11 Things You Didn't Know About 'Eat Pray Love' Author Elizabeth Gilbert
She's inspired millions of people around the globe with her novels.
— -- She's inspired millions of people around the globe with her novels.
The New York Times best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert, 46, put her career on the map with her travel memoir “Eat Pray Love." In that book she chronicled her personal journey to finding true love and happiness.
"Eat Pray Love" sold more than 10 million copies worldwide and became so popular that Time Magazine named Gilbert one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Four years later, her book was turned into a film, starring Julia Roberts as Gilbert.
Now Gilbert is at it again with her first self-help book "Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear."
In “Big Magic," Gilbert asks the question, “Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures within you?”
Gilbert spoke with ABC News at the Omega Institute’s Being Bold Women and Power retreat, which helps women realize they can be bold, face their fears and tap into their creative potential.
Gilbert said the entire intention of her book is to help people.
"It’s a hope that I can help people move past their fear, so that they can live more creative lives,” Gilbert told ABC News.
“The way I define a creative life is very simply, any life where your choices are made more by curiosity than by fear. Giving people the entitlement and the permission, and maybe even the playfulness, and the courage to start living a more curiosity-driven life,” explained Gilbert.
Gilbert says her inspiration comes from her mother. “My mom came from a world of very limited circumstances and very narrowed horizons where she was told in a million different ways that she did not really matter," said Gilbert.
“The most important thing to my mother was to raise women who were not waiting for somebody to rescue them; who were not waiting for life to hand them something, but who understood it was their own agency that was going to make things happen in the world. I only owe my mother literally everything. She’s my hero,” Gilbert added.
Gilbert admits one of her biggest regrets is wasting too much of her life swooning over men who weren’t as ambitious as she is.
“I was boy crazy and romantic and sort of adventurous in those ways,” Gilbert told ABC news. “Honest to God it’s not so much the sex that I regret but it’s the hours of my life that I gave away. I wish I had given that time to myself or that I had spent that time with people who were kind of on a rocket direction like I was. I could have done a lot more stuff with my life if I had given myself those hours back."
Gilbert offers this career advice: focus less on "passion."
"Follow your curiosity," she said.
Here at 11 things you don't know about Elizabeth Gilbert.
1. What was the moment like for you when you found out Julia Roberts was going to be playing you in your movie, "Eat, Pray, Love?"
“I still have not processed it,” said Gilbert.
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