4 Life Lessons to Boost Your Creativity

“Creativity can come from broken places.” – Julie Burstein

The tension between what you can control and what you need to let go can be turned into something beautiful if you just see it in the right light. Being creative is more than just having good ideas. Being an artist often comes from hardship.

In her TED Talk “4 Lessons in Creativity“, radio host Julie Burstein, who talks with creative people for a living, shares four lessons about how to create in the face of challenge, self-doubt, and loss. She further explains that to give birth to creativity; we need to embrace the following life lessons:

1) Experience

Good artists are always aware of their environment. They collect experiences and turn them into expressions of their voice. They see, hear and smell to capture the essence of things beyond what is apparent to most people. That gives them the possibility to create and dream new things from ordinary, everyday experiences.

2) Challenge

Many times is within the challenges people face that they find their strengths. One great example is writer Richard Ford. He discovered he had dyslexia since he was in school, but despite this, Ford developed a great passion for literature.  He has made it clear in interviews that his dyslexia may, in fact, have helped him as a reader, as it forced him to approach books at a slow and thoughtful pace. Just as him, many other artists have learned to work with their challenges and have intentionally turned them into tools for creativity and success. 

3) Limitation

One important lesson Julie points out is that many times is the things we are not so good at, that end up leading to the right path. For example, Richard Serra became a world known sculptor after embracing his limitations as a painter. It was when he embraced his weaknesses that he found his strength.

 4) Loss

The last lesson for creativity is the loss. As Julie explains it, creative people have a unique intake on having lost something or someone. They somehow can take the things around them that feel painful and use them as inspiration. They find ways to turn trials into life lessons and ultimately mold them into works of art for others to see.

So all you need to do to fuel your artistic side is to embrace your experiences, challenges, limitations, and losses, allowing your creativity to flow from them. If you want to learn more about this, you can check out her book Spark: How Creativity Works and find out how to ignite your own dreams.