How Following Curiosity Beats Fear | Insights from Elizabeth Gilbert in 26 Minutes

The only thing I have ever wanted to be for my whole life was a writer. Creative living is any life that you live where your decisions are based more strongly on your curiosity than your fear. The definition of your ego is it's a bottomless hole of desire. It can never be satisfied with anything. You can't open a magazine today, right, without somebody— the headline is always, "How so-and-so found balance." For me, in my life, writing is the thing that I love, and the shit sandwich was the 7 years that I was not getting published. With creativity, even my failures The stakes are so low. You know, aside from people who are very heavily medicated, the calmest people that I know tend to also be the wisest. If you can't feel like you're alive unless you're burning bridges behind you, light the match, walk away. That's, that's your deal. I'm operating constantly at like 90% fear threshold. I'm afraid right now.

She's an American author, essayist, biographer, and novelist. She's best known for her book "Eat, Pray, Love," which has spent 199 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. "Eat, Pray, Love" was also turned into a film by the same name in 2010. She's Elizabeth Gilbert, and here is my take on her top 10 rules for success.

The only thing I have ever wanted to be for my whole life was a writer. I wrote all through childhood, all through adolescence. By the time I was a teenager, I was sending my very bad stories to The New Yorker, hoping to be discovered. After college, I got a job as a diner waitress kept working, kept writing, kept trying really hard to get published and failing at it. I failed at getting published for almost 6 years. So for almost 6 years, every single day, I had nothing but rejection letters waiting for me in my mailbox. And it was devastating every single time, and every single time I had to ask myself if I should just quit while I was behind and give up and spare myself this pain. But then I would find my resolve, and always in the same way. By saying, "I'm not going to quit. I'm going home." You have to understand that for me, going home did not mean returning to my family's farm. For me, going home meant returning to the work of writing, because writing was my home, because I loved writing more than I hated failing at writing, which is to say that I loved writing more than I loved my own ego, which is ultimately to say that I loved writing more than I loved myself. And that's how I pushed through it. My definition personally of creativity is that it's the— intersection between a human's labor and the mysteries of inspiration, which is kind of grand. But my definition of creative living is much simpler. Creative living is any life that you live where your decisions are based more strongly on your curiosity than your fear. That's it. And if you consistently, habitually, routinely, at every sort of intersection and decision in your life, make decisions that are based on curiosity rather than fear, then you will be engaging with creativity at some level, at some point. And it won't look like my life, It won't look like your life. It won't look like anybody else's life because everyone's curiosity is different. So everybody's path of following curiosity will have a different outcome. But your life itself will sort of become a work of art if you can consistently live that way. Not easy, but so worth it. So worth the trouble. It's perfectly okay to have an ego. We all have one. The definition of your ego is it's a bottomless hole of desire. It can never be satisfied with anything. Your ego is the thing that will sell 20 million records and wonder why it wasn't 30 million, right? And that's, it can be satisfied for moments, but it can't be eternally satisfied. No matter what your ego gets, there's gonna be another level where it wants more, it wants 5 of them, it wants them in blue, it wants it tomorrow morning. You know, that's the definite, we all have this at some level in ourselves. So I had a letter on Facebook the other day from a young woman who said, I don't think it's fair for anybody to tell me that I shouldn't, "want to be a successful actress. I'm going to acting school and I want to be a successful actress." And I said, "Of course you want to be a successful actress. I wanted to be a successful writer. When I was your age, I wanted to be published. If I didn't want to be published, I wouldn't have bothered to try to get published. I would have just written in my bedroom and put it under my desk and been fine. But I wanted it to be seen. It's fine. But make sure you have, if you're not capable of having a stronger motive than that, make sure you at least have an additional one." Make sure you have an additional one, and let that additional one be something that has more to do with your soul than your ego. Because you are also a soul, and your soul wants a bunch of different stuff than your ego wants. Your soul wants wonder, it wants becoming, it wants unfolding, it wants process, it wants connection, it wants some sort of sense of meaning. Those are the things your soul wants. And I have this lecture with myself all the time, so that when I get a bad review and I'm miffed about it, and I feel like I've been misunderstood, or worse, understood and revealed in a way that I don't want to be, I can see this difference where I can check in with my ego, and my ego's wounded. It doesn't