[Guy Raz] Guy's Favorites: The Source Of Creativity

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Hey. It's Guy here. So as some of you may have heard, there will be a new host of TED Radio Hour, which is super exciting. Her name is Manoush Samorodi, and she'll be starting in March. In the mean time, I wanna share some of my favorite episodes of Ted Radio Hour over the years. And this one is called the source of creativity, and it's full of big ideas about where creativity comes from and how we can all tap into it. This episode features Sting, writer Elizabeth Gilbert, and sir Ken Robinson, who still holds the record for the most popular TED talk of all time. And one final note, it also features an interview with the great British choreographer, Dame Gillian Lynne.

Dame Gillian was 88 when I talked to her in 2014. And last year, she passed away. Her story of how she got to be a dancer and how she found her creative outlet in dance is so inspiring. You will love it. So here is one of my favorite episodes. It's called the source of creativity. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks.

Those talks, those ideas adapted for radio. From NPR. I'm Guy Raz. And today on the show, the source of creativity. Ideas about where it comes from, why we all have it, and how to find it.

Hello. Hello. Now, I just wanna make sure that you can hear me.

I can hear you.

And can you hear Guy?

I can hear Guy. Hello? Hi. It's Sting. How are you?

Yep. Sting. Hello. Welcome.

Thank you.

Thanks for coming in.

It's a pleasure.

So I was in Vancouver and saw your talk. So Sting's TED talk was about finding inspiration by going back home and how he turned the stories of his childhood into an album and then a show on Broadway. And the stories are all based on the people he grew up around in Northern England in a town called Wallsend.

The town was was basically, dedicated to shipbuilding. At the end of my street was a shipyard. They built the biggest ships in the world right at the end of my street. The other end of the town was a coal mine, so it wasn't exactly like living living next to the, the Met. There were never any operas in our town or even any shows, but, I had a need for that kind of life. And so I I kind of invented it in my head.

Now the story of how he made the record about Wall's End and how he was able to mount this huge production is really a story about creativity. And in Sting's case, how he lost it. But we'll get there. When you think of the word creativity, like, how how would you define it?

How would I define creativity? I for me, it's the, it it's the the ability to take, a risk, to actually put yourself on the line and risk, ridicule, being pilloried, criticized, or whatever. But you have an idea that you you think you wanna, put out there, and you must take that risk.

Did you think of yourself as a as a creative person when you were when you were younger?

I was actually allowed to dream a lot as a child. I worked with my father every morning as a milkman, and he would get me up at 5 in the morning when, all of my school friends were in bed, and we'd we'd drive around the streets and deliver milk, and he wouldn't say very much to me apart from, you know, 22 points here and the 3 points there. We didn't talk. And so I was allowed in this very creative time in the day, you know, as as light was coming up, to dream. And I dreamt and dreamt and dreamt about futures I might possibly have fantasized, I suppose. So I was in the creative mode from the very beginning, just by being left alone.

And Sting's career, pretty well known. Kind of hit after hit from the moment he left Wall's End. The creativity just poured out of him. 1978. A second album in 79. Another hit in

1980,

81 and 83, his first solo record in 85, and then in 87. There were 3 more albums, 91, 93, 96,

All the

way up to 1999 into 2003. It was nonstop. Sting was like a creativity machine. And then one day, it ended.

I would look at the page every day and think, you know, what what I'm gonna write about, and and day followed day, and then week turned to months. And pretty soon you have a couple of years where you haven't actually put pen to paper, and you have to ask yourself why. What is it?

How long did this go on?

I think it was maybe an 8 8 year period when, the the flow of songs stopped, and, I I wasn't idle. I'd certainly play. I would I would practice and, hopefully refine whatever artistry I had, but the desire to write something down was not there. It it simply wasn't there.

That creative drive that pushed him to write so many songs for 20 years had just disappeared. And day after day, staring at an empty page, Sting started to ask himself some pretty big questions. Questions he raised on the TED stage.

