“Everybody is 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 I’ve been saying a lot to people is that we keep telling people to follow their passion and I feel that that can be an intimidating and an 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 the finger…because it just makes you feel worse. So I always say to people, forget it. If you don’t have an obvious passion, forget about it. Follow your curiosity. Because passion is sort of a tower of flame that is not always accessible and curiosity is something that anybody can access any day. Your curiosity may lead you to your 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 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 spend your time here.” (emphasis mine)
–transcribed from “The Source of Creativity,” TED Radio Hour, “Elizabeth Gilbert: Where does creativity come from?”, December 27, 2019
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