The Moment Of Inspiration [UPDATED]
Every time you send an invoice, an email or you share a link, every time you send out a newsletter, coupon or discount code, every time you ask for a connection request, you may be sparking a brand induced moment of inspiration.
The Moment Of Inspiration
These moments might be complicated, but they're unbelievable opportunities to own the consumer journey. And remember, consumer induced M.O.I.s are not always big things, they could be really small things, like you just ate a tuna salad sandwich and you have tuna salad breath, and maybe you need to buy some gum.
The media has the power to inspire you to go on a journey you never expected and this happens unbelievably often. Even if you're reading an article about something and you see the name of someone, a thought leader who's given a quote in that article, you might Google the thought leader, find out they run a company and next thing you know, three months later, you're buying their product or service. That is a media induced moment of inspiration, it sends that person on a journey they never expected.
All these efforts, and others elsewhere, stand as testament to the fact that when good people act in the face of hate, good things invariably will happen. We were inspired and awed by these selfless acts to turn incidents of hate into moments of hope.
In recent years, I can recall very strong moments of inspiration where I felt called to create or write or draw or say something. The inspiration is so strong that it almost feels real. It feels within reaching distance. It feels within my abilities of that day, of that moment. It feels like THIS THING MUST HAPPEN. How could it not happen?? I must make it happen!
As 2022 comes to an end and we ready ourselves for 2023, ADL looks back on the moments from the last year that gave us some light, hope and inspiration. In our work to combat antisemitism and all forms of hate, we celebrated many of these moments as they advanced the fight against hate and prejudice and reaffirmed why our mission is so important in these challenging times.
In August 1955, a 14-year-old Black youth named Emmett Till was lynched in a racist attack that shocked the nation and provided a catalyst for the emerging civil rights movement. Since the 1880s, Congress has tried and failed over 200 times to pass anti-lynching legislation. But this year, Congress finally passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, and the bill, which was strongly supported by ADL and our allies in the civil rights community, was signed into law by President Biden on March 29. Lynching was a terror tactic used against Black Americans, particularly in the racially segregated south. According to Tuskegee University, which collects records on lynchings, 4,743 people were lynched from 1882 to 1968 and 3,446 of them were Black. The passage of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act is a long overdue historic moment for the U.S., and while nothing can fix the past, this new federal law demonstrates a formal commitment to holding those who commit this heinous crime accountable.
The word inspiration can mean to be filled with excitement, to be motivated, or to be moved by a great idea or a creative act. It can also mean to breathe life into something. In fact, in French, inspire (inspirer) is an actual verb meaning to breathe. This etymological relationship is particularly enlightening when speaking of Isadora Duncan and Loïe Fuller. In their respective autobiographies, both women evoke moments of inspiration that literally set them in motion.
The mirror was placed just opposite the windows. The long yellow curtains were drawn and through them the sun shed into the room an amber light, which enveloped me completely and illumined my gown, giving a translucent effect. Golden reflection played in the folds of the sparkling silk, and in this light my body was vaguely revealed in shadowy contour. This was a moment of intense emotion. Unconsciously I realized that I was in the presence of a great discovery, one which was destined to open the path which I have since followed.
Zig continues his life`s mission with a book designed to encourage and build hope, whatever your life circumstances. This inspirational book offers vignettes on various topics such as attitude, love, inspiration, relationships, goal setting, and motivation that will help you become "excited about your country, your family, and your future," and will provide you a lift in your attitude and enjoyment of life.
For more books on life and inspiration, browse through our collection of motivational books. We offer a wide range of books that will aid your personal and professional development. We also offer management training programs and sales training seminars.
Join us for an evening of inspiration and meet donors who share a passion for philanthropy. Hear from Kathy Jetton, CEO of Make-A-Wish Central & Western NC, Elizabeth Martinsen, W.I.S.H. Society chair, as well as a local wish family who knows first-hand how much hope a wish can bring for a child and their family.
This week, it gives me great pleasure to direct you to two pieces I published last week about seizing on moments of inspiration in business. I wanted to describe a few of the most formative experiences in my career that ultimately led me to start my latest venture, UserMuse.
Now, as a researcher it is my pleasure to document his successes and those of the other writers and composers whose work he discussed in his excellent keynote address. With the book series Palgrave Studies in British Musical Theatre my co-editor, Dominic Symonds, and I are promoting this research in association with Palgrave Macmillan. By engaging with Musical Theatre Network, Mercury Musicals and other industry bodies we are encouraging interactions between writers, performers and researchers so that the gaps in the written history will be filled (and published in our series), but also so that musical theatre projects, processes and productions will be available for future generations of readers. A moment of performance in a tiny theatre in Plymouth in 1982 turns out to have been quite remarkably inspirational.
These solutions, however, seem a little prescriptive. It is essentially an attempt to tell people to be casual and creative. Companies may choose to pursue more imaginative and resourceful approaches to seeking that spark of inspiration.
Empirical data related to inspiration, perspiration, and creativity are now available for consideration. A number of studies indicates that inspiration is a robust predictor of creativity. At the between-person (i.e., trait) level, inspiration and creative self-concept are positively correlated, and inspiration predicts longitudinal increases in creative self-concept (Thrash and Elliot, 2003). Trait inspiration also predicts objective indicators of creative output. In a sample of U.S. patent holders, inspiration frequency was found to predict the number of patents held (Thrash and Elliot, 2003). Inspiration also predicts creativity at the within-person level, such that inspiration and self-reported creativity fluctuate together across days (Thrash and Elliot, 2003).
In three studies of different types of writing (poetry, science, and fiction), self-reported state inspiration during the writing process uniquely predicted creativity of the final product, as assessed by expert judges using the CAT (Thrash et al., 2010b). These findings held when a variety of covariates (e.g., openness to experience, effort, activated PA, awe) were controlled. Finally, inspiration has been shown to mediate between the creativity of seminal ideas and the creativity of final products in a manner consistent with the posited transmission function4 of inspiration (Thrash et al., 2010b). Covariates of inspiration (effort, activated PA, awe) failed to mediate transmission, indicating that the transmission function is unique to inspiration.
One such method for capturing variability in inspiration across time, while simultaneously reducing the burden of eliciting inspiration repeatedly, is to record electrical brain activity using a non-invasive technique (such as EEG) during the creative process. For instance, if researchers record screen capture data during the writing process as in Thrash et al. (2010b), they can subsequently play back the recording to participants and collect continuous measures of recalled inspiration during the creative process (e.g., using a dial or slider input device). These ebbs and flows of inspiration can then be linked to variability in neural processes.
Next, we consider the question of where to look in the nervous system. While at present there is no neuroscience of the inspiration construct per se, literatures on related constructs can offer us some hints.
As inspiration involves not only transcendence and evocation, but also approach motivation, we may also look to the neuroscience literature on states of approach motivation (Elliot, 2008). There exists a burgeoning literature on approach motivation and appetitive affect, with attention to underlying neuronal circuitry (e.g., Bradley et al., 2001; Aron et al., 2005; Junghöfer et al., 2010), subcortical reward systems (e.g., Rosenkranz and Grace, 2002; Wise, 2004; Alcaro et al., 2007), neurotransmitters (e.g., Bassareo et al., 2002; Hoebel et al., 2008), and neurohormones (e.g., Frye and Lacey, 2001; Frye and Seliga, 2003; Frye, 2007). Findings in this area may offer suggestions for the neural underpinnings of the inspired to process.
Although the neurological findings regarding certain aspects of the inspiration construct can offer clues, the neural components of these pieces alone are unlikely to tell the full story. After all, we have already argued above that inspiration is not the same thing as insight or activated PA, nor is it the sum of these parts. For instance, an individual could be in an appetitive motivational state at the same time that he or she gets a creative insight, but he or she would not be inspired if the appetitive state reflects anticipation of eating, rather than of bringing the idea into fruition. The evoking object, in this case, the insight, does not meaningfully relate to the motivational object. The critical question for neuroscience is how processes related to generation of creative ideas recruit appetitive motivational processes, such that individuals respond to creative ideas not with indifference, but rather with a feeling of being compelled to act. How exactly does the prospect of turning a morsel into a dish fire the soul, as Mozart put it (in the opening quotation)? 041b061a72