Do you own a vinyl album? It has two sides. They are not opposites, but they are both related and different. You can think of inspiration as one side of the album. It’s the feel-good side where you seek out the bright spots that support your belief in yourself and your goals.
What’s on the B side of inspiration? I think it’s bloody minded optimism. I was once told there was no hope for what I wanted to do with my business. My response was “then I guess we go on without hope.” That’s bloody minded optimism. To paraphrase a popular slogan, “it feels terrible and it works.”
When famous inventors spent many years on failed attempts before creating the thing that made them famous, they used bloody minded optimism. Every failure felt like failure and they didn’t stop. This is also true of the many people who were working on the same inventions at the same time and did not make it into the history books. What keeps them going is usually not the warm fuzzies of inspiration. It is a willful determination to see the obvious, to hear the criticism, and to keep going anyway.
It takes substantial support to keep picking yourself up and moving forward despite the odds. Despite the memes and clichés of solitary success, you need to know where to find a hug (if only figurative) and compensation (even if its ice cream) while you pick yourself up and reset after a fall. It’s true that you need to believe in yourself and it’s also true that is more likely if someone else cares for you and encourages you.
We all need encouragement and comfort. But we often lose track of the heart of those words. They don’t mean to make someone feel cozy and safe. They mean to make someone brave and strong. They mean you might get a pretty bandaid for your scraped knee but you are also going to be placed right back on the bike.
Who supports your own bloody minded optimism?
