Your elusive creative genius | Elizabeth Gilbert - YouTube

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• ancient Greece and ancient Rome -- people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then

• People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons.

• The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity "daemons." Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar.

• The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. Which is great, because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. 06:59 They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio

• And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. 08:26 You know, I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel, you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche.

• It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance.