A thought on waiting (maybe in vain) for lightning to strike

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
— Jack London

The stroke of genius, the bolt of blue, the eureka moment: so much of our culture has various threads about the supposed suddenness of when inspiration happens.

Except, as Jack London gets at here, it often doesn’t happen to you; you happen to it. Or rather you make it happen. This aligns with various perspectives about working hard, or simply getting started.

Woody Allen famously joked that 80 per cent of success is showing up, which can be interpreted in different ways, including that sometimes just being present will do the job. I think it also is about, literally, showing up. Doing the work.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers was a bestseller in part because of he popularized the concept that 10,000 hours of work helped turn the Beatles from wannabe rockers in Liverpool to proficient musicians by the time Beatlemania exploded. I think this builds on Jack London’s observation. The Beatles to me no doubt had true genius, but they also hunted down their inspirations, and worked ferociously hard. Here’s an interview with Gladwell from 2009: