What Inspires Me

Inspiration is a fluid and ever changing thing. Sometimes you get it sometimes you don’t and everyone’s different. A group project at Inspiration Bit aims to find out how everyone finds their way to inspiration. This post is a snapshot of my life seen through the eyes of inspiration.

Music

Music has to come first. It isn’t necessarily the first time I was inspired, but it shaped most of my time at school; when I was there, and possibly more importantly when I wasn’t

Music is where I found a hero in Slash, the guitar player from Guns N’ Roses. He wasn’t flashy but a craftsman who played the blues. Everyday I played guitar, learned riffs, solos, and chord progressions, and really enjoyed playing in the band.

As with most things that are driven by inspiration it needs to be constantly renewed and as Guns N’ Roses began to fizzle out so did my desire to be part of the band.

Ten-ish years later Oasis — sometime past their best days — would re-inspire me to take it up again but it wasn’t the same and didn’t last. Now I only play guitar on the odd occasion a riff jumps out and grabs me or when I visit friends who play. I daresay I may take it up again in the midst of a mid-life crisis in the next ten years or so.

Music is also a constant background to everything I do. Music can make the difference for me between getting it done and not.

This may well stem from the days doing art A-Level when we listed to a mixture of The Sultans of Ping, Bach — Particularly the famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor — Frank Zappa, and Beck. Later on I found Groove Armada a perfect accompaniment to help me think without distracting.

As I write this I am listening to “We Come One” by Faithess, which has increased my typing rate significantly.

Problem Solving and Understanding

When I was a student it is fair to say that the lack of problems was an issue. Problems to solve that is. I took maths until 16 and found very little of it a challenge. Learning how to do something for the sake of knowing how to do it really isn’t a challenge and as a result I was rarely — if ever — inspired by it. I found history interesting but the novelty soon wore off. The facts were interesting, learning and using them wasn’t. As a result my studies went underground, and largely stayed there.

Ten years on and a significant amount of javascript and investment planning requires those same maths skills that I sailed through at school. I have had to re-learn how to use and compare vectors, euclidean geometry, standard deviation, and a some techniques that were not covered at all. I also recall more of the history of the Plantagenets than I ever thought I would.

The other way that knowledge inspired me is in learning about the universe. For reasons that really do escape me I find String Theory, and physics in general really very interesting. One of the least interesting of the mandatory subjects at school is now something I have read a lot on. Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene have a lot to answer for but they have each inspired me to learn more.

Art

The only subject I really followed through on at school was art. It is the only A-Level qualification I have, which may make people wonder how I ended up in financial services as a career. I wonder that myself sometimes.

Although I have studied various artists there are some that stand out in my mind.

First it was Wassily Kandinsky who’s work I saw on a family holiday at the Guggenheim in New York. The idea of transforming sound — In particular the work of Wagner — into light was a fascinating one and one that I have considered several times; although with slightly less success than Kandinsky.

Next was H.R. Giger. He was the favourite amongst our group and still someone who’s work I am yet to see in person. Giger’s work has an interesting sense of the fantastic, grotesque and perverse that appeals to the dark and moody side in me that also finds music by Placebo, The Prodigy and Pendulum so enticing; although I also quite like Kylie.

One piece that has always struck me was An Oak Tree by Michael Craig-Martin. It is one of the few pieces of conceptual art that I really love mostly for the explanation that accompanies the piece.

Most recently I have found inspiration in the photography of some amazing photobloggers such as Chromasia, Kulay and Zenith9. They have inspired me to take my own photographs — although I have been a little lax recently — and combined with being new to Yorkshire to create Photospots, a simple website for sharing places to take photographs in Britain.

I have recently become convinced that it isn’t really necessary to travel outside Britain until I have explored what Britain itself has to offer and — shocking as my parents may find it — I have been inspired to walk the hills of Yorkshire on my weekends.

Newness, Progression, and being the go-to guy

For a long time I had left web development well alone. The horrors being created with DHTML had convinced me that it wasn’t a field I wanted to play in and I promptly went about my life without it. It was inspiration that brought me back.

Learning about the existence of blogs was a life changer and people like Jeremy Keith, Dan Cedarholm, Jon Hicks, Andy Clarke, and so many others showed me how to use web standards, html, progressive enhancement, etc… to give structure to web development. This was new, it was progressive and I was inspired to be part of this.

The next thing is always the exciting one; I always want to moving on and taking things further and so I did. Like so many things in my life I never made a decision to be serious about standards, but I was inspired to be and once inspired it was easy.

I have always found value in knowledge, but more than the desire to have it I have a desire not to be found to lack it. It isn’t so much a desire for recognition that inspires so much of what I do —although that is part of it — it is the desire to be able to contribute, to be in the know, and to be part of something inspiring in itself.

That is what inspires me.

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Andrew Rickmann

Andrew Rickmann is a financial compliance specialist, part time blogger, photographer, and WordPress fanatic.

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