Elizabeth Gilbert on Creativity
February 11, 2009
Following on my brief commentary on the economics of creativity I’d like to follow up on an interesting talk one of the graphic designers at work forwarded around to the company.
Elizabeth Gilbert wrote Eat, Pray, Love which is a bestseller that I’ve never read. She talks about the psychology of dealing with success in creative endeavors and how we can deal with the problems of the creative process. Its a very interesting talk and a very positive one.
Following Gilbert’s talk on creativity I’ll also mention a book that I’ve seen rammed down the throats of art students everywhere which is Art and Fear. Art and Fear is about the other side of Gilbert’s talk in that it talks about failure rather than success.
Amusingly I should mention that the question of “will I be a big zero in the grand tapestry of history” isn’t limited to artists. During my undergraduate program in Physics one of the things students talked about (primarily among ourselves but also with our professors) was what it meant to Be Wrong. Being Wrong in the sciences is just like Being Ignored in the arts. What would happen if you spent your entire career chasing down a theory that some smart ass 24 year old shoots to pieces? Scientists who showed the rest of the community The Wrong Thing To Do are not celebrated although they do an essential service of showing others that a certain line of investigation is a dead end. Until a theory is rejected it remains a possibility.
I suspect that the reason our professors made our tests so difficult (my 20% score on a final worked out to a C… an A was 35%) was to get us used to the bitter, bitter taste of fail so we wouldn’t be paralyzed by it later in our careers. At least for myself barely scraping through my degree by the skin of my teeth allowed me to pursue a career I had no training in and later pick up photography because I had drank so deeply at the cup of suck that I wasn’t afraid of the taste any longer.
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