The internet has given us access to an unlimited amount of inspiration. New articles, books, tweets and podcasts are published every day. At this point, it's unclear whether this is helping or hurting us.
Want to start a new company? At least 1,000 entrepreneur podcasts are waiting for you. Stuck with your life in general? Millions of self-help articles are a click away.
Inspiration is important. It's a source of motivation, a reason to wake up in the morning and pursue a productive life. But sometimes, we let inspiration be the end in itself.
We just need to take one more online course before starting our own business. We just need to read one more article. Inspiration can become a way to procrastinate, and it's a nice way to do it too. Getting inspired feels rewarding in itself. It seems to trigger the happy chemicals in our brain almost as much as doing the thing we wanted to do.
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration—the rest of us just get up and go to work.” Stephen King
In the early days of the internet, inspirational content was less readily available online. I found inspiration and fed it by creating, building and designing myself. Today I can get lost for hours and hours just reading, looking at pretty pictures or watching advice videos.
With this never-ending stream of inspiration and motivational content, we need to learn where to draw the line. When will we listen to enough startup advice podcasts to finally execute our own dream? When will we have all the advice we need to just go for it? That's for us to decide for ourselves, but we can only hope it's sooner rather than later.
