This is the first of many videos in my ‘Inspire Me!’ series. (I’ve got another three in edit right now) It’s all about how you can always find inspiration in things around you. So you never need to be stuck for an idea.

This is a word for word transcription of the YouTube video. Sometimes I have a weird way of saying things. So that’s what you’ll see here. I make no apologies for that. You’re better off watching the video, I reckon.

INSPIRE ME!

Hi! I’m Dave Birss.

And we’re going to do something new today.

We’re going to go hunting for inspiration.

I’m out and about close to where I live. And we’re going to do an exercise today that I very often do in my workshops. And it’s to show people how to be inspired by anything. Because a question I often get asked is “Where do you find inspiration?” So I show people how to find it absolutely anywhere. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to try and find just random objects and we’re going to try and pick up some principles that we can learn from those objects. And then these principles are things that we can apply to our own ideas.

So let’s see what we can find.

So the object I want to learn from today is this bust of James Walker. He’s the guy who designed this dock that’s behind us here. So let’s see if we can get three principles to learn from this bust.

GIVE PEOPLE CREDIT

So the first principle I think we can learn from this is GIVE CREDIT. I mean, this statue is giving credit to the guy who built this incredible body of water behind us. Some industries are very good at giving credit. The film industry obviously. At the end, you’ve got several minutes of all the names that are being credited for doing everything in the film. The music industry is very good at credit. Obviously it credits the songwriters and credits the musicians. You’ve got the art world. It naturally credits the artist. So credit is quite a powerful thing. Could you give credit for something where credit is not normally given? So something – a physical product, a digital product, an app, input that people have made to the company. See what happens when you try to give credit. It might take you somewhere.

HELP PEOPLE REMEMBER

The next principle you could probably learn from this is HELP PEOPLE REMEMBER SOMETHING. You know, this statue here is to help people remember who it was that built this. Because otherwise none of us would know. We wouldn’t know who this guy was. Ww wouldn’t know who was responsible for it. Is there anything you can do to help people remember something? Because people have difficulty remembering these days. There’s something called the ‘Google Effect’ which means if you’ve seen something online – or in a digital medium – then there’s a very good chance that you’re going to forget it because you think it’s already stored. You think you can search for it and find it whenever you need it. So you don’t retain it in your head. So is there anything you can do to help people remember something more effectively?

USE A STORY TO ADD VALUE

So the third principle I think we can learn from this is ADD A STORY. That’s what this statue is all about. It’s adding a story to the structure that he helped to build. Now when you add a story it gives meaning. And when you give meaning it adds value. So is there anything you can do to use story to add value to whatever it is that you’re doing.

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There we go. There’s three things that might be able to inspire us to have an idea we wouldn’t normally have. If you find this video helpful, then please like it, share it comment below.

Is there anything else that you think we could learn from this?

Maybe subscribe to the channel if you haven’t subscribed already and click the little bell icon. You know all this stuff. All the people who are doing stuff on YouTube are saying the exact same thing at the end of the video. So really do I have to say it? Yeah probably. Well, I’ll be back soon. I’ll be doing some more of these.

In the meantime, big love to your beautiful brain.

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Look out for more films in the Inspire Me series and…