What have I done to offend the gods that they would abandon me so? Is the gift of songwriting taken away as easily as it seems to have been bestowed? Or perhaps there's a more deeper psychological reason. It was always a Fauci impact anyway. You're rewarded for revealing your innermost thoughts, your private emotions on the page for the entertainment of others, for the analysis, the scrutiny of others. And perhaps you've given enough of your privacy away.

I mean, so so so what what did you do? I mean, how how did you break out of it?

I thought, well, you know, maybe my best work wasn't about me. Maybe my best work was when I, started to write in the voices of other people or, put myself in someone else's shoes. I saw the world through their eyes, and and that kind of empathy is is eventually what broke this, writer's block, we'll call it. Just just by sort of stopping thinking about me, my ego, and who I am, and actually saying, let's

let's give my voice to someone else. Well, they say

write what you know. Someone else. Well, they say write what you know. If you can't write about yourself anymore, then who do you write about? So it's ironic that the the landscape I'd worked so hard to escape from and the community that I'd more or less abandoned and exiled myself from should be the very landscape, the very community I would have to return to to find my missing muse. And as soon as I did that, as soon as I decided to honor the community I came from and tell their story, songs started to come thick and fast. I've I've described it as a kind of projectile vomiting, a torrent of ideas, of characters, of voices, verses, couplets, entire songs almost formed whole, materialize in front of me, as if they'd been bottled up inside me for many many years. One of the first things I wrote was just a list of names of people I'd known, and they become characters in a kind of three-dimensional drama where they explain who they are, what they do, their hopes and their fears for the future. This is Jackie White.

He's the foreman of the shipyard. My name is Jackie White. And, I'm foreman of the yard and you don't mess with Jackie on this key side. I'm as hard as I unplay it. We'll be tied to you if you're late, when we have to push a boat out on the spring tide. Now you could die and hope for heaven, but you need to work your shift, and I'd expect this all to back us to the hilt. For if Saint Peter at his gate would ask you why you're late, why you tell him that you had to get a ship built? We build battleships and cruisers for her majesty the queen. Super tankers for Onassis and all the classes in between.

We built the greatest ship in tonnage. What the world has ever seen.

And the only life we have known is in the shipyard.

Steel in the stockyard and in the soul would conjure up a ship, whether you stop your hold. But we don't know what we'll do if this yard gets sold, for

the only life we've known is in the shipyard.

How did you know how to do that? Like, how did you know how to go back to to where you came from in in order to, like, reclaim your creativity?

Well, I think songwriting can be considered a kind of therapy, and, maybe a kind of, regression therapy, you know, to go back to the beginning. Why are you like you are? Why do you think the way you do? Why do you behave the way you do? And most of the answers are in your childhood. People I wondered whether I shouldn't try and honor the people I was brought up with.

It was almost like you had to get out of your own way, like like, you realize that it it didn't have to be about you, that it's not about you.

It's not. And and the creative process of often that takes place outside of your ego. You you channel something, but you can't take credit for a lot of it. And you just tap into it. You you tap into that thing, and it's it's a wonderful honor to be that channel.

I mean, how how did you get out of your own way?

Just by saying get out of your own way. You're you're in the way. Sting is in the way. I'm sick of Sting, so let's let's let's sing about somebody else's thing. And, I realized very quickly I was I was writing in dialect, a dialect that I I was brought up in, but I haven't used, and I don't use. In fact, I only use it unconsciously when I get angry. But I was writing in dialect, and the rhythms and the cadences of that dialect were helping me create the story. It it wrote itself.

There's something in your talk where where you you seem to imply that creativity is like a gift, like, that can be taken away. I mean, is that how you see it?

Well, it's it's very ephemeral and and can disappear. You know? What is it? It's it's rhyming couplets and, and some melody. It's not like you're building a ship. It's not like a piece of metal that you can, you know, just keep. The whole thing can just disappear in in into the air.

Do you feel pressure to to to be creative all the time?

