How to Prosper in the Gilded Age of Creativity
8 keys to wealth flow in this time of opportunity
We are living in The Creative Gilded Age.
If you live in the West, have access to a computer, an Internet connection, if you can read and write and know how to use your mind — if you get out of your own way — only your excuses can stop you.
There have never been more opportunities for creative expression, communication, education, and commerce.
This is one of the most, if not the most, prosperous times in history.
Writing for Business Insider, Kevin Loria demonstrates with 23 charts, “Why this is the best moment to be born.”
Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., speaking at the Economic Club of Washington in 2016, said, “This is the most prosperous economy the world has ever seen, and it’s going to be a very prosperous economy for the next 100 years.”
Viral blogger, Ayodeji Awosika, has written, “The time for excuses is long past.”
Regardless of the statistics, and whether or not all the above is still true since the recent ‘crisis’, it is safe to assume that few people reading this will have known thirst or real hunger or genuine material deprivation.
But even in these unprecedentedly abundant times, many believe they don’t have enough and that they are doomed to fail.
We may truly believe the world is rejecting our gifts. We feel unseen or unacknowledged. Unrewarded. Struggling for attention. Ignored.
Why does anyone living in a wealthy country ever feel this way?
Many of us wonder, even with so much wealth around us, why we’re not wealthier.
These eight keys will help you harness your mind’s power so you can release the flow of prosperity in your own life.
Your success is imminent.
Key one: Define what prosperity means for you.
“Decide what you want, and then act as if it were impossible to fail.”
- Brian Tracy
In his work, The Danger Of Monoculturalism In The XXI Century, Sunday Adelaja writes, “If a person wants to live a prosperous life, they must, first of all, determine what prosperity is to them personally.”
So what is prosperity? Wealth means different things to different people. For some, it’s the ability to pay all their bills and have money left over. A simple bowl of rice may be great riches to some. A comfortable level for other people may be having three or four million dollars in liquid assets.
Perhaps you yearn for a billion dollars. You might even believe there is no limit to how much money you would like. Or maybe your definition is more modest.
Catherine Ponder writes, “The word prosper in its root means’ wholeness.’ You are prosperous to the degree that you are experiencing peace, health, and plenty in your world.”
You must take into account your whole life. Prosperity must include not only money but also health, time, beauty, peace, family, friendship. Good food, music, art, laughter. Meaningful work. The things you enjoy and love.
For me, prosperity is about having the time to spend doing what I want to be doing. I want to spend most of my time reading and writing, with a few walks and meals and excercise and time to play my classical guitar and a bit of family time sprinkled in.
I want to commune with my own soul 24/7. Being able to do that is, for me, true wealth.
Define what wealth means for you. What are your values? How do you ideally want to spend your time? Spend some time thinking, make notes. Go deep.
Think big. Don’t hold back! Dream your desires into being. Focus on the experiences you want, not on the feeling of wanting itself.
As Stephen Richards, the author of the Cosmic Ordering Service, so eloquently puts it, “To dream by night is to escape your life. To dream by day is to make it happen.”
Key two: Come out of hiding.
Voltaire: “The best is the enemy of the good.”
Confucius: “Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.”
Shakespeare: “Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.”
Are you hoarding your creative treasures? Maybe you’re waiting to finally finish before you show your project to the world. Or do you leave your creations unfinished because they don’t live up to your ideals?
Maybe you don’t talk up at the family dinner table because you didn’t go to MIT like your older brother. Perhaps you’re afraid to go back to college because you flunked math, and you’ll have to admit that to someone.
You might think, I can’t share this piece of writing because it doesn’t fit with my other writing. It makes me look scattered.
I won’t submit my articles in case they get rejected.
I can’t suddenly try to sell my oil paintings when I’ve worked so hard to convince everyone I’m 100% devoted to Unix Programming.
I’m not as good as Michelangelo, therefore there’s no point in doing any art.
To unblock the flow of prosperity into your life, stop clutching parts of yourself to your chest.
“Procrastination is not Laziness,” I tell him. “It is fear. Call it by its right name, and forgive yourself.”
― Julia Cameron, The Prosperous Heart
We may leave experiences out of our resume because we don’t think they’re worthy. Perhaps we’re embarrassed about the lowly job we had for a time or that low-bar, vocational community college class we took.
You keep your passion for building model airplanes or designing earrings hidden from your colleagues because you think they’ll find it silly.
