I stumbled on Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s TED Talk from 2019 earlier this week, and couldn’t help but feel compelled to share it.

“If your creativity is driven by a desire to get attention, you are never going to be creatively fulfilled,” says Joseph Gordon-Levitt, actor, musician and creator of the online creator community HitRECord.

In his TED Talk, Gordon-Levitt speaks about the human desire to get attention and how that affects his creative output.

“It’s a powerful feeling to get attention. I’m an actor, so I’m a bit of an expert on, well, nothing really, but I do know what it feels like to get attention,” he explains. “I’ve been lucky in my life to get a lot more than my fair share of attention and I’m grateful for that.”

He continues: “But there’s another powerful feeling that I’ve also been lucky enough to experience a lot as an actor. And it’s funny, it’s sort of the opposite feeling because it doesn’t come from getting attention. It comes from paying attention.”

Gordon-Levitt goes on to describe that special feeling when he’s acting, when his “attention narrows and everything else in the world and anything else that might be bothering me or grab my attention … all goes away.” He urges, “That feeling, that is what I love, that to me is creativity.”

“I think that our creativity is becoming more and more of a means to an end, and that end is to get attention,” he explains.

The actor goes on to speak about his experiences as an actor engaging in social media, how the number of Instagram followers and engagement on Twitter feeds his ego, yet makes him feel utterly miserable.

“In my experience, the more I go after that powerful feeling of paying attention the happier I am. But the more I go after that powerful feeling of getting attention, the unhappier I am.”

As an artist, creative, or any other in our own right, the plight for attention and approval from others is natural. I recognized that in myself as a younger girl in my early 20s, when I incessantly shared my writing and music to social media and the number of views and likes seemed to satiate a desire for validation. As I began to get a notable amount of attention (oftentimes unwanted), I saw how these numbers didn’t matter to me because I just wanted to share, create and express the things I loved and cared about and felt passionate about, for the sake of expressing myself. That power of paying attention, as Gordon-Levitt so eloquently put, is more powerful than any attention I could ever get. And I realized that if I myself wasn’t achieving or accomplishing my own personal goals to create freely and in abundance, I’d never be satisfied.

Gordon-Levitt makes a very strong and self-aware case of the detriments and facade of getting attention.

When we achieve our own flow state and operate in a space of pure concentration, while everything else in the world fades away, that is the state that gives us pure, utter bliss and ultimately, happiness.

What are your thoughts?

Have a look at Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s talk on creativity below: