Inspiration is perishable

"Sparks of inspiration" is an astute metaphor. A spark can turn into a glorious fire, but only if it immediately gets in contact with some kindling, which can burn and produce enough heat for bigger logs to light up. 

Think of how many times you have had compelling ideas, but didn't act on them. Most of our sparks of inspiration just die, without kindling and logs. Eventually, we even stop paying attention to the sparks and the sparks just stop. Why bother? 

What a tragedy it is to not follow our inspiration and to not engage our uniquely extraordinary capacity for creation! 

I have my share of unrequited inspiration, but I like how a recent spark turned into a fire. 

Last week, I had an idea to build a newsletter that automatically summarizes top Hacker News posts and comments. A spark! 

If I had tried to develop a full program to do it with my rusty programming skills, it'd have been too overwhelming and a slog, and the spark would have died. Before throwing in a log, I needed twigs first; something I could do quickly to build on this inspiration. So instead, I prototyped a newsletter manually in 15 minutes using ChatGPT. It was promising...the spark had turned into a small fire. 

That gave me enough momentum to write a local program to do it automatically and print the results to the console. Fun, and substantially easier to do today, thanks to ChatGPT! The fire was growing. 

Now that I had a local program to generate the summaries, I tried to create a way for people to sign up and email them daily and automatically, but I ran into a few hurdles. It was too big a log and almost suffocated the fire. Luckily, I decided I could manually run the program everyday and copy-paste the results into a Substack publication, which offers excellent newsletter functionality out-of-the-box (but no API to publish posts automatically). That gave me a nice working prototype. I had gotten to a MVP not by comprising on functionality, but by compromising on operational effort, which is a much better way to test demand for the concept and attract/retain users. I shared it with a couple of friends and they liked it, and within a day, I had 15 subscribers! The fire is strong now, and I'm ready to throw in a few bigger logs!  

Our sparks of inspiration and ideas are precious, especially those that keep tugging at us passionately and repeatedly. Acting on them gives us joy and agency. And as you keep buying lottery tickets, you will likely end up with something life-changing. Regard your sparks as gifts that they are and kindle them gently until they turn into a fire.