing. It means we’re blazing trails, creating new ideas, and forging a path our grandmothers (and grandfathers) never dreamt of. But, in others, it sets us up for an impossible standard. Today, more than ever, our work requires that we be able to tap into our creativity and come up with something new on a moment’s notice.

Sure, there’s no shortage of derivation out there. But that’s not your path (right?). And that means that today, more than ever, you need to be able to access that flow of ideas, tap into a sense of endless possibility, and create from the hip, as it were, day after day.

And I think a lot of us have the sense that creative brilliance is a momentary, lucky flash, that we  have to wait for it to strike us. Alas, that attitude runs exactly contrary to what we need to be bringing to our businesses every day–immediate, impact-intense inspiration (pardon my alliteration!).

Now I’m not saying there’s not a lot of substance to the advice that genius is 99% perspiration or that there aren’t days when you do simply need to get the work done whether or not you feel like it.

But, if you’ve been existing in a steady gloom of doldrums about your business and your writing for more than a month; if you’ve been procrastinating on your blogging and newsletter writing; if you’ve been avoiding creative work and finding yourself choosing to watch the news (or, in my case, Firefly on DVD) instead of basking in the work you used to enjoy… There’s a way out.

But before I spend a few hours writing and editing those posts, I’m going to go hang out with Izzy for a bit. After all, it’s 10 p.m. and I’ve been working all day.

(By the way, that factors into the tips I’ll share as you might expect… Keep reading these posts on finding business inspiration and motivation for precisely how.)