Elizabeth Gilbert stopped asking what she was passionate about
She replaced the question with a smaller one — and found the smaller question actually led somewhere.
The standard creative advice is to find your passion and follow it. Elizabeth Gilbert spent years noticing that this instruction paralyzes as many people as it motivates. Passion implies a burning clarity you're supposed to already have. For most people, most of the time, that clarity isn't there.
In Big Magic, she proposes curiosity instead. Curiosity doesn't demand certainty. It only asks you to follow the next small interest — not the destination, just the next step that genuinely interests you. A thread, not a map.
Gilbert also argues that fear is not a problem to be solved before you begin. Fear is going to be present in the passenger seat regardless. The question is whether it gets to drive. She describes her own practice as something like: acknowledge the fear, proceed anyway, don't let it have a vote on whether work gets made.
The permission she's really granting is smaller than it sounds but harder to accept — you don't need to know where you're going to start. You don't need an external authority to grant you the title of artist before you make the work. You need only the next genuine point of curiosity, followed by a willingness to see where it goes.
Some of those threads lead nowhere. That's what threads do. The ones that go somewhere are worth the ones that don't.