Despite the importance of inspiration to all of us and the great opportunity it presents, surprisingly little is known about what it is and how it works, especially in the workplace.
We have interviewed business executives, thought leaders, inspirational figures, creatives, trailblazers, and entrepreneurs across a wide swath of industries and business models to find out what inspires them, how inspiration works in their lives and business, and, most important, how they sustain inspiration over time and through challenges.
This research uncovered five truths about inspiration that help us understand how it works and how to have more of it in our lives.
These truths come to life in the story of Captain Barrington Irving, an aviator and educator who accomplished great feats as a young pilot—including being the youngest person and first African American to fly around the world.1 He went on to develop an organization called Experience Aviation to expose children to flight and to educate and inspire them to explore careers in STEM+ (science, technology, engineering, math, and the arts).
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1983, Irving moved with his family to Miami, Florida, when he was six. His parents ran a Christian bookstore, where he helped out in his spare time. When he was fifteen, a chance encounter with a Jamaican United Airlines pilot named Captain Gary Robinson, who was shopping in the store, changed the course of Irving’s life forever. In our interview with Captain Irving, he said: “I pursued a career I never thought possible because of a chance meeting with this inspiring man.”2
When they met, Robinson asked Irving if he’d ever considered being an airline pilot. Irving told us that at that point in his life, he was disinterested in school and focused on athletics; the future he imagined for himself was playing football, one day in college and perhaps professionally.
The conversation with Robinson opened up new possibilities for Irving. Robinson offered to give Irving a tour of the airport and of the cockpit of an airplane he flew—a Boeing 777—“and just like that I was hooked.”3 The many possibilities that flight introduced to Irving fueled his pursuit.
Earning a private pilot license cost six thousand dollars back then, which Irving did not have at the time. Exercising invincibility in the face of challenge, he began picking up odd jobs, like cleaning pools, bagging groceries, washing planes, and helping out around the hangar, to pay for it.4 Another pilot, Robert Girdler, offered Irving the chance to fly his Cessna 172 every other week, and his free time was soon filled with work, studying, and practicing on a forty-dollar computer-based flight simulator at home.5
A standout high school football player, Irving’s coaches were flabbergasted when he turned down a college football scholarship to the University of Florida in order to pursue his dream of becoming a pilot. He ultimately earned a full scholarship to Florida Memorial University after being noticed by the director of aviation at the school who saw him make an impassioned presentation at an aviation event (his 4.49 high school grade point average probably didn’t hurt either).6
It was at Florida Memorial that he decided his next goal was to fly around the world solo, an almost unimaginable possibility. No one his age had yet done so. His goal was to exponentially replicate the inspiration that Robinson had sparked in him to consider aviation by reaching children all over the world. “I simply wanted to inspire others,” he explained.7
His round-the-globe aspirations were costly—around $1 million—but that didn’t deter Irving. He began knocking on the doors of sponsors, trying to raise the money needed to buy a single-engine Lancair Columbia 400 and cover his travel costs. Turned down by more than fifty potential sponsors over the next two and a half years, Irving finally landed enough support to build the plane and take off. A junior in college at that point, Irving took flight in March 2007 from Florida’s Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport in his plane aptly named Inspiration with thirty dollars in his pocket.8
Over the next ninety-seven days of travel, Irving sustained his inspiration by staying in touch with nearly three hundred thousand students and educators who followed his thirty-thousand-mile flight via the Internet. In doing so, he became the youngest pilot and first African American to fly around the world. One teacher who used a Sharpie and a shower curtain with a map of the earth on it to follow Irving with her class, wrote a letter to Irving saying: “Thank you for inspiring them… but I need you to empower them.” Irving said this message stuck with him for years and moved him to found his organization Experience Aviation,9 a nonprofit organization created to introduce students to aviation and STEM-based careers. Shortly thereafter, he created the Build & Soar program, which challenged sixty high school students to build an experimental plane in ten weeks, which he then flew—a plane he named Inspiration 2.
His next venture was the Flying Classroom, an interactive STEM+ experiential learning adventure that took place while he flew around the world again in a Hawker corporate jet to teach the fundamentals of science, engineering, and technology. Between September and November 2014, he conducted sixteen ground, sea, and air expeditions, exploring real-life applications of STEM topics as well as history, geography, social studies, and language arts.
