CHAPTER THREE

SPARKED BY YOU

“The object isn’t to create art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”

—Robert Henri, artist

What can we learn about inspiration from the owner of a taco truck in Los Angeles? As this chapter unveils, he used personal engines of inspiration to revolutionize his industry.

Chef Wes Avila, the founder, in 2012, of Guerrilla Tacos, the L.A. food truck sensation, was a sous chef at Le Comptoir, a gourmet French restaurant. At that time, the restaurant only gave him work four days a week, and he needed more money to cover his bills. Prompted by sheer necessity for survival, he pulled out the last $167 in his bank account. With the help of his wife, Dr. Tanya Mueller, who was in graduate school at the time, he set up a simple food cart to sell tacos on the streets of L.A.¹

Avila is part of a wave of L.A. chefs who blend gourmet flavors with everyday comfort food, sometimes leaving jobs at high-end restaurants to serve in food trucks.

AN INSPIRED IDEA

Avila, a child of one immigrant parent, grew up in Pico Rivera, east of Los Angeles. His mother, Judy, cooked for the family every day while he was growing up, shaping his appreciation for simple well-seasoned food. When he was fifteen, his mother passed away, and his father took over the cooking and taught Avila some new approaches to traditional dishes.² Although he was identified as a gifted child, he said in our interview with him that, after his mother’s passing, he lost his way for a while and stopped pursuing his passions.³ For seven years, he worked with his father, brother, and uncle in a box factory, driving a forklift. When he met his now wife, she asked him “What do you want to do?” and he replied, “I don’t want to be a forklift driver. I love to cook.” “Why don’t you do that?” she asked. He decided to finally pursue something that had been a hidden passion of his for years, taking out loans to enroll in the California School of Culinary Arts.⁴

His first job out of culinary school was under Chef Walter Manzke at L’Auberge Carmel, inspiring his gourmet tastes; he later went to France to study further under Alain Ducasse at Le Centre de Le Formacion.⁵ He relentlessly pursued his passion for culinary arts until he had his breakthrough idea of using tacos as a medium for blending the formative flavors of his parents’ cooking with his newly honed craft in French cuisine and selling this unique food on the streets. The challenge of blending two different worlds and taking an entirely new perspective as a street food vendor was the spark of inspiration.

Featuring tacos as the “vessel” for his unconventional ingredients, Avila’s high-quality food with its unusual flavors was a hit, and fans would line up around the block for the chance to witness his signature talent. However, without the proper equipment or permits, he found himself moving to different locations to sell his highly sought-after gourmet tacos, dodging the cops to avoid potential fines. “We were kind of bending the law, not necessarily breaking the law. We had to move around so we wouldn’t get caught—you know, like guerrilla warfare. That’s why we had that name because we’d be in random alleys, random streets, being kind of renegade like that.”⁶ Avila’s wife came up with the name Guerrilla Tacos, which eventually moved from a cart to a fully legal taco truck.

Avila’s willingness to rewrite the rules has paid off. In 2018, he opened up a brick-and-mortar restaurant in the downtown L.A. arts district,⁷ and he has expanded his reach by coauthoring with Richard Parks III his first cookbook, Guerrilla Tacos.

Chef Wes returns to his original source of inspiration—blending his family cooking with his gourmet training—almost daily when he goes into his restaurant and gets ready for the day with his team. He describes what they bring in as new material—such as a fresh fish, a whole pig, or a unique vegetable from a farm that no other restaurant has access to. The challenge of figuring out how to use his talents to translate this material into extraordinary and novel cuisine is what creatively activates him.⁸

INSPIRATION STARTS WITH YOU

Avila’s story showcases many different ways that he personally activates inspiration in his work. Similarly, you can deliberately increase the likelihood that inspiration will emerge by purposely igniting six engines of inspiration that come from your personal experiences, emotions, and mindsets.

