I am often inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of NY Times bestselling books Eat, Pray, Love, and Big Magic. She is brave, strong and brilliant but she is also vulnerable, real and scared. That inspires me.
This last week I listened in on an interview with Liz Gilbert and Longform host, Max Linsky.
Here are some of my favorite takeaways:
@6:18 min - the two reasons we do anything:
There are high reasons and low reasons that we do everything. The high reason is the sense of wanting to make a thing, a creative impulse, a dream. Which is... the coolest reason to do anything, right? The reason that doesn’t even have to have a reason other than: “I’m not just here to pay bills and die. there’s a vision that I have for my life. I want to make a life in my own image. I want to test the limits of my creativity and my resourcefulness.”
@23 min - Which is amazing and makes you want to devote your life to making something. The devotion is what liz calls vocation:
It’s the idea of vocation…I am committed to this work because it unfolds and reveals within me aspects of myself that I can reach no other way. Therefore it feels like it’s a divine gift. Therefore this is what we are going to be doing for the rest of our lives.
@24:50 min - and then Max asked about criticism and if it’s ever soul-crushing even when you’re doing what your soul longs to do:
[Criticism] is not soul crushing. it is ego crushing. i have an ego and my ego is very harmed by those things and it doesn’t like it. It hurts and sometimes it’s sad and sometimes it makes me angry… all of that happens but that’s not soul, that’s ego. My soul is this other part of myself entirely that doesn’t have anything to do with that and that looks at that whole scenario and says, “Wow. Cool. Can we do it again? Wow we just made a thing and it didn’t work. And what are we going to do now? What are we going to do today? What are going to make now?… All I want to do is make things and attempt things and collaborate with people and try stuff. That’s soul work.
@35:06 min - But what happens when you don’t know what your soul work is? Or you do, but you’re scared?:
Return home. What are you here to do? What is your work? Are you doing your work? Are you doing it with honor? Are you doing it with devotion? Are you doing it with humility and worship and love and joy? Then you’re fine…. whatever happens, you’re going to be good.
@1:10 min - Then Max asked her how she chooses what to work on next and this answer, well… I needed this answer:
The one that is the most exciting to you has to be the one. There is no other way to decide. it has to be that. And it can’t be calculated much past that because any other calculation is going to put into working on a project that you are not very interested in and then it is going to be really hard to motivate yourself to do it. It’s hard enough when you’re excited about it… the calculus has to be what’s the thing that’s going to make me want to get up in the morning, what’s the thing that makes me say I’m so psyched that I get to do this.
@1:11:43 min - How do you set up your life so that your vocation finds you? This. You do this:
It’s about being very awake and very alert. The work is clearing your life of distractions enough that you are capable of feeling that excitement when it arrives.... And it’s about trusting your own curiosity enough to follow it even if it doesn’t make sense, even if the inspiration that you have doesn’t align with anything you’ve ever done before.... You have to have full faith that if you’re curious about something it’s for a reason. That its a clue on the great scavenger hunt and that you follow that clue and then the next and the next and the next.
The tricky bit is that you have to start from a place of this is what I’m most excited about, this is what I’m most curious about and then you have to recognize and know what will happen.
@1:13 min - Because this is what will happen and you will want to be prepared:
Six months into it it is going to feel very boring and tedious. Because making things is often boring and tedious. Another idea is going to come along... and say “I’m a much more interesting, much more exciting idea. Why don’t you abandon this project that you’ve been working on for six months and come and run away with me to paradise.”
You have to be smart enough to know not to do that. Because six months from now that project will also be dull and boring and another idea will come along and seduce you and you have to be able to stay with it through the boring part to get to the end. So when those other seductive ideas come along you have to tell them to take a number.
So to the next idea, the next project, the thing that takes you from this thing, this vocation, this reason for being we say: “Hold back. Take a number. Because nothing is going to steer me from this beauty, this making stuff, this life.
Nothing.”
