Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature – all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at them and you’ll find out how big a prize you’ve won.
Interpretation
Engaging with various aspects of life can unlock your creative potential.
In this quote, Twyla Tharp highlights that creativity can be fostered through diverse experiences, such as reading, engaging in conversation, and connecting with one's environment and culture. By seeking out inspiration in various forms and from different sources, individuals can uncover the hidden treasures of creativity that lie within these interactions, just like finding a prize under a scratch-off lottery ticket.
In practice
In a motivational speech about fostering creativity in the workplace.
Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me.
I am still pushing the edge of what my body can do.
No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.
I grew up in a drive-in theater, from the time I was 8, working in a snack bar watching four features every week. It was silent theater in the sense that this was a drive-in, which meant that I often saw the films going with no sound. But I learned to tell stories through action.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft.
Bring together things that have as yet never been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.
Finding the medium that excites your imagination, that you love to play with and work in, is an important step to freeing your creative energies.
In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.
Creativity is a natural extension of our enthusiasm.
In order to have a real relationship with our creativity, we must take the time and care to cultivate it.
Creativity means to push open the heavy, groaning doorway to life.
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