Elizabeth Gilbert talks about her peculiar views on the dangers of a career in a creative job. The burden of genius as part of the artist's identity – a maddening perspective, spoiling the life of artists in the last three hundred years. Gilbert juxtaposes the ancient concept of having a genius instead of being one, and tries (with some help from Tom Waits) to give a modern times equivalent of the spirit that channels creativity from the gods.

Call me a materialist, but I'd easily find a modern equivalent for externalizing genius as an entity that does not belong to the individual – that is society, meaning both the proximity of other human beings and their inspirational power, as well as the whole body of knowledge carried by a specific culture and the special, unique section that each single individual makes out of it.