How to Inspire
For the past two weeks, I’ve been alone in Lisbon.
My partner has been away traveling, and without shared presence or familiar routines to anchor the day, my calendar opened up. There were fewer dinners to prepare, fewer invitations to accept, and fewer movements around the city to make. The stillness wasn’t silent, but it was quieter than usual. And in that unexpected space, something unexpected happened.
It didn’t begin with an intention. There was no plan to retreat or reset. But with fewer inputs from the outside, more attention turned inward. I found myself drawn to a new project—an idea I’d been circling for a little while but hadn’t completely stepped into. It's a different kind of creative effort than this blog, but something about it called for exploration. Slowly, then suddenly, I found myself deep inside of it.
I didn’t think of it as work. In fact, I avoided calling it that. Maybe because I wasn't doing it for outcomes. There was no performance to measure, no deadline to meet, no one else waiting beside me. And yet, I was waking up buzzing, energized, thinking about it, and only it. Not with worry, but with possibility.
It felt more like play—like the kind of play I remember from when I was twenty and building my business for the first time. Where the effort comes not from pressure, but from imagination.
Some days, I’d spend hours entirely focused. No phone. No notifications. No email. No stock market. Well fed, well hydrated, and alone with my thoughts. Books piled beside me. YouTube videos queued up. Podcasts paused mid-sentence so an idea could be written down. It was deep work, but also deep learning. Probably the deepest I’ve gone in years.
What surprised me most was not the clarity or the quality of attention, but the energy.
Despite sleeping less, exercising irregularly, and spending less time socializing, I didn’t feel depleted. I felt the opposite. Inspired. Body, mind, heart, and spirit—aligned and alive. Not sustainable, maybe. But also not necessary to sustain forever. Sometimes a sprint is what’s needed. Not to escape life, but to remember a part of it.
The satisfaction didn’t come from anything completed. It came from showing up. Not half-heartedly or cautiously, but fully. There’s something rare these days about giving something everything—not as sacrifice, but as self-expression. To try, just because it feels good to try. Without calculating if it’s worth the time, or whether it will amount to anything. Nothing was owed to it, and yet something inside wanted to keep giving.
Learning like this is harder now than it used to be. Maybe because it feels less urgent. Or maybe because it requires more humility. Being a beginner takes effort. It asks for presence. But when that effort is made not toward mastery, just toward curiosity, the reward isn’t a result. The reward is the trying.
When I would share this burst of energy with friends—when I’d talk about what I was building, what I was reading—I kept hearing the same word back: “inspired.” It made me pause. I hadn’t set out to inspire anyone. That wasn’t the point. But something in how I was living those days had a ripple effect. Not in grand gestures. Just in the quiet way a person lights up when they’re deeply engaged. And how, somehow, we notice.
I’ve experienced this from others before—watching someone follow what moves them, and feeling a subtle ignition inside. Energy transferred without intention. Without knowing. The most inspiring people in my life never tried to be that. They simply were.
At the start of each year, I choose a word. A one-word intention, like a quiet promise to myself. In past years, it's been words like open, space, build, flow. This year, the word was inspire.
Until now, it hadn’t really landed. I hadn’t felt it in a way I could describe. I’d journaled about it. Thought about it. Wondered whether I had chosen the right word. But after these two weeks, something clicked. Not all at once. More like an unfolding. The connection between feeling inspired, and inadvertently being that for others, finally made sense.
None of it happened through striving. That’s the part I keep returning to. The inspiration came through immersion. Through permission. Through less structure, and fewer demands. Less of everything, really—except intention.
And that is how I learned to inspire.
