The Reality of Design Inspiration

The process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, esp. to do something creative.
The quality of having been so stimulated, esp. when evident in something.
A person or thing that stimulates in this way.
A sudden brilliant, creative, or timely idea.
The divine influence believed to have led to the writing of the Bible.
I'd like to challenge the idea of inspiration as stated above. This is how I would define inspiration:
Inspiration
An edge piece of a puzzle.
Think about how many puzzles you have started, got 90% of the edge work done, and then never touched again? I honestly could count on one hand how many I actually got past that point and I have a feeling the same is true for most people. Why is this true? We get all the outer pieces together because they are easy to sort out, it takes little time to pull out all the pieces with flat sides. Then we can fit them together because we can distinctly see the edge of the puzzle on the box.
So why do we stop when we get the edge nearly done? Because we know the next step is going to take some commitment and all we have is an outline. All the hard parts start to look like blobs of color or texture and our brains can't sort it out.
Missing Pieces
More often than not this is what inspiration does. We see people who create innovative products and we say "What a stroke of brilliance!" or we see a beautiful work and we think "They are so talented!". Then we think "I wish I could do that", we start to arrange what we know (the edge pieces) about it. As we piece it together we start to run into problems and unknowns (Ambiguous blobs of color or texture), if we hit enough of these we start to get doubt. Doubt turns into dismay, and eventually we tell ourselves "I'll never be able to do that".
Obviously this doesn't happen every time, so what about the times that we push through and finish the entire puzzle? What is different about those times? In my opinion there are two things missing and these are: Risk and Failures. I've come up with a simple formula which I think explains the level of success anyone will have at any given task.
(Inspiration + Risk) x Failures = Level of Success
So it all starts at inspiration, it is necessary to have inspiration to accomplish anything. With inspiration you must understand and accept the risks, the later is more important than the former. Nothing worth doing is without risks but truly accepting what may happen and doing it anyways is the ultimate goal.
This is when we reach failures, for every failure you make there is a much higher chance you will succeed the next time you do that thing. This is why I love to sketch my ideas to the point of exhaustion. I've found that the more times I try and fail in rapid succession the faster I can get to the part where I can succeed! It's incredible! The faster you fail the faster you succeed!
Make a Change
This silly equation aside the main thing I wanted to address is that Inspiration is nothing without Risk and Failure. So challenge yourself to finish the inside of the puzzle. Think of one thing you've always wanted to accomplish and go do it! You will probably fail, but then you should just do it again! Then you should come back here and share what you did with me because I would love to hear your stories.