“Inspiration is for amateurs. . . .

The rest of us just show up and get to work” (artist Chuck Close, quoted in The Antidote:  Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman, p. 69).

I always say if you can get one good idea from a book or speaker that you can carry away and actually put into practice then you’ve spent your time well. So my key insight from the above-mentioned book is this:  you don’t have to feel like doing something before you do it.  And indeed sometimes, perhaps most of the time, trying to make yourself feel like doing something just puts an extra step between you and your work.

As Burkeman says, “Feeling like acting and actually acting are two different things” (68).  But most inspirational self-help speakers and writers focus on the feeling part:  getting “motivated.”  (Indeed, the beginning of the book tells how Burkeman, a rather reserved Brit, attends a Get Motivated! seminar led by the late Dr. Robert Schuller.  He wasn’t late then, just to be clear.)  So the guy in the picture isn’t literally chained to his bed; he just feels like he is.  There’s so much wisdom packed into pages 66-70 of Burkeman’s book that I will be returning to these ideas in several future posts.

For now, though, I want to take a look at the artist quoted above, Chuck Close.  That brief quotation is his only appearance in Burkeman’s book, but I was so intrigued by his words that I decided to find out more about him.  He is a photographer, painter and printmaker who has been exhibited all over the world.  He suffers from “face blindness,” or prosopagnosia, an inability to recognize faces.  So he became a portrait painter.  Make sense to you?  Me neither.  Then, to add insult to injury, in 1988 he suffered a spinal artery collapse that left him almost completely paralyzed and wheelchair-bound.  He now has to paint with a paintbrush strapped to his wrist.  (Reminds me of Joni Eareckson holding a paintbrush in her teeth.)  I’m sure there are many, many mornings when he feels like the guy in the picture, but he shows up.

So I’m finding him to be pretty inspiring, with his most striking quality to be his total lack of self-pity or false cheer.   If you’d like to get more of his pithy wisdom, go to his BrainyQuote page.  His viewpoint isn’t a grim “just do it” mentality but rather a refusal to accept excuses linked with a deep self-awareness, both qualities that I need to develop.  I so often say or think, “But I just don’t feel like it,” when I know perfectly well that if I just go ahead and get started I’ll be fine.  I’m not really paralyzed (or in a wheelchair); I just feel paralyzed.  But I can ignore that feeling and get on with the job.  (Again, this idea isn’t that you force yourself to do things you hate; maybe there’s a good reason why you hate them.  It’s that you just go ahead and do things that you really want to do. You realize that your problem is inertia, not inability.  Great wording, huh?  Maybe I’ll get my own BrainyQuote page one of these days.)

The Strategy of Scheduling is a big help to me in just getting on with work.  I set my phone alarm this morning for 9:00 and sat down to start this post.  It’s now 10:26, with the alarm set to go off in four minutes.  And here I am, all finished!  So I’ll hit “publish” and get on with the rest of the day.

How about you?  In what area of your life do you simply need to show up?