The six engines of personal inspiration are

1. Connecting to and voicing your values and purpose

2. Using your strengths

3. Progressing toward and achieving success

4. Using your whole brain with unstructured time

5. Developing new perspectives

6. Activating body movement and presence

While all engines are effective in sparking your inspiration, some have greater potency as they draw from the core of who you are, what you stand for, and what you have to offer. The top three on this list—which are about your purpose, strengths, and achievements—are different in nature from the rest of the list. Your passions and your calling are seeded in these engines, so they pack more punch in terms of inspiring you.

1. CONNECTING TO AND VOICING VALUES AND PURPOSE

Inspiration can be sparked by looking inward to your deeply held beliefs, which reflect your purpose, mission, meaning, values, or your faith—your inner why. Your why consists of the central motivating aims of your life, or, more simply, the reason you get up in the morning. You can actually have more than one why. In fact, you may have a different why for each different facet of your life. Your why influences your behavior, shapes your goals, and offers a sense of direction and meaning. For some people, their why is connected to their vocation—meaningful, satisfying work. For others, it lies in their responsibilities to their family or friends or to areas outside work, such as their faith, hobbies, or community.

Finding meaning and purpose in work has emerged as a top priority for many employees, the most prominent group being the millennial generation. Today’s employees thirst for meaning and purpose in their jobs. As Aaron Hurst addresses in The Purpose Economy,⁹ gone are the days when compensation alone motivated employees. Workers today want to feel that their contributions at work also serve the greater good, that their work is connected to their why.

It turns out that employees who see their jobs as “integral to their lives and their identity”¹⁰ are generally more satisfied with that work, reports Amy Wrzesniewski, PhD, professor of organizational behavior at Yale University’s School of Management. Wrzesniewski and University of Michigan’s Jane Dutton’s research found that employees who were able to cast their job tasks in terms of their own values, including a hospital janitor who saw her why as about serving “her patients,”¹¹ are far more satisfied and fulfilled and more inspired to take action in new ways in their work. For example, the hospital janitor changed the artwork and plants in her patients’ rooms each day to provide them with new stimulation. She even broke hospital protocol to walk patients’ families to various parts of the hospital to ease the families’ stress.

Our interview with Avila revealed how he activates his values and purpose in his work. First and foremost, he sees himself as a creative: “Inspiration is the drive to want to create, to reinterpret, reinvent, and to put forth something that is meaningful in my industry.” He said everything in his restaurant is “there on purpose,” from the graffiti art on the walls done by local artists to the raw ingredients and materials in the food. He emphasized his values around mental health and balance in an industry where self-sacrifice is a “badge of honor.” He provides all employees with good benefits and insurance so they feel taken care of, remembering how his father took only one week and three sick days off during his entire work life—one week when he was seriously injured and one day each for the births of his three children. Avila values balance and makes it part of his purpose to promote this value within his industry.¹²

“Inspiration is the drive to want to create, to reinterpret, reinvent, and to put forth something that is meaningful in my industry.”

—Wes Avila, Chef/Owner, Guerrilla Tacos

Looking inward and connecting to your own values, purpose, and personal why is a powerhouse source of inspiration—in fact, out of all the engines of inspiration, it may be the most potent of all. It can be daunting to try to winnow everything that’s important to you down to a single list of values or one purpose statement. Start by asking yourself: Where do I make my greatest contribution and why is it important to me? You can ask yourself this question across many different domains of your life: work, family, friends, and the like. Although your purpose may overlap across domains, there may also be distinctions between certain areas that are significant. Articulating your values and purposes is an important first step to connecting to opportunities that inspire you.

2. USING YOUR STRENGTHS

What makes you distinctly great can also be a source of inspiration. Both Dr. Chris Peterson and Dr. Martin Seligman, pioneering researchers in the field of positive psychology, have studied how people use their character strengths to make a positive impact in the world. In their research, they have found twenty-four distinct character strengths that are consistently valued across cultures as virtuous attributes, such as creativity, kindness, hope, love of learning, and fairness.¹³ People who use one or more of their character strengths in their work regularly tend to be more engaged and have greater well-being at work.¹⁴ In addition to elements of character, strengths can also be based on talents or skills.

Here is a thought experiment you can try to assess your own strengths, passions, and values. Think back on a time when you made a contribution that made you feel really proud. Maybe you had an innovative thought, maybe you helped someone, maybe you performed at a greater level than you usually do. What were you doing?

