Stop Chasing Balance: CreativeLiving Framework That Works

Six days a week, for nearly six years, Elizabeth Gilbert came home with rejection letters. She wrote in a New York apartment at night, working as a diner waitress by day—later as a bartender, an au pair, someone who worked at flea markets, a cook. She'd write. Mail rejection. Repeat. Each letter was a fresh wound. Each morning she had to ask herself: should I quit? Should I spare myself this pain?

She didn't quit. She'd tell herself the same thing every time: "I'm not going to quit, I'm going home." For Gilbert, home didn't mean her family's farm. Home meant the work itself—the writing. And because she loved writing more than she loved her own ego's need for recognition, she kept showing up, night after night, rejection after rejection, until one day the rejections stopped.

What emerged from those seven years wasn't just success. It was a framework for living that challenges almost everything contemporary culture tells us about creative work, ambition, and the good life. That framework begins with one radical proposal: the word "balance" should be eradicated from human existence.

Why Does "Balance" Deserve to Be Erased From Culture?

Gilbert has spent years watching writers, artists, and entrepreneurs destroy themselves chasing an illusion. Pick up any magazine, and the headlines are predictable: "How [Celebrity] Found Balance." "The Secret to Having It All." It's everywhere. And Gilbert finds it not just unhelpful—she finds it actively destructive.

"That is a word I would like to see eradicated from the cultural conversation," she says. "You can't open a magazine today without somebody—the headline is always, 'How so and so found balance! How this person found balance.' Have you ever met that person? And if you did, would you want to even be friends with them?"

The problem isn't that balance is hard to achieve. The problem is that it's impossible to achieve, and pretending otherwise is a setup for self-hatred. We live on a planet spinning 7,000 miles per hour. Our minds spin at 20,000 miles per hour. We're surrounded by people in constant change. We ourselves are in constant change. To expect that any human being should somehow hold a steady state through all of that is, frankly, insane.

"Balance is something that you find and lose, regain and lose," Gilbert explains. The moment you achieve some temporary equilibrium, life shifts. The client demands attention. The child gets sick. The creative project demands a sprint. When you find balance, you lose it again.

What she proposes instead is this: stop trying to balance. Decide what you love enough to be unbalanced for. That's the actual question worth asking.

What Actually Is Creative Living?

Gilbert has a precise definition that's far simpler than the self-help platitudes usually offered:

"Creative living is any life that you live where your decisions are based more strongly on your curiosity than your fear."

That's it. Not talent. Not luck. Not access. Curiosity over fear.

The beauty of this definition is that it doesn't require you to be a writer, a painter, or a musician. It doesn't require you to quit your job or move to Paris. It simply requires that when you face a choice, you let curiosity be the stronger force than fear. And that when you do that consistently—"habitually, routinely, at every intersection and decision in your life"—your life itself becomes a work of art.

"It won't look like my life, it will look like your life. It won't look like anybody else's life. Because everybody's curiosity is different, so everybody's path of following curiosity will have a different outcome. But your life itself will become a work of art if you can consistently live that way."

How Do You Distinguish Between What Your Ego Wants and What Your Soul Wants?

This is where Gilbert's framework gets sophisticated. She's not suggesting you kill your ego. That's impossible—and trying is counterproductive. The ego exists in all of us. It's the part that wants recognition, success, validation. It's not evil; it's just insatiable.

"The definition of your ego is it's a bottomless hole of desire. It can never be satisfied with anything. Your ego is the thing that will sell 20 million records and wonder why it wasn't 30 million, right?"

The issue is that if ego is your only engine, you're doomed. Because the ego literally cannot be satisfied. There's always a bigger achievement, a better review, a higher number.

But there's another engine in you: your soul. And your soul wants entirely different things:

"Your soul wants wonder, it wants becoming, it wants unfolding, it wants process, it wants connection, it wants some sort of sense of meaning."

Gilbert's practice is to check in with both. When a negative review lands, her ego gets wounded—she'll never entirely move past that. But then she can turn inward and ask her soul: "How you doing? You okay?" And her soul says, "We're fine, can we play more? Can we make another thing? I just want to make another thing. Let's do it again, let's do it differently, let's try this."

The goal isn't to circumvent the ego. It's to make sure you have a richer, more interesting part of yourself to consult. That way, you're not running on fumes. You have multiple sources of fuel.

