My 10 Learnings from 'Big Magic' in Leading a Creative Life

It was back in 2016 when I first read the book ‘Big Magic‘ by Elizabeth Gilbert. The obvious choice of why I picked it was because I had totally loved her earlier books ‘Eat Pray Love’ and ‘Committed’.

Reading Big Magic is like having a discussion with a therapist, the one where you are confused on your creative journey and you get actionable advice in a tone that has the right dosage of strictness and warmth. While she mentions that she wrote the book to clear her head of what it meant to lead a creative life, through the pages we receive a heady mix of inspiration combined with tough talk for all creative types. Reader friendly, funny at places, some well placed anecdotes, simple chapters, no unnecessary jargons, straightforward and self-effacing I almost felt I was having a chat with a friend.

The book encourages us to find our most creative and expressive life which is driven by curiosity than by fear. By helping us understand that to embrace creativity, we have to welcome fear and prep ourselves to live in that manner.

If given a chance I would reprint the entire book here cause it’s that good but I have tried to pick the quotes that felt like personal messages to me in the current times and I’m sharing those here in this blog.

You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures. What do you love doing so much that the words failure and success essentially become irrelevant?

Be it in career, a hobby or any goals for yourself, if you have been through the ups and downs, walked across the rough terrains, didn’t succeed at multiple attempts and are still staying in the game purely for the joy of it, you are already proving your strength. Failure is an inevitable part of any creative process since creativity is all about experimenting. It definitely hurts when as a creator, any piece of work doesn’t get as much love and attention we thought it would, but nonetheless keep creating because hey! you love love the art and it’s only whatever you are doing to stay on that path that matters.

Done is better than good.

Perfection is a distracting ideal and is fleeting. So waiting for the opportune time, day, plot. mood, idea to get working on what you want may actually have you waiting forever. As long as it’s not to do with someone’s health or life, everything else is better when out there than getting baked in your head. Always weight the ‘perfection’ against the cost and efforts in terms of time, joy, peace, of mind, relationships and efforts.

A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life. Living in this manner—continually and stubbornly bringing forth the jewels that are hidden within you—is a fine art, in and of itself.

Creative living is all about courage and letting go of outcomes. The concept of tormented artists succeeding in his/ her creative endeavors is a big myth. It has become normal to see pain as an essential ingredient for art. Art doesn’t art have necessarily have to to stem from a place of anguish. Happiness or curiosity is a better way for it to blossom. Great works whether influenced by happiness or inspired by sorrow become great when they have an impact on the receiver and when behind each of them lies years of practice, which is an invaluable commodity.

It’s a simple and generous rule of life that whatever you practice, you will improve at.

You are what you practice. As a general rule of thumb it is is that the longer you spend doing something — repeatedly, over and over and over — the closer you’ll get to mastery. Well, that’s true provided the way or manner or how the thing is also in the right direction.

Perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat.

Create for the fun of it. Create because you like the process. Not every piece you make has to be a masterpiece but every time you sit to do it, you have to feel the joy in the journey. If perfection is stopping us from doing things we love doing or sharing our work with the world just because we aren’t sure it’s the right and the flawless thing, that kind of perfection is perhaps a bigger obstacle in our creative living.

If you’re alive, you’re a creative person.

Each and everyone of us is creative by nature. There are only different forms we express it in. Humans are designed to be inherently imaginative and innovative with new ideas and perspectives bubbling inside us. So if you ever had a doubt about your talents, the answer is YES, you are gifted and are creative too. You may not be artistic in composing beautiful melodies or sketching beautiful portraits, but that doesn’t make you unimaginative. It’s about your uniqueness in managing your life, figuring solutions for yourself, designing your days in the manner that you want to live are all aspects that add up in the creative realm.

If I am not actively creating something, then I am probably actively destroying something.