A friend of mine shared this video with me recently and it hit home for me. I am one of the people she is referring to when she speaks of those who are unable to act on creativity for fear that it won’t be accepted or that it has already been done before. I find myself with new ideas on a daily basis, or new to me anyhow. That’s all that matters says Gilbert. That the ideas are new to YOU. She’s right. I just never really thought about it that way. I’m sure earlier in the year we had a discussion about what original content is and “is anything really original if everything you ever learn is recycled?” Alas, I have received some release over this looming anxiety. It isn’t original in the sense that it has never been said or learned or thought of before, but it is original in that your exact composition of recycled ideas is very different from someone else’s recycled ideas. This means that every unoriginal thought or idea could be communicated in millions of different ways, ways that resonate with different audiences. SO, I guess this means everyone is capable of original and creative thought. Or that everything you recycle has potential to be your own. I suppose the success of a work could be waged against how many people it resonates with- this kind of success suggests that you understand people so well that you are able to communicate your ideas in such a way that mostly everyone understands them, except you are still keeping your own perspective and method/voice. Then, there is the success in works that fail to resonate with anyone because they are so amazingly individualistic and subjective that no one else could possibly understand them because the way of communication is so brand new that nobody has figured out how to understand. I guess this could be used to explain why so many famous people are only famous in death :).
There was something else discussed in this video and it had to do with how to write a book or a work, and in summary, Gilbert just said that you have to get over how much you suck and you have to love writing so much that you don’t care how much torture it is, or you have to be willing to put up with torture for the rest of your life, which is the case for any passion you may take up. Only call it a passion if you are passionate about its ugly sides too not just about how many great things it does or will do for you.
Generally, I learned that I gotta take all my creative ideas and similar to a baseball player, bat all of them out into the field and hope I hit a home run. And if none of them are home runs, at least I played baseball my whole life because I loved it, and if I bat them all, then I won’t worry that some of them were meant to be home runs. Or maybe I hit a home run, and magically, the whole world misses it, and then that’d be too bad, but I’ll know I hit it and I’ll die a champ in my eyes :). Watch this!