The Secret Life of Inspiration

I went to listen to Andre Agassi talking about his hugely popular autobiography "Open" this Friday afternoon at the Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto. Agassi has always been my favorite on and off the tennis court, because I saw a vulnerability in his eyes that I related to long back. And now I know a lot more about why I identified with him in the first place. Among a lot of other things, his need to feel 'inspired' to achieve something is uncannily similar to what goes on in my mind many a time.

Agassi reveals in the book that he envied his arch rival Pete Sampras because of Pete's 'dullness.' "I wish I could emulate his spectacular lack of inspiration, and his peculiar lack of need for inspiration," Agassi says. I recognize a deep frustration beneath this seemingly self-serving (and frankly, somewhat insulting towards his esteemed opponent) comment. Only a person who is in a constant pursuit of inspiration will understand that how you wish you were not so dependent on inspiration, because the lack of need for it is so much simpler.

I myself have struggled with my dependence on inspiration. I have let myself feel crippled when I left myself having to deal with multiple projects at various stages of unfinishedness, because I kept moving onto the 'next' project in search of inspiration. Perhaps we all need to cultivate an 'autopilot' mode to go through the days when we are not feeling specially productive, but still need to tackle the day's deliverables. Somehow accomplishing something even at your most uninspired ground state often self-triggers the cycle of inspiration. I now consciously try that self-triggering process by sticking a little longer to the most uninspiring of the projects to get it moving rather than dumping it altogether.

The other intriguing dichotomy about inspiration is that your own uninspired moment can be inspiring for others. When you are relatively less spirited yourself, you often listen to others or accommodate others better, and they feel encouraged and inspired. I have experienced this first hand in various ways. I tend to reach out more and be more sympathetic to others when I am looking for inspiration myself. Me feeling the lack of inspiration has sometimes resulted in some substantive charitable work, or sometimes in something as simple as me being a better mom/wife at home.

Coming back to Agassi, I was very touched by how candidly he admitted that tennis didn't feel inspiring to him for a very long time. But then he reached a point where he either had to walk away or choose tennis--which was his life, whether he admitted that or not. "I didn't walk away, and I chose it," he said. "Once I chose my life, once I took ownership of my life, the scale started to get balanced with what it was giving me. ...Tennis gave me [my] school; tennis then gave me my wife; tennis then gave me the time to raise my children and to live with them, and then it wasn't lost on me. ...It no longer only came with a price."

I must thank Agassi for confirming that the pursuit for inspiration is such an integral and organic part of one's being and evolving. He has inspired me for sure.