Recall the moment in detail—perhaps jot down a few notes to help you make it really vivid again in your mind. Now think about why you are proud of that moment. What does it mean to you? What makes it more important than other times when you’ve done well? What strengths were you using?

Your answers to these last questions likely reflect your personal and professional strengths and talents. Using these more often and more deliberately will be inspiring to you, whether you are already inspired or are seeking new inspiration.

As authors and entrepreneurs, each of us savors the opportunity to put our strengths into practice. Allison’s creativity, perspective, and curiosity come to life through her leadership and executive coaching work, a great passion and source of inspiration for her.

Jen’s appreciation for beauty, excellence, and creativity—a signature character strength of hers—is activated when she appraises physical presence and comportment, especially through dressing. A practitioner of embodied cognition, she takes delight in dressing deliberately for the energy and leadership styles required during her day. She also coaches others to organize their wardrobes to create the same. Exercising her strengths in this way brings her great inspiration.

For Sandy, teaching her students taps into her purpose, which is to help people become their best selves. When she reflects on her significant contributions, they almost always happen in the classroom, where she exercises her signature strengths of teamwork, justice, humor, and appreciation of beauty and excellence. Being in the classroom is inspirational for her.

Chef Wes crafted his current work around his strengths—his creativity, identified as a strength at a young age, combined with his gritty love of a challenge and his passion for cooking. Instigated by financial necessity, he crafted work that capitalizes on his greatest strengths.

Like Chef Wes, it can make sense to organize your work and home life to naturally activate your strengths more. Consider job crafting,¹⁵ in which an employee customizes his or her job by actively changing tasks and relationships at work. It’s sort of like taking your job to the spa to reshape it around your strengths—which involves mapping your time, attention, and energies according to your top values, strengths, and passions and adjusting your role at work to better fit these. What if your job itself could be a more reliable source of inspiration every day?¹⁶

3. PROGRESSING TOWARD AND ACHIEVING SUCCESS

When we set inspiring goals, make progress toward them, and accomplish something truly phenomenal, it inspires us. Inherent in this is the ability to choose our goals, drive our own actions, and create our own impact. In the wake of our striving, progress, and achievement, we recognize even more possibility and feel even more confident. Achievement is known to be an essential motivator in humans¹⁷ as it taps into mastery and self-efficacy, basic psychological needs closely tied to well-being.¹⁸

“Why I come rushing into the doors here every morning is because it’s a purposeful enterprise and we’re having success. Success is inspiring.”

—Tom Kolditz, PhD, retired Brigadier General, US Army, and Founding Director of the Doerr Institute for New Leaders, Rice University

During one of our very first workshops with clients, we asked one of the participants what inspired him, and he said: “I just want to do great work and be awesome!” Our interviews with leaders, such as Gary Garfield, retired CEO of Bridgestone, and Tom Kolditz, PhD, retired brigadier general, US Army, and founding director of the Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University, echoed meaningful achievement as being a major driver of their inspiration.¹⁹ Kolditz’s organization is building one of the most comprehensive leader development programs ever launched at a university, impacting thousands of graduate and undergraduate students at Rice University. Imagine the cascading positive impact of hundreds of students given an executive-quality, evidence-based leader development experience, including one-on-one professional leadership coaching.²⁰ It’s a pioneering endeavor and quite an accomplishment.

Interestingly, striving toward progress and achievement was mentioned by some as a source of inspiration, starting at a young age. Bill Jennings, CEO of Reading (Pennsylvania) Hospital, proudly hangs a framed picture of his Boy Scout badges in his office: “I’m very proud—that’s my totem pole. Scouting had a very significant influence on my childhood and probably has a lot of imprints on leadership development also—it was mostly about goal attainment for me. I never sat down and said, ‘Gosh I’m just going to develop leadership skills.’ I had no interest in that. I wanted to go camping and scuba diving and stuff like that. I was really motivated by advancement and learning and getting the token of the learning. The big prize was becoming an Eagle Scout, and there was never, ever any doubt that I was going to become an Eagle Scout.” Today, he prides himself in furthering his goals of improving the hospital system. What inspires him most is when the system makes meaningful shifts in quality of service and patient safety metrics.²¹

What achievements are you most proud of in your life and work? Looking ahead, what are you striving to accomplish and what progress points can you celebrate along the way?

