Elizabeth Gilbert and Marie Forleo on Fear, Authenticity, and Big Magic

Video below, 48 minutes:

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I don't like the ethic that says, if you try really hard and you put everything into it, you're going to 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 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, empty out your IRA, and just put yourself in a really precarious situation such that you can never do it again.... 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 say "well, if THAT'S what it feels like to give 100% to something, you can keep it... I'm going to take nothing but safe choices for the rest of my life" and that's it and you just shut down.

I never want to see someone in that kind of situation.

So the contract I made with writing, which I made when I was 15 years old... one of the promises 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've 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 -- and 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, ready to be taught, ready to be amazed. 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, and I'm going to 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. Just because I want it I should have it.

That's child-ISH.

You have to separate those things. I believe you can be childlike and mature at the same time.

And being mature means looking after yourself in the real world in a real way.

(See the full interview here:)