Elizabeth Gilbert's 11 ways to think smartly about creativity
For author Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love), we’re all creative souls already. We just need to figure out how to harness inspiration and unleash the creative spirit within. She shared her best pieces of advice for living a meaningfully creative life with TED.
If you’re alive, you’re a creative person.
How many times have you heard someone say, “I don’t have a creative bone in my body.” It’s like somebody handed that person that placard to wear when they were nine, and they’ve been wearing it around their neck ever since. But rather than challenging them on that, because then they’ll dig in their heels, I ask them to take the word “creative” out of the sentence and replace it with the word “curious,” just to see how ridiculous it sounds. If you can just release yourself from the anxiety and burden that might be associated with the word “creativity,” because you’ve fallen for the myth that it only belongs to the special, the tormented and the professional, and you insert the word “curious,” you’ll see, in fact, that you are an enormously creative person, because all creativity begins with curiosity. And once you tap into your curiosity and allow yourself permission to follow it wherever it takes you, you will find very quickly that you are living a much more creative life than you were last year.