Without inspiration, willpower is useless. You must be inspired in order to accomplish anything, with a sense of motivation that comes from within. No one can help you with this. It’s up to you to decide if you’ve got the vibe going.

When I was a kid, I used to play videogames a fair bit. One of my favorite games was Ultima IV, a role playing fantasy game where you moved across a vast digital landscape battling monsters and casting spells as part of a group of adventurers.

I used to cast fireball spells with my wizard character, and I would lean back in my chair and press my hands to my lips and feel a surge of energy as the fireball went out. That, to me, is the very definition of inspiration: intense energy accompanied by playful hope.

Inspiration means you have flights of fancy that transport you to new heights. Properly inspired, you can go for years on a mission or project, even if results seem rather thin on the ground. Personally, I’ve engaged in more than one long-term project and am still going strong precisely because I’m inspired.

Some may say too much inspiration is a bad thing; that if you’re in a dead end alley, you’ll be butting your head against a brick wall continuously on account of your motivation to move forward. But I think inspiration is wiser than that. Men know when they’re fucking up and going nowhere. They need the motive fuel to move forward more than the sense of when to quit. Quitting is easy; continuing takes balls.

In order to feel inspiration, you must, on some level, believe that life is good and getting better. The despondent and the crushed don’t get inspired, for very good reasons. There is a combined optimimist/realist worldview which aids in the generation of inspiration, and there is nothing wrong with “priming the pump” a bit to get the inspiration going. At times we need to believe based on nothing more than vapors, and this is more than okay, it’s almost ideal. The supposition that we are heading for good things generates its own self-supporting feedback loop, which grows stronger as we go along. And isn’t that what life is for?