Quit hiding. It’s time to show up fully for your life.
Your creative work wants to be released. The world is waiting for your skills and your talents. Show the world your entirety. Opportunity favors the brave.
You’ve got to monetize all your creative works. Finish the things you’ve half started. Profit from all your ‘failures.’ Realize there are no failures.
“Creative freedom is prosperity for the soul.”
― Michele Jennae
Quit imagining you’re going to come back to projects long after you’ve given up on them. Instead, recognize they are probably finished and ready to be shared.
Wake up. It’s time for you to get paid.
“Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.”
— Brenee Brown
Travel back into your past and scoop up all that rich, raw material waiting for you in your half-finished projects and in the experiences you’ve been stashing away. The present becomes very powerful when we stop shutting ourselves out of it.
I recently started writing at 4 times my normal speed and publishing at 10 times my regular rate. I’m currently writing on Medium, writing on my three content sites, and working on a series of middle-grade children’s adventures. I’ve written two non-fiction Kindle books.
I’ve started giving my creative ideas away like candy just because I can. See here and here.
I’ve stopped cutting off parts of myself. I’ve stopped hiding. And I’ve never felt more creatively fulfilled.
I made ‘I get paid’ my mantra and cashed in on all my sunk costs. I went fishing and gathered up all my ‘failures’ in a net and turned them into successes.
You should too.
Key three: Focus on the giving, not on the getting.
“When you are able to shift your inner awareness to how you can serve others, and when you make this the central focus of your life, you will then be in a position to know true miracles in your progress toward prosperity.”
― Wayne W. Dyer
When you get up every day and ask, How can I give value to the world today? the world responds by giving back to you.
‘Being great’ is irrelevant. It’s ‘giving great’ that matters.
So many of us are chasing after the rewards. We chase acknowledgement and money without understanding the world is our reflection.
We are the image. The world is our mirror. The world will give you what you give it. If you chase, the world will run faster.
If we give, the world gives back. If we try to take, the world seizes up and becomes unyielding.
Once you start on your personal quest of giving, you’ll find it comes easily. You’ll have so much to give you won’t be able to keep up. The more you give away, the more the inspiration will flow in. Giving begets an avalanche of abundance.
Creativity is the ultimate generosity.
When you let your boss know all the things you can do, not just the tasks they hired you for, you might be surprised by the results. Give your whole self to your job — don’t hold your energy back. Be generous with your talents.
Quit worrying about what you are getting from the company you work for. Be of value, and you will receive value.
When we listen, we are giving. When we smile, compliment, make a coffee for someone, and take the time to drink it with them, we are being generous. Laughing at someone’s joke is giving. Reading your colleague’s blog and letting them know you enjoyed it is a gift.
Sharing your own crazy, goofy, silly, weird, childish sense of humor is a form of giving.
You never know where your giving will lead. But that is not for you to control. Just know that you will receive all that is meant for you and relax.
Of course, generosity doesn’t mean you should be a pushover or a doormat. This doesn’t mean letting your boundaries be disrespected or giving to someone who is abusing your generosity. Don’t let yourself be leeched off.
I’ve certainly been there. For much of my life, I’ve been one of those people everyone says is ‘so nice’. People pleaser. You know the type. That’s not me anymore. I embraced my inner Punk Rocker.
But I still give with all my heart. The difference now is I give what I choose, not what others choose for me.
Some people will try to suck your gifts from you. Most will receive with gratitude and grace, and you’ll both be richer for it.
You know the difference. Trust your judgment.
“Live life king size and serve others.”
― Francis Shenstone, The Explorer’s Mindset: Unlock Health Happiness and Success the Fun Way
Prosperity is about expansion. It’s about creative and financial and spiritual growth.
When you give, you grow.
So get out your art supplies, start or finish that novel. Finish off that short story or article or business plan. Reopen that online store you gave up on too soon.
Tidy up your boss’s presentation over the weekend or brainstorm a new product idea even though no one asked you to do it. Speak up in the meeting when you have something to contribute.
Let down your guard. Release your grasp. Practice in public. Gift your works and your talents to the world.
Key four: Give up trying to find yourself and, instead, start creating yourself.
Success is not an accident, success is a choice.
— Stephen Curry
In her groundbreaking work, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, says, “This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts.”
Are you trying to figure yourself out? I’ve got news for you — the years can stretch into decades on a fruitless quest for self-discovery.