I think you're always under under, you know, a little bit of, pressure. You know, you're from vanity, maybe. You know? You wanna you wanna be, you know, still relevant after all of these years, and then you you look at your peers, and they're doing well, and and so you compare yourself with them. So there is a bit of that. But, you know, I I I try and go into a a deeper place inside me that is that is much calmer, and it's it's it's irrelevant whether I'm successful or or celebrated or not. Where my true happiness lies has got nothing whatever to do with any of that. It's it's basically just comfort and being who I am, and it's it's it's it's deeper. It's at a deeper level.

A song from Sting's Broadway show. It's called The Last Ship. You can watch his full talk at ted.npr.org. More ideas about creativity in a moment. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

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It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. And today on the show, the source of creativity, ideas about where it comes from, why we all have it, and how to find it. So think of someone you consider a creative genius.

That's that's a well,

this, by the way, is Charles Lim.

I would really hate to say one, but Bach comes to mind.

Now, what if you could watch the creative process actually unfold inside Bach's brain? Well, that's sort of what Charles Lim is trying to do.

I run a music cognition lab at Johns Hopkins where I try to understand how it is that creative people, both hear music but also produce music.

And and Bach let's go back to Bach for a second. Why Bach? What did what was it about him?

I mean, this is not that recent that Bach was writing his music, yet it sounds interesting and compelling and exciting. And there's a certain, a lot of ideas were flowing out of this very, very creative man.

And what Charles is trying to figure out is where creativity comes from. And if it's possible to locate the exact place in the brain where it lives. But his challenge is how to capture the moment, the precise moment when creativity happens. This is the music of Keith Jarrett, the legendary jazz pianist, and he plays entire concerts in front of thousands of people completely improvised.

What's notable to me when you watch Keith Jarrett or really any other amazing jazz musician is it's almost like turning on a faucet. There's just a a kind of a a flood of ideas come pouring out.

What actually happens is so much in the moment, so much of a nanosecond.

This is Keith Jarrett. I asked him about those live performances.

And I know a lot of people probably are skeptical about whether they really are always improvised. I just I myself feel skeptical even though I know they were.

And that means that when it comes to creativity research, jazz improvisers like Keith Jarrett are the perfect, the ideal research subjects for people like Charles Lim.

How many times can you go and say, we're gonna watch genius being created in front of us?

Here's Charles on the TED stage.

I've always just as a listener, as just a fan, I listen to that and I'm just astounded. I think, how can this possibly be? How can the brain generate that much information, that much music spontaneously? And so I set out with this concept scientifically that artistic creativity is it's magical, but it's not magic. Okay. Meaning that it's a product from the brain. There's not too many brain dead people creating art. And so with this notion that artistic creativity is, in fact, a neurologic product, I took this thesis that we could study it just like we study any other complex neurologic process. And I think there's some sub questions there that I put there. Is it truly possible to study creativity scientifically? And I think that's a good question.

And I'll tell you that most scientific studies of music, they're very dense, and when you actually go through them, it's very hard to recognize the music in it. And so it brings the same question, why should scientists study creativity? Maybe we're not the right people to do it. Well and maybe. But I will say that from a scientific perspective we talked a lot about innovation today. The science of innovation, how much we understand about how the brain is able to innovate, is in its infancy. And truly, we know very little about how we are able to be creative. And so I think that we're going to see, over the next 10, 20, 30 years, a real science of creativity that's burgeoning and is going to flourish, because we now have new methods that can, enable us to take this process of something like this, complex jazz improvisation, and study it rigorously. And so it gets down to the brain.

And so all of us have this remarkable brain, which is poorly understood, to say the least. I think that, neuroscientists have much more questions than answers. And I myself, I'm not going to give you many answers to. I just ask a lot of questions. And fundamentally, that's what I do in my lab. I ask questions about what is this brain doing to enable us to do this.

And so in his lab, to answer those questions, Charles brought in a bunch of jazz musicians. Come on in. I'll make the 4th

make the 4th dude.

Nothing's in your pockets. Right, Mike? No.

Nothing's in my pocket. Okay.

And what he did was he basically stuck these guys in a functional MRI scanner that was fitted with a keyboard. And he told them to jam. And then, he watched part of their brains light up on the screen.

