TED Talk #167 – Your elusive creative genius

Watching TED Talks is a popular pastime at CN&CO. We visit TED.com regularly to clear our heads, have a laugh or get inspired. TED Talks open our minds, spark new ways of thinking and can lead to some very interesting conversations. Each week we pick a favourite and publish it on a Tuesday, because we like how “TED Talk Tuesday” sounds. It’s also a way that the CN&CO team play their part on spreading ideas and helping to make the world a better place. This week’s talk is posted by Colin. Here’s why he chose it:

I love the idea held by the ancient Greeks that creativity was bestowed upon a person by a mystical being called a daemon. The Romans called this being a genius. This shifted the responsibility of creativity to an external locus and left the individual free of the pressures of being creative. If the work was a success, it was because the person who created it had a clever daemon or genius, not because they themselves were a clever daemon or a genius. Similarly, if it failed, blame the sprite.

In this TED Talk, Elizabeth Gilbert – famed author of Eat, Pray, Love – shares her take on the elusive creative genius that lives inside all of us. As a so-called “creative” myself, I can relate to the pressure of constantly having to make something out of nothing. It is different from being a chemical engineer. As Gilbert points out, “When last did you hear of someone getting ‘chemical engineer block’?”