In his life-changing book, Personality Isn’t Permanent: Break Free from Self-Limiting Beliefs and Rewrite Your Story, Dr. Benjamin Hardy makes a case for designing your current identity based on your desired future self.
That is the beauty of this life — it’s up to us to define ourselves.
Choice is our golden ticket to freedom. There is no danger that you’re on the wrong path. Every choice in your life so far has led you to this moment. All that matters is where you choose to go next.
Are you still asking yourself whether you’re an artist or a business person? You’re asking the wrong question. Ask yourself what you choose to do. Besides, if you want to make any money, you have to be both.
Do you worry about whether you’re happier single or married? Are you fretting about your ‘path’ and what you’re ‘meant’ to be doing with your life?
We are deluded if we believe the answer is out there. That there is an intrinsic identity or life we can discover, and when we do, everything will be plain sailing.
The question shouldn’t be, am I meant to be a craftsperson or an artist, an actor, or an entrepreneur, or a writer? But, who do I choose to be?
Not, am I meant to be in this marriage? But, do I choose to be married to this person?
Don’t ask, What should I do? Ask, What do I choose to do?
Stop chasing mirages. The chances are, you won’t suddenly discover your overwhelming talents lie in this or that. You’re likely to realize you are bad at a lot of things. And that you could be good at many, many more things.
Have you noticed that the intelligent, creative people are the ones who most struggle with finding ‘themselves’? It’s because they think their job is to discover their one true talent, rather than making choices out of their many talents.
Your potential gifts are free. They don’t ask anything of you. You can enjoy your potential at leisure, with no effort at all. Your actual gifts need to be chosen and worked for.
One of our culture’s tropes is the middle-aged, married man or woman going off the rails as they try to ‘find themselves.’ But are they looking for themselves, or are they trying to find their power of choice?
Your power of choice is the only thing you have to find.
Exercising choice means taking responsibility for who you are, what you do, and how you give and receive from the world. Choice means you make a statement of how things are for you. How you determine your reality. Choice is a statement of autonomy.
Your chance of success is 100% if you choose it. Choice is the master-key.
Are you undereducated? Choose to become better educated. You can start studying for free right now.
Are you too introverted for interviews? Choose to become more outgoing. Learn to smile and look people in the eye and hold your back up straight.
Are you bad at tech? Choose to improve your skills. Sign up for an online course. Change your mindset around machines.
Don’t have enough credentials? Get some or decide once and for all it doesn’t matter.
Choose which of your attributes to cultivate.
People who have found their Superpower of Choice know they have no one to blame for their life. They take responsibility for who they are and what they have.
And prosperity, like anything else, is a choice.
Key five: Facilitate connection.
“Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.”
― Albert Schweitzer
Everyone in this world needs more connection. From the moment we’re born, we grieve for the intimacy we had for nine months with our mothers. We mourn for the loss of oneness we experienced even before that in the non-physical.
How many lonely people do you know? How lonely are you?
Ask yourself how you can facilitate connection in this world, whether through your business, art, product, services or being.
Loneliness, as we age, can become chronic. It is rife amongst young people and common in middle-age. People are lonely in their marriages, lonely because they’re divorced. Nearly everyone hungers for more connection.
Books, movies, music, social media, art, literature, product sales, commerce — everything is about fulfilling that human desire for connection. It’s about exchange.
Michael Roads, author of ‘Talking with Nature and Journey into Nature’ writes, “When you have an honouring relationship with yourself and the people in your life, so you will attract all levels of true prosperity.”
The connections you make with others will not only facilitate the flow of wealth, they will be your most precious treasures. You’ll hold those connections in your heart as you take your last breath. You won’t care about most of the things you are currently chasing. Only the connections you make with others will truly touch your soul.
Prosperity depends on connectivity. Other people are conduits for wealth. To allow wealth, you must let people in.
Commit to connecting. Devote time each and every day to reaching out to people.
Facilitate connection for others. Open yourself to people and to the world. Listen, with your ears and your heart, to others.
The rewards will be wide and deep and true.
Key six: Don’t try to adjust the market. Adjust what you offer.
“Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.”
― Coco Chanel
There’s a story about a man who sold his homemade chutneys in the market. People could sample the chutneys with delicious, olive oil fried tortilla chips his wife made by hand. No one purchased the chutneys — they were over-priced and too rich — but everyone wanted his wife’s chips.