And so what you're sort of seeing is these hot spots and cold spots of activity or or deactivation. And when you look

at Okay. So what Charles observed was that when these guys improvised, very specific parts of their brains would show activity. Not not too surprising. But then he noticed something else.

The prefrontal cortex of the brain or a large part of it was was suppressed in activity in a big way, which was linked to, we think, conscious self monitoring. Now, these are multifunctional areas of the brain. As I like to say, these are not the jazz areas of the brain. Right? They they do a whole host of things that have to do with, self reflection, introspection, working memory, and so forth. Really, consciousness is seated in the frontal lobe. But we have this combination of an area that's thought to be involved in self monitoring, turning off, and this area that's thought to be autobiographical or self expressive, turning on. And we think, at least in this preliminary you know, it's one study. It's probably wrong, but it's one study.

We think that at least a reasonable hypothesis is that to be creative, you have to have this weird dissociation in your frontal lobe. One area turns on, and a big area shuts off so that you're not inhibited, so that you're willing to make mistakes, so that you're not constantly shutting down all of these new generative impulses. And these parts of the brain are really important. I mean, so for for example, right now, I wanna make sure that I'm not saying something too too too stupid. And so that part of my brain is kind of actively filtering what's coming out of my mouth.

It's

basically saying don't be creative.

Yeah. To a certain extent. Make sure that what you say is correct and don't don't make too many mistakes, that kind of thing. Wow. And whereas if the goal were to to come up with something new, it would sort of, turn off. Yeah. Or hopefully, it would turn off.

I mean, if if we know that our brains can kind of stifle our creativity, how do we sort of exercise more control over that? Like, how could we somehow manipulate our brain to make sure that it doesn't do that at times when we most need that creativity?

So, I'll tell you, in the lab, this is something we think about all the time, which is how can we manipulate creativity? And that's a different question than should we manipulate creativity, you know, because there's a, I think, a big debate on whether or not one should. Now people have been trying to manipulate their own creativity for forever. I mean, whether it's drugs, whether it's meditation, whether it's practice, I do think we're heading towards an understanding of the brain where we'll be able to manipulate circuitry linked to creativity and hopefully for the better, meaning in the same way yeah. I mean, in the same way that you take I I think in the same way that you take a you drink a cup of coffee in the morning for its kind of neuropharmacologic effects, I think it might be the same way with a creativity pill that, you know, it's, hey. It's time to work on this piece of music. Let me just take this pill that will sort of get me in my my groove a little bit more easily. But I think that all people have some ability to enter these flow states, with maybe, you know, some for some people, it comes easier than others. But our brains, I think, are meant to do this because this is how we generate novelty.

Everybody has the capacity to be creative.

Yeah. And I it it might sound strange or surprising, but I tend not to over romanticize the idea.

Oh.

So I

think there's a bit of a, a myth that art is kind of just comes from some ethereal, you know, land of inspiration and just the lucky few are able to generate it. I mean, most artists that are doing what they do and are good at what they do have been working at their craft for their whole lives. I mean, they're putting hours and hours and hours into learning to play their instrument or to paint or whatever it might be. I mean, this is something that they're practicing. It's not just magic. The idea that a professional musician can enter a flow state because they've practiced doing it is important.

Oh, absolutely.

Once again, jazz pianist, Keith Jarrett.

I have a connection with the instrument due to how long I've played it. It's like almost a talisman. But, you have to be able to be ready to fall on your face, flat on your face and have failed miserably. Like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance. You know, she falls over. It's her worst nightmare come true, But what can you do that's worse than that if you're dancing?

The idea here is that practice doesn't make you perfect, but it does help you stop thinking that you have to be.

Yeah. I think that's true. I I would say that anytime external influences are interfering with your brain's ability to just generate something new, it is sort of putting an additional cognitive load on your brain that changes the way it's normally meant, I think, to generate new ideas. And, you know, I think for art and for high level flow states, the ability to suppress your own brain may be one of the real hallmarks for what makes, somebody great. I think kind of the ability to get out of their way, not just musically, but neurologically.