like it. I would like everybody to like everything I do. It hurts. I still don't like it after all these years. And I'll be like, ouch, I don't— that didn't feel good. I didn't want that. And then I check in with my soul and say, how you doing? And my soul's like, we're fine. Can we play more? Can we make another thing? I just want to make another thing. Let's do it again. Yeah, let's do another one. Let's do it differently. Let's try this. And that's, you know, I can never totally circumvent my ego, but as long as I'm making sure to constantly check in with a richer and more interesting part of myself, then I feel like I'm all right. And let's throw out that word balance. We're always trying to say balance, and it's like, what is that? That is a word I would like to see eradicated from the cultural conversation. I mean, you can't open a magazine today, right, without somebody The headline is always how so-and-so found balance, you know, how this person found balance. Like, have you ever met that person, first of all? And if you did, would you want to even be friends with them? Is that somebody who you would want to call in the middle of the night when you've lost your balance? Balance is something that you'd find and lose, regain and lose. We're on a planet that's spinning 7,000 miles an hour. Our minds are spinning 20,000 miles an hour. We're surrounded by people who are in change. We're in change. To expect that you should somehow be able to hold your state through that entire thing is just crazy. Every pursuit, no matter how glamorous it may seem, no matter how exciting you you are, it feels to you, no matter how much you feel like you were born to do it, comes with a shit sandwich. And so the question is not, "What do I love?" The question is, "What do I love so much that I don't mind eating the shit sandwich that comes along with that thing?" So for me in my life, writing is the thing that I love, and the shit sandwich was the 7 years that I was not getting published and that I was coming home from my job as a diner waitress, as a bartender, as an au pair, as a as somebody who worked in flea markets, as a cook, and I was coming home tired and smelling like other people's french fries and sitting down and doing my real job, which was to write, and then to go to the mailbox the next day and get another rejection letter, and then say, "Do I still wanna do this? 'Cause this shit sandwich sucks." Am I ready to take another bite? Right. You know? And I did still wanna do it. And now even as somebody who makes their living as a writer, there's no end to the shit sandwiches. It's like, "Oh." "Hello, horrible review in prominent newspaper. That's your shit sandwich today, Liz. You still wanna do this work?" "Yeah, I still do. Still worth it." Like, "Hello, awful comment on social media from somebody who thinks you're a pile of dog shit and just has chosen every possible way that they can just cannot get it out of their system fast enough how much disregard they have for your entire life. Still wanna do this thing?" Yeah, I still wanna do it. You know, so that's the question because if the first time you encounter the shit sandwich you're like, "Well, this isn't worth it," then that's not the thing you're supposed to be doing. And there are plenty of things in life that I have run into the shit sandwich and I've been like, "So not worth it. So not worth it. Like, this is not— I don't wanna do this. Like, whatever the alleged benefits of this thing might be, no." SoulCycle, no. You know, like, I know it's probably really good for me, but I feel like throwing up right now because this is too hard. I'm out. You'll not be seeing me here again. You know, like, and I love my sisters at SoulCycle, I just don't like feeling like I'm gonna throw up when I exercise. So it's not for me. You know? And so that's the question. So if you go into this thing thinking, "If I follow my bliss and I live my dream and I stand in my truth, then everything will be great," it doesn't mean everything will be great. It just means at the end of the day when you check in with yourself and you go, in the end, on the balance, is this still better than not doing it? And the answer is still, yeah, this thing is still better than not doing it, then you're on the right path. With creativity, even my failures, the stakes are so low. You know, I mean, this is the thing that I'm always trying to tell people about artistic endeavor. The stakes are so low. The stakes are so low. Like, very rarely is somebody going to die or have their heart broken or have their life upturned because a poem that you wrote didn't work, you know, or an essay that you tried to write didn't work. If I write a book and people don't like it, they're not going to come to my house and shoot me, you know what I mean? I mean, it's— I'm exaggerating, but it's— I think sometimes we, in the realm of creativity, blow the stakes up to something so much higher than they possibly are. I've heard a lot of comics say that the fantastic thing about doing doing stand-up, which I think is the scariest of all art forms, is to bomb and then to walk offstage and you're like, "Oh, oh, that didn't work and I'm still here. That's amazing. The worst possible thing that could happen happened and nothing happened. I'm still intact. I'm still in one piece." So my creative failures have that feeling to them where it's It's like, "Wow, that totally didn't work, and I'm totally fine. We're all going