Boomerang Inspiration jordanmarsh6, January 31, 2021April 5, 2023 I want to share a story that gives you an idea of how “hyperactively inspired” I can be. In the summer of 2017, I started a summer research internship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Brigham and Women’s Hospital is a hospital connected to Harvard Medical School, so basically I was around some of the smartest people on the planet. My mentor and I were looking for the neurological site responsible for speech and language delays in pre-term children; specifically, we were analyzing the developing auditory control center of pre-term infants and looking for areas of underdevelopment in MRI scans. I was excited about my role in the project and for the opportunity to be working with amazing people. Literally it was my first or second day on the job when I suddenly had a captivating idea: what if you made a patch that would change the smell of a fart? Revolutionary, I know. But I could not get it out of my head. “Yeah it will just stick to the back of people’s underwear and help farts smell like flowers,” I thought. “You could make a bunch of different smells! Almost like an air freshener for your fart! It’ll be called the Fart-Freshener! I’m going to be rich!” My mind was buzzing with excitement and for an hour or two I couldn’t really focus on the work I was doing. Gratefully, my enthusiasm for that idea went poof (or did I actually miss out big time?). In contrast to my mega-hit fart-freshener, a fascination of mine that comes back over and over again is the human brain. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of all the times the brain has captured my imagination: My dad and I would stay up until 2am in the morning when I was a teenager talking about how the brain was “the last frontier”.While walking to my dorm room in college I realized I loved math and I loved the brain. I remember being so excited at the thought of pursuing a career in “neuro-engineering”.I remember talking with my wife in the car and telling her, “If I get to the end of my life, and I haven’t done much to discover more about the brain, I’ll be pretty disappointed.”Once I got to the end of that research internship I mentioned earlier, we made some pretty fascinating discoveries. It was electrifying for me to feel like I was probing the brain’s secrets. This could go on for a while. What’s my point? We can hop around from idea to idea and get excited here and there; this is hyperactive inspiration. If we’re honest with ourselves though, we might recognize ideas and inspiration that come back again and again. I’m going to call this Boomerang Inspiration. I chose a boomerang to describe this for a reason: we might not always be inspired by this particular idea. A boomerang isn’t always with you. You can throw it away, but it will inevitably come back (I guess if you know how to throw it? You get the point.) For example, I haven’t always loved the idea of studying the brain; but when I lose my way and start thinking about politics or law or fart-fresheners, studying the brain usually comes back to me as something I really want. Remember that our ultimate goal is to close the action loop: Inspiration -> Motivation -> Plans -> Action If you’re the kind of person who has the bandwidth to be hyperactively inspired and take action on each of those ideas, the more power to you! This isn’t to say that your own metaphorical fart-fresheners aren’t a total waste of time. We just want to move towards action; and it is most likely that we’ll do that when we recognize and act on the boomerang inspiration in our lives. Self Improvement