After her successful New York Times Best Seller book "Eat, Pray, Love", Elizabeth Gilbert has spent the years since doing her best to become, once again, an author instead of a cultural phenomenon. Her follow-up is her well known book "Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear". Through this latest book, she urges the readers to live creatively, which doesn't necessarily imply 'pursuing a life that is professionally devoted to the arts', but 'living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity that by fear'.
If you want to seek a carrier in drawing, painting or writing, this book will help you do that. But if you want to start your first new business, inspire people, or do something that has never been done before, then the book was pretty much written for you.
Big Magic is guiding manualwith universal aspirations that feels narrowly personal, a crash course in the mental health habits of the highly effective person named Elizabeth Gilbert.
The following sections will present some of the life guiding insights.
Creativity Encompasses Us All
Q: What is creativity? A: The relationship between a human being and the mysteries of inspiration.
This book highlights the revolutionary wake up call that everyone in the world is creative, whether we think we are not.
Before reading the book, I definitely thought because I couldn’t paint or draw awesomely, that I wasn’t a creative person. This book will help you realize that you're creative, no matter what. And it will really lit a fire within you to live a more creative life.
Detach Yourself From The Outcome
It’s so easy to get caught up in the outcomes, results and metrics when we performing any work.
In Big Magic, Gilbert emphasizes how important it is to give your creativity your all and do the best you possibly can, but also detach from what the results of the creativity are.
When you’re creating, you should be acting like it is the most important thing in the world to you, but at the same time acting as if the outcome doesn’t matter at all. Leave your concerns about the results you will achieve behind, and start to focuss on the process instead.
This book has reminded me how important it is to let go of the outcome and to not have expectations on the result of your creativity, which I had previously written about in a blog article. It's also the same core idea at the heart of Mark Manson's renowned book,' The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck'.
Embrace Your Fears
It seems to me that the less I fight my fear, the less it fights back.
Fear is truly asphyxiating creativity, and it’s people's most reason for abandoning being creative, and chose to hide behind the "I’m-not-creative" mask.
Gilbert makes a point that if you want to live a creative life, you must also accept that you also need to make space for fear as well. She also has a really unique approach to dealing with fear, instead of going to war with her fear, she chooses to make space for it.
Groundbreaking Creativity is a Myth!
Big Magic will give permission to accept and embrace that your creativity doesn’t have to be revolutionary at all.
Your creativity really doesn’t entitle you to money, fame, acknowledgement, appreciation, views, likes, shares, or any reward.
Gilbert emphasises that you don’t have to make money from your creativity in order to be entitled to live a creative life, “But to yell at your creativity, saying, “You must earn money for me!” is sort of like yelling at a cat; it has no idea what you’re talking about, and all you’re doing is scaring it away, because you’re making really loud noises and your face looks weird when you do that.”
Expecting or chasing rewards for your creativity does not serve you or your creative inspiration either.
Your Creativity Doesn't Have To Be The First In Its Kind
Well, yes, it probably has already been done. Most things have already been done—but they have not yet been done by you.
Have you ever been caught up in thinking that there’s no point in you trying because it’s all been done before anyway?
If everyone believed that there was no point in doing things that have already been done before, nothing would really happen at all, because really all we’re doing is stuff that’s already been done before in our own way, with our own individual spin on it.
No matter how many people have done it before, it really does not matter, because it has not yet been done by YOU, in your way, by your unique self.
Big Magic is your permission slip to do it anyway, in our own way (even if you think it’s already been done a 1000 times already!).
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