How To Seduce a Muse (2024)

Please don’t freak out now, but something’s watching you. A disembodied, energetic life-form is checking you out to see if maybe you’re the one for it to make magic with. It’s an idea, perhaps many of them. That’s how inspiration works, according to bestseller author and expert on creativity Elizabeth Gilbert. “It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual,” Gilbert writes in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. “Therefore, ideas spend eternity swirling around us, searching for available and willing human partners.”

They will take care of the magic part, all you have to do is keep your eyes and ears open and signal that you’re the right candidate to bring them into life. Maybe one is eyeballing you right now, contemplating if you’re serious about putting the work in and creating something.

These are 11 of my favorite ways to seduce the muse into getting it on:

1. Fuel up

Whatever you put into your brain has a say in what will come out of it. In the words of Steve Jobs: “Creativity is just connecting things.” So if you look into your beer all year, you might come up with beer cake, a beer-cation business, or even something egg-related. And not that there’s anything wrong with that. But, as a rule of thumb, the more exciting stuff is bustling around in your head, the more likely you will make spectacular connections. “The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table,” writes Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. So don’t let your creative self fall into the productivity trap by pushing yourself to toil away at your dreams. You don’t need the approval of our culture of achievement, you need sparks. Fascinating stories, inspiring people, unique activities. Take the time to stock up your life with what lights your…