Tuesday's TED Talk: Your Elusive Creative Genius

I wasn't particularly impressed with Eat, Pray, Love, but I could not resist the title of this next TED talk. And it turns out I was profoundly impressed with Elizabeth Gilbert's creative genius.

This is a good one. Again, an idea worth spreading. 

 My Takeaways

  • Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do? Why are people who feel the pull of creativity afraid in a way that chemical engineers are not? (So true!)

  • Why have we collectively accepted that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked? And that artistry will inevitably lead to anguish?

  • In Ancient Greece and Rome, people believed that creativity came from a divine and unknowable source, versus coming from within us. There was a separation between the work and the self.

  • "Genius" maybe isn't something that we ARE. It is something that we have, and that we all have access to.

  • The pressure of having to be the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery (versus a conduit for it) can and does drive artists to various levels of insanity. We really can stop that.

  • I love that she said, "I'm a mule, and the way that I have to work is that I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly."

  • I've said to a friend before, "Our ideas are not US." Having a separation can guard from excessive narcissism (as well as excessive despair) about how a creative work turns out.

  • "Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that may be."

And especially:

"Maybe if you just believed that [the most extraordinary aspects of your being] were on loan to you from some imaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you're finished...it [would start] to change everything."

I have been thinking a lot lately about mystery—and how I so often search for certainty where it does not and cannot exist. There's something so beautiful and freeing about embracing the mysterious and leaning into the uncertainty–letting myself be carried by the tide of experience, rather than trying to resist it, form it, shape it, and understand it every step of the way.

Angie LucasComment