What truly puts your self-chosen career path at stake is your own motivation. I never get it why people would search for “inspiration” online, I’m rather wondering how you manage NOT to be inspired in this urban, complex world we live in. The problem lies on the opposite side of the equation: we are flooded with inspiration on a second-to-second basis – how are we supposed to keep up and craft what we perceive into our own, genuine personal expression?

(hover over the pictures to read the English translation)

How do you keep an unshakeable motivation to persist and stay at it, when the only recurring feature of everyday life seems to be that there’s “too much of it all”, too many things happening in parallel?

You could synchronize yourself with likeminded people. It’s a first step towards feeling more empowered, and something that sure motivates me to go ahead in my journey: Knowing that I’m not alone.

One common feature I noticed among creatives is our inclination to blow up deadlines. It’s easy for me to keep track of time when I work for others, but being my own boss in a project easily results in going down my favorite rabbit holes and not coming back for the rest of the night / morning / following day ….

Every story you tell develops a dynamic and a life of its own if you stick to it long enough. From the moment you sense how the story starts to unfold by itself, it becomes very easy to forget time and diving deeper. The state of immersion is actually similar, no matter whether you are telling a story or listening to it.

And the biggest reward is a feedback that echoes your own excitement about the story, just expressed from another person’s point of view.

These moments of mutual feedback among artists have become an important essence of my life. They also help us overcome moments of doubt, when another super important client job pops up and threatens our dream work to vanish into the folder of beautiful ideas.

You can handle this kind of parallel personal work as long as you manage to structure your life and make time for every necessary step of the process, so that every project’s flow goes on. But there is a risk in every business model, and the constant switching between jobs is super time sensitive. What kind of falling apart threatens your productivity most, and without you even thinking much about this possibility?

When a worst case scenario finally happens, it changes the entire atmosphere of the surrounding space. You sense how much you’ve been rushing all along, when from one moment to another running becomes technically impossible.

Tomorrows Ghostwriter episode: “Tea Strategy”

Note to German Speakers: Ghostwriter ist zur Leipziger Buchmesse in kleiner Auflage im Selbstverlag erschienen. Wer das Buch bestellen möchte, kann das hier tun, solange der Vorrat reicht.