Now, Irving continues his efforts to inspire middle and high school students, including underprivileged youth, to pursue careers in engineering and aviation, frequently speaking at schools and events nationwide. He says that “inspiration is a common denominator,” where economic status, race, and other factors disappear. “You can inspire a child to do anything,” he says, as he recalls building race cars and hovercrafts with children from all backgrounds and skill sets. When children are inspired to do something, they don’t ask the question, How much math do I have to learn to do this? They just learn it. Children previously discouraged from learning or disinterested in the classroom suddenly show interest and are fully engaged in learning.10
He encourages children to set lofty goals and strive to achieve them by telling them: “They told me I was too young. They told me I didn’t have enough money… They told me I’d never come back home. Well, guess what?”11
To this day, he has traveled to more than fifty countries, conducted thirty STEM expeditions and is constantly on the lookout for ways to push students to reach for their dreams, as he did. And he still stays in touch with Gary Robinson, his original inspiration, now mentor.
We looked closely at Captain Irving’s story and other examples to understand the truths of inspiration, including
• Inspiration is highly personal and evolves over time. What inspires us is as unique as our fingerprints and is often determined by or traced back to a seminal event from early in our lives.
• We have agency and choice about inspiration in our own lives. Through intentional practice, we can take steps to spark and sustain inspiration when we need it. It is within our control to a large degree.
• There are reliable engines that spark inspiration. Inspiration engines vary by individual and can be sparked by the people we surround ourselves with or by the circumstances or environment we put ourselves in.
• Inspiration can be sustained over time. By consciously activating and using it, like a muscle, you can evoke inspiration more often, more readily. You’ll also be able to make bursts of inspiration last longer.
• Inspiration is contagious. As with other emotions, you can become inspired by others’ inspiration, just as they can be inspired by yours.12
What inspires each of us is highly personal and unique. In some cases, what inspires us can be traced to an event that occurred early in our lives.
Captain Irving’s decision to pursue a career in aviation grew out of curiosity with planes and flying that was sparked by a chance conversation with a United Airlines pilot in his parents’ store during his teens. Other teens may have had similar conversations with pilots—even Captain Robinson—and yet not had the same spark of curiosity that Irving did.
Likewise, filmmaker Steven Spielberg’s viewing of the movie Lawrence of Arabia13 during high school “set me on my journey,” he says. “It just uplifted me… provoked me to know more about how movies are made… got me excited about making movies someday.” It’s almost universally understood that Lawrence of Arabia is a great movie, but few viewers are moved by it in the same way Spielberg was.
What sparks us can have an unexpected and lasting impact on who we are and who we become. Early experiences can fan the flames of curiosity, opening doors to opportunities we could never have imagined. These experiences—formal or chance encounters—have the power to transform us and to influence the decisions and career paths we choose as adults.
Research tells us that emotions attached to experiences can enhance our memories and details surrounding them.14 The stronger the emotions associated with the experience, the more vivid the memory, presumably making it more likely to impact our subsequent thinking and choices.
Although we all may recognize inspiration when we experience it, where it comes from and how it shows up in our lives is different for each of us. Sources of inspiration are unique to each person. In this way, the roots of inspiration are like a fingerprint: they are consistent, mostly stable over time, and individual. No two people have the same fingerprints—even identical twins—just as no two people are inspired consistently by the same thing.
“I equate inspiration with this phrase of being ‘lit up.’ Lit up for me means there is a moment of grace, a moment of ah-ha and I would even go as far to say a moment of euphoria. That is inspiration for me. It’s powerful, who wouldn’t want to be around that?”
—Claude Silver, Chief Heart Officer, VaynerMedia
Some are inspired by challenges, obstacles, and hardship, like trauma surgeon Dr. Shea Gregg, MD, who is inspired to perform at his best by seeing “low blood pressure, ongoing bleeding, or other signs of patient extremis,” as it activates his urgency to mobilize his team to save a life, he told us.15 Grieving the death of his son, Ryan, Dr. Joe Kasper tapped into his grief as a source of inspiration that led him to develop a model and platform to connect people who are grieving.16 Devika Bulchandani, the newly installed president of McCann New York, said she is inspired by chaos.17 Derek Ohly, COO of Peach, is inspired by the memory of his father painting every day: that drumbeat practice of his father provided insights that inform how he runs his company every day.18
Some people are inspired by silence or the quiet beauty found in nature, while others are energized and fueled by the hustle and bustle of city life. Some of us need community or other people, while other individuals are rejuvenated and more creative and find inspiration when given time to be alone with their thoughts.
Although inspiration is unique to each of us, and is often stable over time, what inspires us can also evolve over time. New experiences, new encounters with others, new exposure to ways of thinking or believing can all push what sparks us into new territory. Just as we grow and evolve as people, what inspires us evolves as well.
Although many people think inspiration is something that happens to us—that we are suddenly struck by it, often out of the blue—the truth is that we can impact how often we are sparked by inspiration and how much we sustain it in our day-to-day lives.
Captain Irving, for example, is able to continuously reinspire himself and his love of flying through his work with an organization he founded that encourages young people to consider studying and pursuing careers in aviation. Irving shares his love of flying and is reinspired by the curiosity of the children who go through his program.
Intentionally choosing to become inspired leads to behavior and attitude changes. These choices include the things we do, perhaps even subconsciously, to give ourselves a boost—to make conditions more favorable for inspiration to occur. For example, professionals who work from home often opt to dress in professional attire rather than sit around in sweat clothes all day, to change their mindset about what they can get done that day, a concept called enclothed cognition.19 Laying the groundwork for inspiration may include steps we take to lift our mood or to give ourselves a different perspective, to help us see things with a new perspective, such as fresh-cut flowers in a pretty vase, pushing a little harder than usual on your morning workout, or sharing your daily meditation with a friend. Every day, we can endeavor with hope and deliberate choice to bring more inspiration into our lives and affect our well-being.
Surely, our overall belief systems make a difference here. The extent to which inspiraton is accessible may be affected by our worldview. Jer Clifton, founding director of the Primals Initiative and one of our interviewees, studies our primal world beliefs as our most general impressions and expectations of reality. In our conversations with Clifton, he conveyed how those who have generally greater optimism about the world will likely find inspiration easier to access and sustain, while sustained pessimism might make inspiration harder to reach.20
Regardless of your worldview, first you make the choice to be inspired; second, you deliberately zero in on what inspires you. The power of choice is embodied in Jenna Bell, one of our interviewees, who told us about how she contracted a virus that led to a heart transplant. Bell was able to isolate for us the specific moment, presurgery, when she made a deliberate choice to do everything she could to maintain the little health and energy she had remaining and inspire herself to continue through what would turn out to be an almost two-month hospital stay. Without direction from her physicians, she walked hospital halls for four hours a day as part of her rehabilitation; she monitored her diet; she built family-like relationships with her nurses; she even decorated her hospital room in a way that made her feel more comfortable and inspired.21
Choosing a pathway to inspiration starts with self-awareness. We’ve witnessed aha moments—the realization that yes, I can create inspiration in my life or work—in many of our clients. As soon as clients accept that they can choose to be inspired, they are on a path toward it. When we asked interviewees about times in their lives they have actively chosen inspiration, their descriptions show great self-awareness. People know what inspires them. For example, Chuck Firlotte, president and CEO of Aquarion Water Company, made a conscious choice to spend more time meditating; he also talked about taking in the beauty and peace of wooded trails while exercising with his friend Charlie.22 Keith Yamashita, cofounder of SYPartners, a creative firm that specializes in organizational transformation, created a ritual of buying and reading a stack of magazines and then carving out time to sit with them, clipping pictures and other inspiring excerpts to fuel his ongoing inspiration.23 These are all examples of individuals recognizing the opportunity to inspire themselves and choosing to capitalize on it.
Once you’ve made the choice to be inspired, there are many ways to reliably generate sparks, including states of mind, behaviors, and interactions. Irving’s inspiration to fly was sparked by meeting Captain Gary Robinson. Irving’s inspiration to educate was and continues to be sparked by his realization that he could create opportunities for young people who might not otherwise have them; he could spark their interest in flying to rewrite possibilities in their lives. Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky at Airbnb were inspired to create the company by reframing the way they looked at their own home—seeing it as a potential guest residence rather than just where they lived. Adam Neumann at WeWork was also sparked by seeing an existing space in a new way, specifically recognizing that shared work spaces could meet the needs of the increasing number of workers not affiliated with an organization but still seeking connection, community, and purpose.
Though the sparks of inspiration here are specific to the people and circumstances involved, they illustrate ways to spark inspiration that we’ve heard again and again in our research. There are reliable, repeatable methods to generate that critical initial spark of inspiration. We refer to these methods as the engines of inspiration. There are eighteen engines of inspiration that fall into three categories: sparked by you, sparked by others, and sparked by situations.
