The Active Pursuit of Inspiration
A Daily Practice for Creators in the Digital Age
You may often hear creators say they're "waiting for inspiration to strike." I love this romantic notion of inspiration as though it were lightning—a powerful but random force of nature beyond our control. This passive conceptualisation of creativity is deeply embedded in our cultural mythology, the idea that you either have it or you don’t. I was led to believe that I was born with it, and don’t get me wrong that belief in myself took me quite far. But, after many years working at the intersection of art and digital technology, I suggest it is something different.
Inspiration doesn’t happen to us—it's something we actively cultivate, and it comes from inside.
The Myth of Passive Inspiration
In Western cultures, we have romanticized the idea of the artist struck by a bolt of genius—the musician who wakes at 3 AM to record a melody that came in a dream, the writer who produces a masterpiece in a feverish weekend, and the digital artist who suddenly visualizes a groundbreaking concept fully formed and ready to ship. These stories reinforce the notion that inspiration is rare, mysterious, and beyond our influence.
Whilst it might sometimes feel like it happens that way, this myth does not always serve the creator well, particularly in our hyper-connected digital age where creative output is constant and the pressure to produce innovative work has never been higher. It can leave us paralyzed, waiting for a moment that will likely never arrive through passive anticipation alone.
Reframing Inspiration as Practice
What if we viewed inspiration not as a fleeting visitor but as a garden we tend daily? As someone who bridges traditional artistic practices with digital innovation, I've found that consistent creative output relies not on random bursts of insight but on developing an inspiration practice as rigorous as any technical skill.
The most prolific digital artists, game designers, and multimedia creators I've worked with don't wait for inspiration—they pursue it systematically. They treat it as muscle memory, something that strengthens with deliberate exercise and atrophies with neglect.
Five Daily Practices to Cultivate Active Inspiration
1. Cross-Pollinate Your Inputs
The digital age offers unprecedented access to diverse creative influences, yet many artists confine themselves to narrow information streams within their field. True inspiration often emerges from unexpected intersections.
Daily practice: Spend 20 minutes exploring content completely outside your discipline. As a digital artist, I regularly dive into other topics of interest like quantum physics, neuroscience, and ancient history. These seemingly unrelated fields have informed my work in ways my discipline alone never could.
One collaborator, a VR designer struggling with environmental concepts, found breakthrough inspiration after exploring 17th-century Japanese garden design. The principles of ma (negative space) and shakkei (borrowed scenery) revolutionized her approach to building her virtual landscapes.
2. Document Obsessively, Without Judgment
Inspiration doesn't always announce itself with fanfare—sometimes it whispers in the mundane moments we dismiss.
Daily practice: Maintain a digital or physical "inspiration journal" where you document observations, questions, and reactions without filtering for quality or relevance. Use your smartphone to capture images, sounds, or notes throughout the day.
What seems insignificant—the particular quality of light on your morning commute, an unusual interaction between strangers, the geometric pattern of cracks on the footpath—often contains the seeds of your next breakthrough. By documenting without immediate purpose, you build an archive of authentic responses to the world that becomes an invaluable resource when needed.
3. Embrace Technical Constraints
The blank canvas is often the enemy of inspiration. Counterintuitively, limitations often fuel creativity rather than hindering it.
Daily practice: Impose arbitrary constraints on your creative process. For example, if you're an illustrating artist, you could try limiting yourself to just three colours for a week. Last year, I invested in a tonne of art materials for the children’s art classes I was teaching, and I can’t stand to see good art materials just sitting there not in use. As a digital artist, crayons aren’t my usual medium. I forced myself to abandon my usual techniques and discover new expressive possibilities within the limitations. These studies informed the work I am producing now, after a long run of sticking to the familiar not knowing how to break free.
4. Schedule Unstructured Creation Time
The relentless pressure to produce finished, polished work can suffocate the exploratory mindset that nurtures inspiration.
Daily practice: Block 30 minutes daily for creation with no expected outcome. Don’t worry about the outcome or your productivity—it's about retraining your mind to create without the pressure of results. Use this time to experiment with techniques, media, or concepts you wouldn't normally pursue in your professional work.
I collaborated with a multimedia artist who had come from a games background, and she implemented a "digital sandbox" hour every morning where she engaged in creative play, just for the sake of play, without clients or deadlines in mind. This reignited her passion for gamification, and less than six months later, the techniques she developed as a result of these sessions had become signature elements in her UX work.
5. Cultivate Embodied Experience in a Digital World
As our work increasingly happens in digital spaces, we often experience disconnection from physical experiences that have traditionally nourished creative thinking.
Daily practice: Engage in at least one fully embodied, sensory experience daily. This might be walking without headphones listening to the sound of the traffic or the birds, preparing a meal for yourself or others with full attention, or practicing a craft unrelated to your primary work. It doesn’t have to be too routine. I do yoga two to three times a week, walk around the Royal Melbourne Botanic Gardens at least once a week, not at any particular set times. I also enjoy cooking, foraging for herbs in urban gardens, and collecting succulent cuttings, stones and flowers for my ‘altars’ I place around the house. Plus, anyone who has ever lived with me knows all about interior “reset” hobby (obsession with rearranging the furniture).
When Nick Cave’s mother died during the pandemic he started making clay figurines, which then turned into a passion. Never be afraid to try something new. It’s what makes the difference between an artist who grows, evolves and innovates, and a frustrated technician grinding away uninspired by their own existence.
The Science Behind Active Inspiration
This approach to inspiration is actually supported by neuroscience. Creative insights emerge from novel connections between existing neural networks. The more you actively expose yourself to diverse stimuli, documenting your authentic responses, embracing constraints, creating without pressure, and engaging your senses, the more you are literally reshaping your brain's connective architecture to become more conducive to inspiration.
Research on the default mode network—the brain state active during mind-wandering and daydreaming—shows it plays a crucial role in creative insight. By intentionally creating space for this network to activate through practices like unstructured creation time, you're leveraging your brain's natural inspiration mechanisms rather than hoping they'll activate randomly. How great is this? Not only do you need to give yourself permission to play in your studio. Your creativity depends on it.
From Waiting to Cultivating
The shift from waiting for inspiration to actively cultivating it transforms not just our creative output but our relationship with the creative process itself. It moves us from a position of dependency to one of agency.
On days when inspiration seems distant despite these practices, remember that showing up matters. The daily commitment to your inspiration practice builds resilience and creative stamina that carries you through inevitable dry periods. Even when immediate results aren't apparent, you're developing the neural pathways and creative habits that support sustainable innovation over a lifetime.
In our fast-paced digital creative landscape, we can't afford to wait for lightning to strike. By approaching inspiration as a daily practice rather than a mysterious visitation, we become not just more prolific but more innovative, resilient, and fulfilled not only in our creative work, but in our lives in general.
The next time you find yourself waiting for inspiration, remember: you’re not catching lightning—you’re tending to your garden where new ideas grow daily.
Subscribe to my Substack newsletter www.catherinethecreative.com for my blog articles regularly direct to your inbox.
About the Author
I am passionate about empowering creatives and sole operators to survive and thrive in the digital eco-system, allowing more time for passion projects, personal development and self-care. I enjoy collaboration as part of this process, allowing me to share my passion for creativity, follow our hearts and achieve our dreams. My artwork blends photography, mixed and digital media drawing inspiration from mythology and sacred symbolism, from ancient to contemporary worlds. I see my art as a conduit for self-discovery and personal development, and a shared experience of creative transformation.