I honestly enjoy writing editorials. Something pops into my tiny brain next to something else, and I'm off. However, today, as I started to write on the topic of learning, I suddenly felt like I had just written this same editorial. I go and look, sure enough, several of my recent editorials have been on learning. OK. Well, I'm clearly stuck in a rut. Let's talk, instead, about inspiration.

When we talk about inspiration, we have to break it down. There's the concept that inspires you, personal freedom is a big one for me. There's the person that inspires you, historically I've always had a soft spot for Teddy Roosevelt. However, by inspiration in this context, I mean, what drives us to make the choices we make. Deciding to write about learning vs writing about inspiration, that idea has to come from somewhere. Myself, I spend a lot of time thinking about learning, from the standpoint of the ignorant person who needs information, and from the standpoint of the informed person trying to share information. Learning and teaching are fundamental to my everyday job. This is why I've so frequently put learning into my editorials.

I generally get my inspiration from the things I do the most. Hence, references to history (reading an interesting, not sure I can say good, book on the Alamo, "Exodus From The Alamo"), ham radio (doing more with DMR), and travel (off to SQLBits this week), will pop up in the stuff I write quite a lot. I get inspiration for blog posts from the questions I get when I present and the ones I see here on SQL Server Central. I even get ideas sometimes from watching stupid stuff on TV. It all comes together, eventually, to inspire ideas.

My question to you today is probably pretty obvious by now: where does your inspiration come from? More specifically, I'm curious where your solution inspirations come from? How did you decide to try a CROSS APPLY instead of a JOIN on that query you're tuning? What made you look into AWS RDS as the host for the latest data project? Where are you finding your technical inspiration?