While these engines are born out of our research and our work with clients, they are also consistent with roughly twenty years of research in the field of positive psychology. This field, as originated by Dr. Martin Seligman in 1998, concerns itself with human thriving and flourishing.24 Positive psychology uses PERMA, which stands for the five domains and pathways through which people create well-being: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement.25 The PERMA framework helps us understand how and why many of the engines inspire us.
As we have discussed, the initial spark of inspiration need not be a fleeting emotion. Just like you can take action to spark inspiration, you can take action to sustain it.
“Inspiration takes work. It doesn’t always come naturally, and I find as a leader I have to work at it. I have to be conscious, I have to push at it. But it’s so worth it.”
—Cliff Bogue, MD, Chair of Pediatrics, Yale School of Medicine and Chief Medical Officer, Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital
Our research expands on this concept, combining the ecstatic feelings of invincibility and possibility with intentional practice: first knowing what inspires you and actively seeking it, looking to the engines to activate it, and building in habits along with support and accountability that help new behaviors last. Sustainable inspiration is a resource, something you can tap into and generate on command to yield extraordinary results.
So how can you sustain inspiration? There are a number of ways, listed below and offered in detail in Part III:
Resparking or remixing the engines of inspiration. The eighteen engines are sources of inspiration, so if you want to manifest it and retain it, refer back to what has made you feel inspired in the past. Also, consider new engines to try or ways to combine or mix engines.
Direct inspiration to desired outcomes. When a spark of inspiration is used to ignite successful action and results in the world, it begets more inspiration. Humans thrive on achievement, whatever they define that to be. One of the best ways to sustain inspiration is to take action in ways that are known to drive successful outcomes.
Use boosters to advance your inspiration. Progress and relationships are great motivators and can enhance your ability to sustain inspiration. Track, measure, and celebrate progress toward goals to keep yourself inspired. Also look for friends, family members, and coaches to partner with you to keep your inspiration high. Social support from people who care about you is invaluable, and coaches can help clear away obstacles that are interfering with you achieving your objectives.
Manage your energy to keep it positive and uplifted. This includes physical energy, emotional energy, and even cognitive energy (or mindset). Inspiration is a perspective and a positive emotion that is easier to experience when you’re feeling energized, open, and joyful. When you have low energy or are feeling depleted in any of these domains, it is much harder to generate positive energy.
Again, intentional practice is about working inspiration like a muscle. The more you refer back to your inspiration engines and use them to generate positive emotions and creativity, the more easily you’ll be able to evoke inspiration at will. Consistently putting yourself in the mindset and situation to spark inspiration will also make it possible to extend those bursts of inspiration until they last much longer. This is not easy or casual work; it takes commitment. This practice may feel a lot like focused work, or deep work, as Cal Newport26 calls it in his book by the same name, where you set the stage for concentrating on what you need to accomplish.
Through each of these steps, you can develop the ability to call forth inspiration when you need it most, and then hang on to it for an extended period of time.
Not only can inspiration become sustainable over time, it can also be shared with and spread to others. Like other emotions,27 inspiration is contagious. And shared inspiration is powerful. Inspiration can be spread throughout teams, groups, and organizations and help them to thrive. It is exciting when it goes viral!
Effective leaders know this and are thoughtful about how they share inspiration with those around them and throughout their organizations.
How and why is inspiration contagious? When a person feels inspired, he or she expresses these emotions through verbal or body language. People who are around an inspired person will pick up on the verbal and body language communication of inspiration and their mirror neurons will start to fire and replicate the same emotions of inspiration.28
This phenomenon occurs because humans have what is called an open limbic system: we pick up on one another’s cues and are impacted emotionally by one another. From an adaptive point of view, the open limbic system and mirror neurons are what allow social bonding and trust to occur. A classic example of this is a mother whose open limbic system allows her to emotionally read the cues of her baby and understand her baby’s needs.29
Within groups and teams, leaders have incredible opportunities to foster inspiration contagion. We have all had the experience of being around someone who is vocally negative or critical within a group or team; soon the entire group or team is feeling irritated, critical, and negative. Inspiration spreads similarly, though in a positive way.
We discovered these five key ideas about inspiration in our research. Knowing them helps us understand the roots of inspiration and why it’s so important to us, fundamentally, as human beings. What we hear again and again is that people want to contribute in positive and meaningful ways in the world; they want to have a positive impact. Inspiration has guided Irving throughout his life. Similarly, inspiration can provide an important compass to guide individuals on the right path and to help them evolve over time and discover how they can contribute to the world in meaningful and positive ways.