In Chapter 7, “Direct Inspiration to Desired Outcomes,” we will dive deeper into positive impact and results. Striving for goals, making progress toward them, and achieving them can not only spark inspiration but also sustain it over time.

4. USING YOUR WHOLE BRAIN WITH UNSTRUCTURED TIME

Instead of trying to force new ideas through concentrated effort, you can allow inspiration to strike when your brain takes a sabbatical, or when you give yourself the time and space to do something relatively routine or mundane. This can allow ideas to emerge from outside consciousness. When you stop deliberately problem solving or actively thinking, new ideas or solutions are more likely to emerge. That’s the value of unstructured time.

Mentioned by many as a source of inspiration, this is not an unusual occurrence, and neuroscience backs this phenomenon up. Dartmouth College psychology professor, and one of our interviewees, Dr. Christian Jernstedt, an expert in the neuroscience of learning, explains that some of our best ideas emerge when our conscious minds are engaged in a task but not intently focused on solving a problem. For example, this often happens while taking a shower, taking a long drive in the car, or casually listening to a presentation. As the conscious mind passively focuses on a mundane task, the hidden mind—which may carry out nearly 95 percent of the brain’s activity—can reveal results of our thinking outside conscious awareness to solve problems, synthesize ideas, and spark new ones.²²

According to Jernstedt, multitasking decreases opportunities for inspiration; it is typically time sharing from a brain perspective and can get in the way of our recognizing our thinking outside conscious awareness. We need to plan time to incubate ideas, and we can put plans in place to create unstructured time. Then the time itself can allow more to surface than an active, forced, conscious effort to solve a problem or come up with an idea.²³

When new concepts appear, they are related to subjects we have previously pondered. Nancy Andreasen, a neuroscientist and neuropsychiatrist who has studied creative geniuses for the last several decades, explained in a 2014 article in The Atlantic: “When eureka moments occur, they tend to be precipitated by long periods of preparation and incubation, and to strike when the mind is relaxed.”²⁴ We need moments of this type of reverie to allow our minds to wander so that our unconscious minds can emerge.²⁵

What types of situations give your brain a break? For some, the perfect cocktail for unstructured think time is a professional event, like a seminar or conference—something that takes people out of their typical work environment and puts them into new surroundings filled with novel ideas and inspiring people. New surroundings like these, even when they’re work related, can provide ample time for mind-wandering reverie.

For Allison, the annual coaching conference at Harvard is one such opportunity. She says, “I find myself bombarded with unexpected ideas. In the middle of listening to a phenomenal speaker, my mind wanders off for a few seconds, and then bam!—a novel spark flies into my brain that infuses me with excitement, even euphoria. Some of my best writing and blog ideas, content ideas for clients, come to me at conferences.”

Many have their best ideas in the shower or folding laundry or hiking up a mountain. One of our inspiration interviewees, Andrea Goulet, CEO of Corgibytes, says that driving in the car is when she feels sparks. Chef Wes in our interview said that the single most potent source of inspiration for him is traveling on vacation. He said that something about the new locations and unstructured time allows for inspiration to “fall into my lap.” From there, in order for it to snowball, he needs to “jump on it and add fuel” by translating his ideas into action after he returns.²⁶

Think back on the types of situations that give your brain a break from typical activities and that give you the space to think more freely. This is where sparks emerge. What are the brain sabbaticals that work best for you? Vacations? Long runs? Plane travel?

5. DEVELOPING NEW PERSPECTIVES

Learning new information—through reading, taking classes, or simply being exposed to new ideas in everyday conversation, events, or collaborations—is another pathway to inspiration. A spark can be ignited when you combine existing ideas in new ways, or combine new ideas with what you already know, providing an entirely new perspective.

