A good online friend of mine recently shared a TED talk with me. It’s a talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, whom I admire greatly because I’ve shared another talk of hers from a few years back that I continue to listen to several times a year. This new talk – Success, Failure, and the Drive to Keep Creating (see video below) — is even more meaningful to me than Elizabeth’s first. In light of some of my recent publishing failures, none of which I can tactfully talk about here in public, I desperately needed to hear the truth she tells.
I’ve often forgotten how to get back “home”, as Elizabeth calls it. She makes it clear that your “home” has to be that thing you love more than yourself.
That thing for me? Writing. More than anything else, writing transcends me in every way possible. When I go to that creative place, I am able to see myself and ultimately step beyond myself … and share that experience with others. Without writing to explore everything I am and believe in, I would be a very, very, very lost and lonely soul.
Failure has the ability to make you bulletproof. Despite hitting what I consider darn near close to rock bottom … and knowing I can hit it again even harder in the future … I’m still fiercely devoted to my writing, probably more now than I have ever been. And I’m not going to stop. I may fail in many ways, but never at writing. So how could I possibly quit and not consider that the biggest failure of all?
Elizabeth Gilbert was once an “unpublished diner waitress,” devastated by rejection letters. And yet, in the wake of the success of ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’ she found herself identifying strongly with her former self. With beautiful insight, Gilbert reflects on why success can be as disorienting as failure and offers a simple — though hard — way to carry on, regardless of outcomes.