What's the "Shit Sandwich" and Why Does Every Worthwhile Pursuit Come With One?

This is perhaps Gilbert's most valuable contribution to how we talk about creative work. She's explicit: every pursuit worth doing comes with a cost. Every single one. The question isn't whether you'll pay it—it's whether you're willing to.

"Every pursuit, no matter how glamorous it may seem, no matter how exciting it feels to you, no matter how much you feel you were born to do it, comes with a shit sandwich. The question is not, 'What do I love?' The question is, 'What do I love so much that I don't mind eating the shit sandwich that comes along with that thing?'"

For her, the shit sandwich was seven years of rejection, years of coming home "tired and smelling like other people's french fries, and sitting down and doing my real job, which was to write, and then to go to the mailbox the next day and get another rejection letter."

For a surgeon, the shit sandwich might be decades of training and grueling residencies. For a parent, it's sleepless nights and financial strain. For an entrepreneur, it's risk and self-doubt and failure. The glamorous outcome requires you to eat a lot of shit to get there.

But here's the insight: there's no end to the shit sandwiches. Once you're successful, you don't escape them—you just get different ones. "Oh hello, horrible review in prominent newspaper, that's your shit sandwich today," Gilbert laughs. The sandwich never ends. You just learn to eat it and keep creating anyway.

Does Fear Mean You Shouldn't Do It?

One of the most common mistakes people make is treating fear as a stop sign. "If I'm afraid, this must not be the thing for me." Gilbert offers a different take: fear is almost always present in anything worth doing. And that's okay.

"I'm operating constantly at like 90 percent fear threshold, I'm afraid right now," she admits. Fear hasn't stopped her from building a life around writing. Fear hasn't stopped her from publishing, from speaking, from putting her work into the world.

The key distinction is this: there's a difference between being afraid and letting fear make your decisions. Fear will always be there—the inner voice saying "what if you fail? what if people don't like it? what if you look stupid?" That's normal. That's human.

What matters is whether you've also cultivated something stronger: a genuine, embodied curiosity about the work itself. It's not about eradicating fear. It's about letting curiosity become the larger presence in your decision-making. If you have that curiosity, fear becomes background noise. It doesn't disappear, but it gets smaller relative to your pull toward the work.

How Do You Build a Sustainable Creative Practice?

This is where maturity enters Gilbert's framework. Maturity, she suggests, is different from childhood. Childishness is "I want it and I should have it." Maturity is "looking after yourself in the real world."

For a creative practice, this means:

• Creating your own deadlines if no one else will
• Understanding that there are seasons—times to push hard, times to rest
• Building cycles rather than trying to maintain constant output
• Learning to say no, which Gilbert identifies as perhaps the most important skill a creative can develop
• Forgiving yourself for what you couldn't know yet

"I had to forgive younger versions of myself for what she didn't know yet," Gilbert reflects. That younger self didn't know the publishing world, didn't know how to survive rejection, didn't know that persistence would eventually pay off. But she kept showing up anyway.

Where to Go From Here

If you're reading this as someone who loves something—writing, music, art, teaching, building, creating in any form—but you're afraid, or rejected, or exhausted by the myth that you should somehow balance it all, Gilbert's framework offers a path forward.

First: stop using the word balance. Or at least, stop aspiring to it. Instead, ask yourself what you love enough to be unbalanced for. What pursuit is worth rearranging your life around?

Second: make sure you have something in your inner world that feeds your soul, not just your ego. Regular practices of creativity, reflection, or connection that remind you why you're doing this beyond external validation. This becomes your lifeline when ego gets bruised.

Third: identify the shit sandwich you're willing to eat. Know what cost you're paying and make peace with it. Be honest about what's acceptable and what isn't. Not every difficulty is worth enduring forever.

Fourth: if you're afraid, that's not a sign to stop. It's a sign you're human. The question is whether your curiosity is stronger than your fear. If it is, keep going. If curiosity has gone dormant, it might be time to listen to that signal.

The path from unknown writer with rejection letters to published author to honored voice is not a straight line. It's not even a balanced one. It's a path built on curiosity, on checking in with what's real, and on choosing, again and again, to love the work more than you love your own ego. That's creative living.