Need to boost your creative courage in 2023? Read this ...

I have a ‘books-to-read’ backlog that is over 100 titles long.  

Not to mention the 7 physical books on my nightstand right now and the 30+ titles on my Kindle reader iPhone app. 

I ❤️ reading.  

It’s the fact that someone distilled specific ideas, stories and/or bodies of knowledge into a structured package that I can quickly consume and incorporate the ideas/concepts into my life. 

Since COVID shutdown the world, I doubled down to gaining as much knowledge from the best books I could find (side note: access to information is a complete miracle). 

I am also a big online course consumer too - I have issues AND not enough time in the day (I know, I know-we all likely feel this way). 

This fall I read a book which was NOT on my radar or queue but was from my wife’s recently completed collection. 

Author Elizabeth Gilbert known for her book Eat, Pray, Love wrote an excellent non-fiction book titled ‘Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear’. 

I now understand why she is a famous author as her personality and talent oozes off the pages. 

Although typically people don’t associate finance professionals as creative types, I reject and prove that notion is false.

Whether at work or at home, creative, innovative, transformational work is what makes life exciting. 

These are my Top 10 Takeaways from BIG MAGIC: 

1- COURAGE - “Creative living is a life driven more strongly by curiosity than fear” Page 9

2- ENCHANTMENT - “A creative life is an amplified life. … a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life.” Page 12

3- ENCHANTMENT - “Creativity is a gift to the creator, not just a gift to the audience.” Page 72. She continued with … “this is how I want to spend my life - collaborating to the best of my abilities with forces of inspiration that I can neither see, nor prove, nor command, nor understand…I cannot think of a better way to pass my days.” Page 78.

4- PERMISSION - “ are you considering becoming a creative person? Too late, you already are one. To even call somebody “a creative person” is almost laughably redundant; creativity is the hallmark of our species. … if you’re alive, you are a creative person.” Page 89.

5- PERMISSION - I literally laughed out loud from this section “ you are not required to save the world with your creativity. For example: whenever anybody tells me that they want to write a book in order to help other people, I always think, oh, please don’t. Please don’t try to help me. I would so much rather that you wrote a book in order to entertain yourself, than to help me. … I would prefer that you made your art in order to save yourself, or to relieve yourself of some great psychic burden, rather than to save or relieve us.“ Page 98–99. 

6- PERSISTENCE - “The only piece I had any control over was my discipline. … mind you, hard work guarantees nothing in the realms of creativity. Do what you love to do, and do it with both seriousness and lightness. … - whatever the outcome – you have traveled a noble path. … when it’s for love, you will always do it anyhow.” Page 184.

7- PERSISTENCE - Rebecca Solnit puts it so well: “so many of us believe in perfection, which ruins everything else, because the perfect is not only the enemy of the good; it’s also the enemy of the realistic, the possible, and the fun.” Perfectionism stops people from completing their work, yes – but even worse, it often stops people from beginning their work.  Perfectionism is nothing more than a deep existential angst that says “again and again, “I am not good enough, and I will never be good enough.” Page 166–167.

8- TRUST - “What you produce is not necessarily always sacred, I realized, just because you think it’s sacred. What is sacred is the time that you spend working on the project, and what that time does to expand your imagination, and what that expanded imagination does to transform your life“ page 232

9- TRUST - Pastor Rob Bell, warns: “Don’t rush through the experiences, and circumstances that have the most capacity to transform you.” don’t let go of your courage the moment things stop being easy or rewarding. Because that moment? That’s the moment when interesting begins. Page 247.

10- DIVINITY - She concludes with this…”Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred. … What we make matters enormously, and it doesn't matter at all.”

If you got this far…congratulations and hope you enjoyed a few of these. I plan to share more of these to share book takeaways.

My reading list is constantly growing from the recommendations of others. 

What books made a big impression on you this year? 

Please share 🙏✌️