Charles Lim runs a music cognition lab at Johns Hopkins. He's also a pretty good musician himself. He knows how to play at least a dozen instruments. Check out his talk at ted.com. So if we can get closer to the source of creativity, is it something that we could nurture from a very early age? Well, the most popular TED talk ever is about that very idea and it was given by this guy.

I'm Ken Robinson. I'm an educator, a writer.

You are sir Ken Robinson? Yes. Yeah. Who calls you that?

Well, my children. I insist

on it with them.

It's a matter of respect.

Ken, as you can tell by by his accent, grew up in the UK. And a few years ago, he was knighted for his contributions to creativity and the arts. Because school when you were growing up, like, especially British school, was I imagine like dreary and really austere and kind of a scary place. Like, what was school like for you?

I'm not quite that old guy. This wasn't grad grand. I wasn't being decanted from the mines to to be thrashed in the school. My schools, I went to 3 of them, you know, were were pretty good. But a lot of people I know because the structure of the system, came through it feeling they weren't very smart, very intelligent, and and didn't do well. A lot of people have gone on to very interesting careers, look back at the time at school as periods where they felt isolated, alone, not really, tuned in to what it is they later went on to do successfully.

So Ken's idea isn't that our schools lack creativity. In fact, he believes there's plenty of creativity in the schools already. Here's Ken on the TED stage.

I had a great story recently, I love telling it, of a little girl who was, in a drawing lesson. She was 6, and she was at the back drawing. And the the teacher said, this little girl hardly ever paid attention. And in this drawing lesson, she did. And, the teacher was fascinated. She went over to her, and she said, what are you drawing? And the girl said, I'm drawing a picture of God. And the teacher said, but nobody knows what God looks like. And the girl said, they will in a minute.

Kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong. Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original, if you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies just, by the way.

We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems, where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this. He said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or rather, we get educated out of it.

When you think about that word, creativity Mhmm.

What does it

mean to you?

So there are different ways of defining creativity. People have their own take on it, but I'll tell you what mine is. Creativity, as I see it, is the process of putting your imagination to work. It's been defined rather simply as applied imagination. That's not a bad way to think about it. With imagination, you can enter other people's world views. You can empathize. You can try and see the world as they do.

You can try and adopt their point of view. So imagination to me is where this all comes from. What it gives rise to is a whole set of related powers. The first thing is that human beings don't live in the world directly as other creatures seem to do. We have ideas about the world. We have theories about it. We speak in languages. We convert experiences into words.

We write songs. We we create poems. We create scientific theories, philosophies. And we're surrounded by the products of human imagination. I'm sitting in the studio talking to you. You're in Washington. I'm in I'm in And we're, acting as if we're in the same room, but we're surrounded by every type of digital device. Well, we don't have other creatures doing that.

You know, we haven't got a building next to us full of cats and dogs, you know, conveying ideas over digital networks.

But that would be very cool

if if we did. Fantastic. It would be a fantastic way to do it. So creativity is that. It's putting your imagination to work. But the thing is, if you think of educate of creativity as being a process, not an event, a lot of the ideas around it that seem so intractable start to at least become, available for for proper thought and practice.

Yeah. You know, a lot of, like, at a very early age, right, kids are encouraged to be creative. But then at some point, there's a break, and that doesn't happen anymore, just stops.

Well, it doesn't have to, and it doesn't always, but but it often does. And but, Pacey, part of my argument here, Kai, is is that it's one thing to have creative capacities. It's a different thing to know how to develop them. For example, you've got 1 or 2 children? 2. Okay. Yeah. Well, you know, how old are they? Can I ask you?

5, 5 and 3.

Well, you know, I'm sure they're speaking and, you know, if in ordinary circumstances that's a fair assumption. But you didn't teach them. You don't sit them down at the age of 1 and say, listen. We need to talk. You know? Or or rather you do, and here's how it works. That doesn't happen. They learn by a process of imitation, which draws on a natural capacity to speak. And I'm saying that children at a very young age demonstrate all kinds of creative capacities.