to live. It's totally fine." Look, something happened to me, but even saying that kind of puts it in a little bit too passive of a voice. I set out looking for something very specific, and through a pretty rigorous search and a pretty rigorous set of practices, I got that thing. That I wanted, which, to put it really simply and perhaps oversimply, is a certain calmness, you know. Life is an extremely agitating event, you know, and I vibrate at a slightly higher frequency than is necessarily healthy, you know, and I always have. I've always been kind of anxious. I've always been super emotive. I feel things harder than is good for me. Indecision has been part of my life, you know, and I could see after a certain age how that was destructive not only to myself but to people around me. And, you know, I just think you get to a point where you don't want to be in other people's way, you know. You don't want to be taking up other people's space and energies to sort of take care of you. And I longed to be a different kind of person, you know. I longed to be just a little more at ease, a little more relaxed, and a little more wise, you know, because it seems to me that wisdom is the beginning of serenity, you know. And, you know, aside from people who are very heavily medicated, the calmest people that I know tend to also be the wisest, who are quickest, you know, or most instinctively able to put things in a perspective that takes away the urgency of the moment. And there are practices that you can do to get there, you know, and those practices, you know, as my friend Richard from Texas always says, "This shit works," you know, those practices work. And people do it in different ways and they do it in different places, but I think that the end result and the end desire is always the same. You want peace, you know. If not in the world, then at least within your own mind. If you can't feel like you're alive unless you're burning bridges behind you, light the match, walk away, that's your deal. That's not the contract that I've ever had with my creativity because for me, you know, we live in this sort of bumper sticker world where the two bumper stickers that I always want to edit are the two— with my, like, a Sharpie in the parking lot. There's the one that says, "Jump and the net will catch you," and there's the one that said, "What would you do if you knew you could not fail?" Right? So the edits I want to make are, "Jump and the net might catch you," and, "What would you do even if failure wasn't even, like, a word that you were caring about, which is a long edit and makes for a terrible bumper sticker. But what I'm getting at is I don't like the sort of— I don't like the ethic that says if you try really hard and you put everything into it, you're gonna get everything that you want. Because we're all grownups here, so can we just say that that may or may not happen? You may or may not. Get everything that you want. You might put everything into something and it doesn't work. And that's okay if you didn't mortgage your house, risk your family, like empty out your IRA, and just put yourself in a really precarious situation such that you can never do it again. Right? That's the other thing. Such that you've been so battered by how you set up your life so that now you're so cornered and strapped and anxious and shamed that you just say, "Well, if that's what it feels like to give 100% to something." You can keep it. I'm gonna take nothing but safe choices for the rest of my life and that's it. And you just shut down. Right? I never wanna see somebody put in that situation. So the contract that I made with writing when I was 15 years old and I lit my candle and made my deal with the universe and said, "I'm gonna be a writer for the rest of my life," one of the promises that I made to the work was, "I will never ask you to support me financially. I will support both of us. I am a resourceful person. My parents raised me to be a worker. I will do whatever I have to do to pay the rent." and you and I will have a love affair on the side of this that is not contingent upon monetization. And I have watched so many creative people murder their creativity by insisting that they are not truly creative unless their creativity pays the bills. And if it doesn't pay the bills, which it might or it might not, or it might for a while and then it might not, you might go out of fashion, your thing might change, people might not want that anymore, and all of a sudden you're stuck. And I see those people go into depression, bitterness, rage, resentment. You have to be childlike in the pursuit of your life, but you cannot be childish. And this is a really big difference. Childlike means walking into the world with wide-open wonder and being open and letting go of bitterness and ready to be amazed, ready to be taught, ready for everything to be new. That's childlike. Childish means I want it and I should have it. And I don't like the way this turned out. It's not fair. I'm gonna have a temper tantrum now. Nothing ever goes my way. I didn't grow up in the right family. I don't have the right tools. I didn't get to go to the right school. Nobody likes me. I quit. And just because I want it, I should have it. That's childish. So you have to separate those things out. I believe you can be childlike and mature at the same time. And mature means looking after yourself in the real world in a real way. I write in seasons, and I'll say that