University of Pennsylvania professor Adam Grant, author of Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, describes a phenomenon called “vuja de.”²⁷ Where déjà vu is the familiar sensation that you have previously experienced your current situation, vuja de “is the reverse—we face something familiar, but we see it with a fresh perspective that enables us to gain new insight from old problems.”

Take the Wright brothers, who are credited with pioneering flight. What isn’t quite as widely known is that Orville and Wilbur Wright first ran a bicycle shop and were considered the local experts on the repair of bikes. It was that intimate knowledge of how a bicycle functions that sparked a new approach to flying. The Wrights applied a number of bicycle concepts to the design of a plane, confirms the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum,²⁸ thereby finding a solution to many of the problems surrounding flight.

For Wes Avila, his exposure to the new flavors and cooking techniques of French cuisine, particularly when he studied in France, changed his approach to the traditional tacos from his childhood. Likewise, Steve Jobs, from Apple, made great strides in the field of computer typography thanks to a calligraphy class he audited at Reed College. The study of calligraphy opened Jobs’s eyes to the importance and possibility of typefaces. Said Jobs,²⁹ “If I had never dropped out [of college], I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.”

Engineering opportunities to see things in a different way is a useful approach to igniting inspiration. Artists of all types do this often, but you don’t have to be an artist to create opportunities to think in new ways. Consider an area where you feel stuck and uninspired. Imagine yourself looking down on it from a 30K-foot view. From way up high, what do you see that you didn’t notice before? What moves you? Or think of a person who is the opposite of you in many ways: How might they see the situation where you feel stuck? In addition, consider shaking up your normal way of looking at things through exposure to new learning, ideas, culture—take a language class, talk to new people, travel somewhere interesting, go to a museum or concert, try a new restaurant.

6. ACTIVATING BODY MOVEMENT AND PRESENCE

Bodies are powerful vehicles for inspiration. How we move, how we dress, how we carry ourselves, our body language—all impact our energy. Our physical energy is inextricably linked to our emotional capacity, which is then linked to inspiration. Physical activity and presence enact chemical changes in endorphins, adrenaline, and other hormones that boost our emotions and spark our inspiration.

You may have experienced times when physical movement sparked new ideas. That mental jolt that comes with physical motion is why many people stop what they’re doing and take a walk or go for a run to push past mental blocks they may be experiencing. Inspiration can work in the same way: physical activity can inspire, generating new ideas or solutions.

When you exercise, your brain releases endorphins, which reduce your perception of pain, as well as serotonin, which enhances your mood. These brain chemicals reenergize you. And since low energy can block or prevent inspiration, taking steps, literally, to generate endorphins and serotonin can have an immediate impact on your energy level and mental state.

Numerous studies confirm this energy-physical activity link. In one reported in the British Journal of Sports Medicine,³⁰ Hannah Steinberg, along with six other researchers, found that exercise improved creativity and levels of happiness. An article in Scientific American³¹ explored the reasons for enhanced cognitive functioning after a walk, explaining that physical activity improves blood flow, which can activate the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory.

Some companies, including Johnson & Johnson,³² have accepted the importance of physical activity and encourage employees to refuel their energy through physical activity as a regular part of the workday, rather than squeezing in exercise during free time. Called corporate athletes at Johnson & Johnson, these workers see their activity routines as an integral part of their roles as leaders and necessary for them to perform at their best.

A number of high-profile businesspeople subscribe to the exercise-as-inspiration link.³³ According to Business Insider, billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson believes he gets an additional four hours of productivity a day thanks to his regular workouts. Vogue editor Anna Wintour plays tennis many mornings before work to jump-start her brain and her energy level. Former president Barack Obama runs several miles a day. The majority of our senior-level coaching clients have a regular movement or exercise regime that benefits them similarly.

Companies are also conducting walking meetings as a way to spark inspiration and innovation in the moment.³⁴ LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are just a few organizations that have embraced the power of physical activity when conversing and collaborating.³⁵ Rather than remaining sedentary around a conference table, employees now get up and walk for twenty to twenty-five minutes around headquarters while discussing the business at hand.

Together, these engines of inspiration are a road map to finding unleashed possibility and rational invincibility within ourselves. They show us that we can take responsibility for our own inspiration and activate it from within.