But if you don't develop them, they may evolve through the child's own efforts, but they may well not. Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability, and there's a reason. The whole system was invented around the world. There were no public systems of education, really, before 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on 2 ideas. Number 1, that the the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the ground you would never get a job doing that.

Is that right? Don't do music. You're not going to be a musician. Don't do art. You won't be an artist. Benign advice. Now profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution. And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image.

If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way. In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job, it's because you didn't want one. And I didn't want one, frankly.

So but now kids with degrees are often heading home, to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation, and it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.

Sir Ken Robinson, he's back in a moment with a story of a friend. A story about how nurturing creativity is sometimes about spotting it in the first place.

My mom, she said I can hear her saying it to the doctor when we went into his lovely little study. Her attention span is very bad. She cannot stop wriggling. We call her wriggle bottom.

I'm Guy Raz. Our show today, the source of creativity. This is the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

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It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. On the show today, ideas about creativity. It's the subject of the most popular TED talk ever. It was delivered by Sir Ken Robinson. And in that talk, Sir Ken tells the story of another Brit with a fancy title.

Hello, guy.

Can can you introduce yourself, please?

Yes. Do you want me to say I'm a dame?

Sure.

You sure? Because I don't use it all the time, but the fact is I am.

This is Dame Gillian Lynne.

Good evening, everybody.

Gillian Lynne got her title from the Queen for her contributions to dance and theater. She choreographed some of the best known musicals like Cats and Phantom of the Opera.

Well, I think life

Anyway, Gillian's life story is a pretty amazing one about creativity. Sir Ken Robinson told it on the TED stage.

I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet in England, as you can see. And, anyway, Jill and I had lunch on her. I said, how did you get to be a dancer? And she said it was interesting. When she was at school, she was really hopeless.

I told Ken that my mum had taken me at the age I think I was 70. Taken me to the doctor because she was at the end of her tether.

The school in the thirties wrote to her parents, said, we think Gillian has a learning disorder.

Her attention span is very bad. She cannot stop moving. We call her wriggle bottom.

I think now they'd say she had ADHD. Wouldn't you? But this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadn't been invented, you know, at this point, so it wasn't an available condition. You know, people people weren't aware they could have that. Anyway, she sent went to see this, this specialist. So this oak paneled room, and and she was there with with her mother, and she was led and sat on this chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school.

Anyway, he was so astute, this man. He'd been noticing me and noticed that I was trying to take in 98 things when there were only 50 to take in and all of that. And,

In the end, the doctor went and sat next to Jill and said, Jillian, I've listened to all these things that your mother's told me. I need to speak to her privately. So he said, wait here. We'll be back. We won't be very long. And and, and they went and left her. But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And when they got out of the room, he said to her mother, just stand and watch her.

And the minute they'd gone, I leaped up. I leaped on his desk. I leaped off his desk. I danced all around the room. I had the most fabulous time.

And they watched for a few minutes, and he turned to her mother.

And he said, the immortal lines. I really owe my whole career in a way, and I suppose my life to this man. He said, there is nothing wrong with your child. She needs to learn to dance. She's a born dancer.

Take her to a dance school. I said, what happened? Said, she did. I can't tell you, sir, how wonderful it was. We walked in this room, and it was full of people like me. People who couldn't sit still. People who had to move to think. Who had to move to think. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School.

She became a soloist. She had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School, found found her own company, the Julian Linnan Dance Company, met Andrew Lloyd Webber. She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history. She She's given pleasure to 1,000,000, and she's a multimillionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down. Now, I think

It's an it's an amazing story. I mean, that that doctor that day, he really understood.

He did.

That that you needed to tap into this creativity that that was there that just wasn't being recognized.

No. And what what a lovely thing for I mean, he saw an energy, and I happened to be possessed of one of the most unusual energies, and he saw it. Now how seldom is that?

I mean,

if if you can teach creativity, like, where do you start?