if anybody out there is an aspiring writer, as everybody is and should be, you know, and I do always encourage aspiring writers, I would say if you're at that level, you should be writing every day because nobody else will make you do it. You have no incentive to do it. Nobody's waiting for it if you're unknown. No editor is knocking on the door saying there's a deadline. You have to create your own deadlines, your own your own structure, in your own time. And I did that when I was an unpublished young writer. But now at this point, the way that I've evolved as a writer is that it's seasonal labor for me. And there are seasons for research, and there are seasons for publicity, as we're doing right now once the book is finished. There are seasons for writing, there are seasons for editing, there are seasons to pause. And so now it goes on a cycle, and right now I'm just beginning the season of research. Research for the next thing. But I don't try to muddy my head by— and also, it's pointless and it's kind of a waste of time for me to write every day if I don't have a thing to write yet. You know, I need to go collect a lot of information before I can actually put it together, and I'd rather have all that done and then sit down and do the whole thing at once. I am inherently and naturally an incredibly fearful person. I'm operating constantly at like 90% I'm afraid right now. I woke up afraid. I'm gonna go to bed afraid. I was born afraid. I always sort of been tremulous with fear, but my only saving grace in my life is that I am 1% more curious about the world than I am afraid of it. And that's all you need. It just has to be 1 gram more curiosity than fear. It's not about eradicating fear. It's not about eliminating fear. Fear, it's not about this— I think of a particularly American thing that's going on right now, of this idea of, like, kicking fear in the ass and punching it out and showing it who's boss, this kind of extreme sports language that a lot of people are using around fear. That doesn't work for me because anything I ever fight in my life tends to fight back harder. So anytime I've ever tried to attack fear, it just decides to show me how much more powerful than me it is, and it just roars to life in a much bigger way. That whole war against fear doesn't really work. And so for me, it's always been about, well, what do I have that's slightly stronger than fear? And for me, it's just about kind of curiosity, wonder, inquisitiveness. I'm terrified to see what's on the other side of that hill, but I really want to see what's on the other side of that hill. I'm terrified to see what will happen if I try to do this project, but I'm also, like, slightly more curious. To see what will happen. And oftentimes when my fear arises, which it does nonstop, I try to engage in a conversation with it. And so the first thing I do is thank it, which I don't think we do enough. I don't think we show enough gratitude to our fear. All it's trying to do is keep you alive and save your life. So I thank it for caring about me and trying to protect me, and then I try to explain to it what I'm doing and why we're doing I know that your job is to tell me all the worst outcomes that can happen, but I really want to do this. And if it still won't back down, I usually come to my fear and I ask it for its alternative suggestions. You know, okay, so I want to do this project and you, my fear, are telling me not to. So what do you have to offer me? What's your suggestion? And when you challenge it like that, the answer is always nothing. It has nothing to offer. It never has a better idea. It has never once had a better idea. It just doesn't want me to do anything. It would just prefer that I stayed in a darkened room with a cool damp cloth on my forehead hiding from the world forever. And that's not gonna do it for me. That's not an interesting enough alternative. And until my fear gives me a better idea than the cockamamie, weird, jacked-up idea that I have, I kind of have to do the cockamamie weird jacked-up idea because at least it's a thing, you know, because the alternative is always do something even though it might not work and people might not like it and you might not make money from it and it might be strange and it might be a disaster. At least it's a thing. The alternative that fear always offers is a blank piece of paper. I got nothing for you. Just don't. Just shut it down. Just nothing. And for me, when the alternative is so clearly between something and nothing, I'm just not nihilistic enough to go with nothing. You know, I'm just curious enough to have to go with something, which isn't a sort of act of faith that it's gonna work. I had a letter recently from a woman who said, "I think I'm about ready to start writing my book, but I'm just afraid that I don't want to start until I'm convinced that the universe will give me the outcome that I want." I was like, yeah, that is never going to happen. The universe might not give you the outcome that you want. We're not children here. Like, we all know jump in the net might not catch you, but the universe will give you an outcome. It's going to give you something. You're going to know more about yourself than you did at the beginning of the thing. Certainly it might not be what you wanted. It might not be what you expected, but it'll be something. And always, always, always, given the choice between something and nothing, I'm going to have to choose something.

