The Importance of Inspiration in Design

I wouldn't say there's a single person who's the biggest inspiration in my work. Whenever I start to design any challenge, I'll probably look and see what a whole bunch of other people historically have done to try to solve this problem. So it depends what problem I'm trying to solve for where the inspiration comes from. If you weren't doing this for a living, what would be your second career choice and why? And my second career choice would be practicing Buddhism full time so that I could hopefully have realization so I could eventually teach it.