Musings of a Marketing Maven

Eliz­a­beth Gilbert got a stand­ing ova­tion when she spoke at TED 2009 about genius, the process of cre­ativ­ity, sources of inspi­ra­tion, and the pres­sures on peo­ple who earn their liv­ing through cre­ative works. Her talk was mov­ing and poignant, at times wryly witty.

Eliz­a­beth is trou­bled by the fear of what if, in her 30’s, she has already done her life’s best work; what if her next 4 decades’ worth of cre­ative out­puts don’t live up to “the freak­ish suc­cess” of her best-selling book, Eat, Pray, Love.

Acknowl­edg­ing the many cre­ative geniuses who have lived tor­mented lives (or com­mit­ted sui­cide) after fail­ing to sur­pass their ear­lier work, Eliz­a­beth says she’s look­ing for ways to man­age her own demons before they take over.

She finds com­fort in the notion that genius may have an exter­nal com­po­nent: that the cre­ator is not entirely respon­si­ble for the cre­ative work. (She wryly iden­ti­fied mul­ti­ple pos­si­bil­i­ties: the divine within, the divine with­out; a fairy; a voice from on high; a genie liv­ing in the wall or the cor­ner of your office.)

Eliz­a­beth told sto­ries of what she and oth­ers, includ­ing a famous poet and a musi­cian, have expe­ri­enced in their own work. They point to genius exter­nal­ized — inspi­ra­tion com­ing from some source out­side of them­selves — as a fully formed con­cept or poem, the core melodic phrase for a new song, an image trapped within the can­vas. Or some­thing that they reveal by work­ing hard, day after day, at their art or their craft. Wasn’t it Michelan­gelo who described his artis­tic process as reveal­ing the shapes that had been con­cealed within the stone?

Her talk has pro­voked a rag­ing online con­ver­sa­tion, with peo­ple attack­ing each other and her, dis­agree­ing vehe­mently on the view­points she espoused. The com­ments reveal a sur­pris­ing num­ber of detrac­tors (peo­ple who dis­liked her best-selling book Eat, Pray, Love and who are tak­ing this oppor­tu­nity to attack her writ­ings in gen­eral?). The peo­ple who most fer­vently oppose her propo­si­tion are those who are self-styled rationalists…

This argu­ment strikes me as one of those vex­ing Mars ver­sus Venus dis­putes — a symp­tom of left-brain ver­sus right-brain polar­iza­tion, ver­sus syn­the­sis. What if Daniel Pink is right, when he states in A Whole New Mind,

The last few decades have belonged to a cer­tain kind of per­son with a cer­tain kind of mind — com­puter pro­gram­mers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft con­tracts, MBAs who could crunch num­bers. But the keys to the king­dom are chang­ing hands. The future belongs to a very dif­fer­ent kind of per­son with a dif­fer­ent kind of mind — cre­ators and empathiz­ers, pat­tern rec­og­niz­ers, and mean­ing mak­ers. These peo­ple — artists, inven­tors, design­ers, sto­ry­tellers, care­givers, con­sol­ers, big pic­ture thinkers — will now reap society’s rich­est rewards and share its great­est joys.

Based on the crises the world is now con­fronting, we’ve seen the prob­lems that can occur when left-brain thinkers rule the world (or at least its finan­cial mar­kets) unchecked by any other value sys­tems or moral codes. What­ever the source of genius and cre­ativ­ity, the time has come for more bal­ance (and more respect) between the pro­po­nents of ratio­nal­ism and creativity.

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