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.
The principle of Creative Limitations calls for freedom within a circle of obstacles and restricted boundaries. Talent is like a muscle: without something to push against, it atrophies. So we deliberately put obstacles in our path - barriers that will inspire us. We disciple ourselves as to what to do, while we're boundless as to how to do it.
While there is no quick fix for instant, pain-free creativity, creative recovery (or discovery) is a teachable, trackable spiritual process. Each of us is complex and highly individual, yet there are common recognizable denominators to the creative recovery process.
When we are involved in [creativity], we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.
Creativity is the ability to identify self-imposed constraints, remove them, and explore the consequences of their removal.
When we open ourselves to exploring our creativity, we open ourselves to God: good, orderly direction.
Share what you do profusely, because it will be remixed by others into something new, rich and strange.
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