Hi this is Supreet. I upload new videos every Sunday. You can follow me on
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If you're an artist, a blogger, a content creator,
or you're a person who wants to live more creatively,
or you're a person who is perhaps stuck in a creative
rut or has questions or doubts about their creative process,
then an excellent book that i would highly highly recommend
is Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. I read this book in January of 2020
and it's one of the books that has had a very very deep
impact on me, probably because of the timing.
At the time, I was... I had lots of confusion and doubt in my own creative
process as a Youtuber. I was even questioning
whether i should continue my Youtube journey or just quit it.
But that book came at the right time to me and
it helped in dissolving a lot of my doubts and confusion,
and in this video i'm going to share my biggest
takeaways and the notes i wrote down while reading this book.
So here we go. A creative life is an amplified life. It's a bigger life,
it's a happier life. And a hell of a lot more interesting life. Argue for your
limitations and you get to keep them. You can measure
your worth by your dedication to your path, not by
your successes or failures. You can live a long life making and
doing really cool things the entire time.
You might earn a living with your pursuits or you might not,
but you can recognize that this is not really the point.
At the end of your days, you can thank creativity for having blessed you
with a charmed, interesting, passionate existence. And this next point, everybody
needs to hear this, not just creative people but
everybody. And this point is: All good ideas feel daunting at first.
my next note from the book is :John Didion said
"I don't know what i think until i write about it".
I love this because i know personally that writing
helps me to think better. In the end, creativity is a gift to the creator,
not just to the audience. And this next point was kind of like a parenting
lesson for me. Elizabeth Gilbert says, "Maybe because my
parents didn't worry too much about me, I didn't worry too much either. I will
never stop creating no matter what the outcome
and no matter how deep my anxieties and insecurities may be.
Now this next one is gold for any content creator, this next
point is gold! Most things have already been done
but they have not yet been done by you. Once you put your own expression and
passion behind an idea, that idea becomes
yours. Talking about originality versus authenticity, Gilbert says "Share whatever
you are driven to share. If it's authentic enough, it will feel
original." You must be willing to take risks if you want to live a creative
existence. No way was i going to give up on my work simply because it wasn't
"working". That wasn't the point of it. The rewards could not come from the
external results. They had to come from the joy of
puzzling out the work itself, and from the private awareness I
held that i had chosen a devotional path and
I was being true to it. If someday i got lucky enough
to be paid for my work, that would be great but in the meantime,
money could always come from other places.
This particular point really made an impact
on me because at that point when i was reading this book in January 2020,
I was beginning to become worried about external factors with my Youtube work,
things like subscribers and likes and so on, and
also thinking I have made so many videos, I have worked so hard,
why is my subscriber count still too low? So i was beginning to attach myself to
the external outcome a lot and in that process, i had
forgotten my original reasons to create my channel and i had kind of
lost that passion a bit. So when i read things like this in
the book it really helped to reconnect me to my original purpose of
starting my channel, which was to help others. It wasn't to
get subscribers or likes. And somehow in the process, after a year
of doing it, I had begun to forget my purpose. So this book
was really great for reconnecting me back to my calling.
"Everybody imitates before they can innovate".
If you can dedicate yourself to anything diligently for 10 years,
that would make you an expert. Learning how to endure your
disappointment and frustration is part of the job of a creative person.
Exactly the words i needed to hear at that time! Because
being disappointed and frustrated is exactly what i was feeling then.
Now this next point is a little bit of a spiritual point but i love it! I love how
beautifully it is stated: My suffering takes this whole thrilling
and gigantic universe and shrinks it down
to the size of my own, unhappy head. If you're stuck, do something
else. Einstein called this tactic "combinatory play" - the act of opening up
one mental channel by dabbling in another.
He would often play the violin when he was having difficulty solving a
mathematical puzzle. After a few hours he could usually find
the answer. So these were some of the notes that i
wrote down while reading this book. Reading this book helped me to reconnect
with my original reasons to create, and it also helped to remind and
congratulate me about my internal measures of success.
It also helped me to feel more joy and less stress
in the process of creation. I smiled and felt inspired on pretty much every
page. So thank you to Elizabeth Gilbert for
writing this book, which created "big magic" in my life!