Weekly Program - "Your Elusive Creative Genius" by Elizabeth Gilbert
This week's speaker seems timely with the installation of new Rotary club officers and the new Rotary theme of "Be a gift to the World". The new Rotary year brings new opportunities for serving others in need, developing leadership skills, touching the lives of younger generations, modeling ethics and sharing the Rotary Four-Way-Test, and creating new ideas about sharing Rotary. Incoming officers are ready to assume leadership for their clubs and all members may contribute to the direction the club moves toward growing membership, selecting service projects, and fully participating in club activities. Look at yourself and how you have something worthwhile to share and contribute. After all, that is why you joined Rotary!
Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses — and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk. She is the author of 'Eat, Pray, Love,' Elizabeth Gilbert has thought long and hard about some big topics. Her fascinations: genius, creativity and how we get in our own way when it comes to both. This Ted Talk was posted in February, 2009.
Why you should listen
Elizabeth Gilbert faced down a premidlife crisis by doing what we all secretly dream of -- running off for a year. Her travels through Italy, India and Indonesia resulted in the megabestselling and deeply beloved memoir Eat, Pray, Love, about her process of finding herself by leaving home.
Elizabeth Gilbert faced down a premidlife crisis by doing what we all secretly dream of -- running off for a year. Her travels through Italy, India and Indonesia resulted in the megabestselling and deeply beloved memoir Eat, Pray, Love, about her process of finding herself by leaving home.
She's a longtime magazine writer -- covering music and politics for Spin and GQ -- as well as a novelist and short-story writer. Her books include the story collection Pilgrims, the novel Stern Men (about lobster fishermen in Maine) and a biography of the woodsman Eustace Conway, called The Last American Man. Her work has been the basis for two movies so far (Coyote Ugly, based on her own tale of working at the famously raunchy bar in New York City), and Eat, Pray, Love, with the part of Gilbert played by Julia Roberts. Not bad for a year off.
In 2010, Elizabeth published Committed, a memoir exploring her ambivalent feelings about the institution of marriage. And her 2013 novel, The Signature of All Things, is "a sprawling tale of 19th century botanical exploration."
Gilbert also owns and runs the import shop Two Buttons in Frenchtown, New Jersey.