I I all the great teachers I've ever met and worked with are people who can inspire interest and passion, and curiosity, and light up people's imaginations with the interest they themselves have for a particular discipline or field of work. Teaching is about enabling. It's about facilitating. It's about mentoring. It's about creating curiosity. It's true in the work of every creative person I've ever met that what drives them is a passion and appetite for the work, but what facilitates it is an increasing control over materials and ideas. So there's a pedagogy and you can do it. And my argument is it's essential that we do do it.

I believe our only hope for the future is to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being so they can face this future. By the way, we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it. Thank you very much.

Sir Ken Robinson, his full talk as well as 3 amazing others are all at ted.com. So it's safe to say that everyone has some degree of creativity. And as a species, we've had it for a pretty long time.

To me, the greatest evidence of that is that human beings have been making recognizable art for 30,000 years. And we've been, for instance, before

we get ahead of ourselves,

can you introduce yourself, please?

Oh, my name is Elizabeth Gilbert. The swiftest point of

identification is that I am the author of a book called Eat, Pray, Love. A book that has sold over 10,000,000 copies, which means it basically went viral

and feral. It just, beyond, way beyond any expectation that I had ever had in my life or

anything that I was ever gonna do. It had taken on a life of

its own. And while all that's

So when she was asked to give her TED talk, she started to think.

What is the magical thinking or mindset that I'm gonna have to fall into to make sure that this isn't the last book I ever write?

Because something funny happens when you write a hugely successful book.

Everywhere I go now, people treat me like I'm doomed.

Here's Elizabeth on the TED stage.

Seriously doomed. Doomed. Like, they come up to me now, like, all worried, and they say, aren't you afraid? Aren't you afraid you're never gonna be able to top that? Aren't you afraid you're gonna keep writing for your whole life and you're never again gonna create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all ever again? So that's reassuring, you know. The answer short answer to all those questions is yes. Yes. I am afraid of all those things and I always have been. And I'm afraid of many many more things besides that, you know, people can't even guess at like, seaweed and and other things that are scary. But when it comes to writing, the the thing that I've been sort of thinking about lately and wondering about lately is why, you know? Is it rational? Is it logical that, anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this earth to do, you know? I should just put it bluntly because we're all sort of friends here now.

It's exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me, you know. So Jesus, what a thought, you know. Like, that's the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at 9 o'clock in the morning. And, you know, I don't wanna go there. You know, I would prefer to keep doing this work that I love. And so the question becomes how. You know? And and so it seems to me upon a lot of reflection that that the way that I have to work now in order to continue writing is that I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct. Right? I have to sort of find some way to have a, a safe distance, you know, between me as I am writing and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing is gonna be from now on.

I mean, it seems like this this would be the part where, you know, a lot of people would just shut down and not even attempt to to do something creative.

Right. I think the thing that stops people from doing it is always exactly the same thing, which is fear, and what I've discovered over the years is not that you have to be fearless because I don't believe in fearlessness, and I don't advise it. I think the only truly fearless people that I've ever met were full blown psychopaths or really reckless 3 year olds, and I don't think we wanna aspire to be either of those things. I think instead what you have to do is recognize that fear and creativity are conjoined twins, and what I see people doing in their lives is they're so afraid of their fear that they end up trying to kill it, and when they kill it, they also kill their creativity because creativity is going into the uncertain and the uncertain is always scary, and so what I've had to figure out how to do over the years is to create a a sort of mental construct in which I make a lot of space to coexist with fear, to just say to it, hey, fear, listen. Creativity and I, your your conjoined twin sister, are about to go on a road trip. I understand you'll be joining us because you always do, but you don't get to decide anything about this journey that we're going on. But you can come, and I know that you'll be in the back seat in panic, but we're going mommy's driving, and we're going anyway. And you just take it along with you, and that seems to work for me.

There's a

story in your TED Talk about a woman named, Ruth Stone. Can you tell me about her?

Yeah. Ruth Stone, was an incredible American poet, and she told me a story about when she was a child growing up in rural Virginia. She used to be out working in the fields and she would hear a poem coming at her. And when she felt it coming, because it would like shake the earth under her feet, she knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, run like hell. And she would like run like hell to the house, and she'd be getting chased by this poem, The whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and, grab it on the page. And other times, she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house, and the poem would barrel through her, and she would miss it. And she said it would continue on across the landscape looking, as she put it, for another poet. Which is not at all what my creative process is like.