Thank you so much for watching. I made this video because Phoebe asked me to. So if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which of Elizabeth's top 10 rules had the biggest impact on you. What lesson most stuck out for you? Leave it in the comments below and I will I will join in the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.

Oh, I'm great at boundaries. I'm not great at boundaries. I'm kidding. I so thought that was going to be a laugh line. I thought you guys knew me. I thought you knew me well enough to know that— what? No, I don't have any boundaries. I'm the permeable membrane. I don't know. I let the— you know, I'm a little better at it, but I have— I don't know, I have learned one important thing, which is that I think you sort of get to a point in your life where you think, I have to learn how to say no to things I don't want to do. And that's a big mature moment when you start to begin to do that. But the bigger mature moment is when you learn how to say no to things you do want to do. Because you know that you just don't have time, or you don't have energy, or there just isn't, you know, you have to sort of triage your life, and there just isn't an opportunity. And that only came to me very recently, that sometimes you have to turn down even the wonderful things in order to take care of your health, or to take care of what you truly, truly, truly care about, not just what you truly care about. No catharsis ever happened without somebody's participation. You know, people talk about cathartic experiences. You know, somebody has a horrible accident or a horrible heartbreak, and it transforms them, but not without their assistance, you know, not without them showing up for it. And I think travel can always seem like such a natural way for people to change their lives, but it can't impose change on you. You know, you can only kind of will it in. And similarly, whatever beautiful sort of treasures of selfhood that I found on this journey are mine to lose any day I feel like it, you know. And so I consider it kind of my obligation to hold onto as much of that as I can within reason. I would love to tell you that I get up every day before dawn and meditate, and I'm half tempted to tell you that because, you know, how the hell would you guys ever know if it's true or not? But in fact, it's not true. But I do it more days than I don't. And I think that I have— for that, I kind of base it on my writing practice as well. I would love to say that I write every day, but I don't. But I write more days than I don't. And I think as long as in your life you're doing more of what's beneficial to you than not, then that's probably good enough. For what we can do in our normal lives. You can only make this decision based on what you know today. And so what you're gonna have to do, whatever you decide to do about this pregnancy, about this person that you're involved with, about this situation that you're in, all you know is what you know right now. And the decision's going to have to be made based on that. So you are going to have to pre-forgive yourself for what you don't know yet. And it may be that years later, when you have more information about your life and about the world, you may look back on the decision you made this day, whatever it is, and you may wish you had made a different decision. But you have to begin right now forgiving yourself for what you can't know yet. I feel like that is the most compassionate possible advice that anybody could be given when they're making a difficult decision in your life. And then later to go back and look, because we spend so much time mired in regret about things we should have known, things we should have done, things we shouldn't have done. And at some point, there's this mercy that you have to show to yourself that says, every decision I've ever made in my life, I made based on what I knew then, and that's all I had to work with. You can't know something before you know it. It's just a rule of life. And I think about some of the stuff I've done in my life and how stupid it was. And I look back on a younger version of myself and think, how could you have not known better? And the only compassionate and merciful response is because I didn't I didn't yet. And maybe I had to do that terrible stupid thing in order to learn so that I could become a more mature person who wouldn't do it again. Maybe I had to do it 10 times. Maybe I had to do it for 15 years. Maybe I had to do it for 30 years. But you're not going to learn something until you learn it. And then at that moment, you must immediately forgive younger versions of yourself for what she didn't know yet. And you must, in advance, I have to sort of look ahead and be like, I know that when I'm 56, I'm going to look back at myself now at 46 and be like, how could you not have seen? You can't see what you don't see yet. I think what we're most missing in our lives, both in the public level, in the private level, and in the personal level, is mercy. Just the sense of mercy. We're all doing the best we can with what we know at any given moment, and we simply cannot do better than that. I can't, you can't, your family can't, the world can't. It's all we've got. So be a little gentler with yourself and with others and their mistakes as well.