When Inspiration Takes the Place of Aspiration

I was sitting with a group of friends recently, talking about Stephen Covey’s framework of urgent and important, when the conversation turned toward aspiration. We started asking ourselves how much of our lives we spent chasing the things we aspired to, and how often those aspirations actually delivered the peace we thought they would.

That conversation stuck with me, because the honest answer is that a lot of our time gets poured into aspiration, and not nearly enough of it results in anything we’d call fulfilling.

Aspiration, in this context, is where you want to take yourself. It’s the goal you set, the version of success you chase, the finish line you’ve defined, whether that finish line is relational, financial, physical, or emotional. The trouble with aspiration is that it’s almost always tied to something, or someone, that makes you feel good about yourself. And if you look closely, a lot of what we aspire to came from somebody else’s expectation long before it ever became our own.

Think about your own life for a minute. Somewhere along the way, someone spoke a word over you, maybe a parent, a teacher, a coach, or a pastor, and it planted itself. Spoken enough times, that expectation became part of your I AM statement. Based on that identity, you started to say, “I aspire to do X. My will is to become X.” And you built a whole life around it without ever stopping to ask where it came from.

My dad had that kind of impact on me. Because of him, I aspired to be the leader of a company, an entrepreneur, a man who practiced philanthropy, someone who spoke and had people lean in to listen, someone who could walk into a room and leave people feeling better than when he arrived. He was also a big teaser, and I don’t know that I ever consciously aspired to that one, but I became a big teaser too, and it might be the most stubborn inheritance of all.

None of that is inherently wrong. Some of those qualities have served me well for a long time. But the problem with aspiration, even aspiration rooted in admiration, is that when you finally get there, you look around and a little voice asks, “Now what?”

Inspiration is a different animal entirely. Inspiration is allowing the Spirit of God to take you where He wants you to go.

When I sit with the things I’m actually inspired to do, not the things I’ve aspired to do, the list looks pretty different. That conversation with my friends reminded me that I’m inspired to help others step into a relationship with Jesus, because that relationship has changed my life in ways I couldn’t have engineered on my own. It’s given me the ability to see and understand so much more, because the seeing is coming from the Creator of the universe. It’s given me a much more forgiving heart, too, especially when it comes to forgiving myself, which is the kind of forgiveness I’ve always struggled with the most. I want other people to experience that, and when I sit with what moves me, helping them get there is at the top of the list every time.

The pattern I’ve come to notice, and it’s one I’d invite you to hold up against your own life, goes something like this. Aspiration leads to perspiration, which eventually leads to exhaustion. Inspiration leads to fulfillment, which leads to peace.

The moment of accomplishment that comes from reaching something you’ve aspired to is real, and it’s worth celebrating. I’m not dismissing it. But that gratification tends to live in a single moment and then it fades. You check the box, you take the picture, and pretty soon you’re already scanning the horizon for the next mountain.

The things you’re inspired by don’t fade that way. They stay with you. You can talk about them thirty years later and still get goosebumps, and I really do believe those goosebumps are the evidence of God’s Spirit coming upon you. Some people might roll their eyes at that, and that’s fine, but I’ve come to trust goosebumps as one of the most reliable compasses we’ve been given for recognizing what actually matters.

That’s the kind of fulfillment you can’t quite explain. You don’t always know why you feel the way you feel, and you don’t need to, because it’s sustained.

The encouragement I want to leave you with is really just a question. How do we live a life that actually produces the kind of fulfillment we’re hungry for? How do we get to the last days of our lives and look back with gratitude, instead of regret?

I don’t think we get there by climbing harder up the aspiration ladder, even when that ladder looks impressive from the outside. I think we get there by asking a different question altogether, which is, “What is God inspiring me to do today, and am I willing to follow that, instead of my own plan?”

That’s a harder question than it sounds. It requires you to let go of some of the definitions of success that have been running your life for decades. It requires you to sit still long enough to hear the answer. And it requires you to trust that the place God wants to take you is better than the place you were going to take yourself.

I’m still learning to live that way. But every time I get it right, there’s peace on the other side, and the goosebumps don’t lie.