I, you know, I would love to have that experience someday, but I've never had it, but I believe in it.

Yeah.

And I believe there are people who are sort of mystical in that way. I had it happen once where I was sleeping on a commuter train on Metro North, and I had a dream, and a short story came to me in a dream kind of word for word, and I woke up and took dictation and wrote it down. And that was in 1995, and it has never happened again. And I've taken a lot of naps on a lot of trains since then. So if I you know, and and that was just this one off. The rest of the time for me, it's it's just been about showing up every day for the work, and I find it actually, what happens is that you begin the work just from a place of diligence and discipline. And then if you're lucky, through that process, you'll have moments where inspiration will come in and meet you. And what that feels like to me is that it feels like I'm lugging my suitcase through a giant airport terminal, and then all of a sudden, I'm on one of those movable sidewalks.

So I'm being assisted in all and I'm still walking. I'm still working. I'm still carrying my suitcase, but it's easier. And then that movable sidewalk ends, and then it comes again, and then it ends. But I keep moving regardless of whether the sidewalk is moving under me. That's how I feel about my work.

I mean, I I'm just sort of imagining you, like, at your at your desk or, you know, trying to write something and just hitting a wall where you feel like you're not tapping into your best, most creative self. And, and that can last a long time. Right? I mean, that can last days, weeks, months. It can, but

motion works. And moving toward motion means do something.

Even if the creative output that day just sucks.

Yeah. That's fine. Yeah. In most days, it does. Yeah. You know? And and I think I I'm also lucky because my mom had this adage that we grew up within our household, which is, this simple statement, done is better than good. Like, you win already just by having shown up. That's a victory enough.

When I was in the middle of writing Eat, Pray, Love, and I fell into one of those sort of pits of despair that we all fall into when we're working on something and it's not coming, and you start to think this is gonna be a disaster, this is gonna be the worst book ever written, Not just bad, but the worst book ever written. And, and I started to think I should just dump this project, you know. So I just lifted my face up from the manuscript and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room. And I I said aloud, listen you thing. You and I both know that if this book isn't brilliant, that is not entirely my fault. Right? Because you can see that I am putting everything I have into this. You know, I don't have any more than this. So if you want it to be better, then you've got to show up and do your part of the deal.

Okay? But if you don't do that, you know what? The hell with it. I'm going to keep writing anyway, because that's my job. And I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job.

It seems like this word creativity, this term that that we ascribe all this meaning to isn't that huge. Right? It's not like this crazy out of reach, elusive kind of thing.

Right? No. Everybody's invited. Everybody's invited. When you say creative people, it's redundant. We are creativity, and we've done a great disservice to bifurcate it. And one of the things that I've been saying a lot to people is that we keep telling people to follow their passion, and I feel like that can be an intimidating and almost cruel thing to say to people at times, because, first of all, if somebody has one central powerful burning passion, they're probably already following it, because that's sort of the definition of passion is that you don't have a choice. If you don't, which is a lot of people have one central burning passion, and somebody tells you to follow your passion, I think you have the right to give them a finger, because it just makes you feel worse. And so I always say to people, forget like, if you don't have a an obvious passion, forget about it.

Follow your curiosity because passion is sort of a tower of flame that is not always accessible. Passion or it may not. It may have been for air quotes nothing, in which case, all you've done your entire life is spend your existence in pursuit of the things that made you feel curious and inspired, and that should be good enough. Like, if you get to do that, that's a wonderful way to have spent your time here.

Writer Elizabeth Gilbert, her most recent book, a novel, is The Signature of All Things. She has 2 great talks that you can find at ted.npr.org.

Hey. Thanks for listening to our show on the source of creativity. If you missed any of it or you wanna find out more about about who's on it, check out ted.npr.org. You can also find many more ted talks at ted.com. You can download this show on iTunes or through the NPR smartphone app. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to ideas worth spreading on the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

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