However, the man refused to see this because he was so pleased with his chutneys. They were his own recipes and had taken him years to develop. He continued to make a loss on the chutneys and never thought to sell tortilla chips instead.
We are deluded into thinking the world should love what we consider precious to us. But the novel we work on for twenty years may get less attention that one of our thoughtless Twitter posts.
Don’t ask, “What can I do to make people change and start buying what I offer?” Ask, “How can my product align with the market?”
The market isn’t fair. It’s up to us to adjust what we offer, not rail against that lack of justice. We can’t change other people. They will buy what they want to buy. We can only change ourselves.
Don’t chase ideas of what should do well. Don’t impose your own standards. Respond to what the world asks from you and rewards you for.
You may never guess ahead of time what is going to do well. Maybe the world doesn’t need another abstract oil painter, no matter how great. But it might need someone to faux-finish private houses.
Or maybe society doesn’t need another Comedic-Politically Radical-Spoken Word-Improvisation-Poet, but it could use a great Web Developer.
Stop trying to dictate to the world. Instead, perceive the prosperity that is all around you. Soak it in. Breathe, taste, drink the abundance of this world
Don’t hold yourself to ransom with the concept of selling out. Did you decide as a teenager that you would be the next Dostoevsky or bust? I have news for you. You are now living in another time and place. You are a different person from the person you were. You’ve grown. Your needs and priorities are different.
Also, know this. You are unique. As unique as an ice-crystal. You are rare. What you have to give to the world is valuable because there is only one of you. Your gifts are rarer than flawless diamonds.
You’ll find out what you should be giving to the world by listening to the world. Not by listening to your preconceived ideas of what the world wants.
You might say, “But I’m so good at ballet dancing. I was always the best in my class when I was little. Sure, I’m nearly forty and thirty pounds overweight. And being a full-time mother with three kids doesn’t allow much time for practice. But… I love ballet dancing so much.”
Maybe you should pursue your ballet dancing dreams. Or perhaps you shouldn’t.
Maybe I should keep writing poignant literary fiction that not even my editors read. Or perhaps I shouldn’t.
Perhaps the world has its own ideas about what it wants from you.
And just maybe listening and responding to the world will lead you to greater things than you could ever have imagined for yourself.
Key seven: Understand we are only experiencing a tiny sliver of the whole pie called ‘Possibility.’
“A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
-Shakespeare.
We cannot understand what we are or what reality is. There is no certainty.
We are living in the Great Unknown. When we try to limit the unknowable with our false certainty, we diminish that greatness. We live in a small closet when we could be living in a vast temple.
We try and shut down possibility with our conclusions about what is or what should be. We think everyone else knows what’s going on, so we adopt their ideas.
The problem is if we’re convinced the world is on a turtle’s back, we won’t ask, “How can we travel to other planets?”
From the moment we’re born, we stop living in the question and instead live in the answer. Living in the question means asking, What if? What are the possibilities?
The question is wide open and ripe with potential.
The answer shuts down. Limits. Cancels out. Eliminates. It creates constructs that block us in. Don’t shut yourself down with conclusions, with decisions. With pretending you know.
Be brave enough to admit you don’t know very much for sure. None of us do.
“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
— Donald Rumsfeld, United States Secretary of Defense (2001–2006)
A true scientist keeps asking. Just because enough people tell us something — our parents, our teachers, the media, the politicians, the corporates — doesn’t make it so.
Consensus does not equal fact.
There have been many times and places in human history where, in retrospect, the belief system seems downright wrong and deluded. We ask — how could they possibly have believed that?
In his brilliant novel, ‘The Plato Papers,’ Peter Ackroyd artfully imagines how our current era might appear to a scholar seventeen centuries from now.
There may well come a time and place when humanity will look at our current era and ask, what on earth were they thinking?
Don’t discount anything. Don’t close your mind to the possibilities of who you are, what reality is, and what you are capable of. Step outside all your paradigms, as much as you can.
“Never surrender your hopes and dreams to the fateful limitations others have placed on their own lives.”
― Anthon St. Maarten
You don’t know how you will be rewarded for your contributions to the world. Don’t make a decision about that one way or another. You don’t know how capable you are of generating enormous wealth unless you’ve already done it.
It’s never too late to reinvent. It’s never too late to question your decisions about anything, especially about your own capabilities.
Don’t let anything be walled off or off-bounds in your own mind.
Key eight: Let go and rise.
Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly
― GK Chesterton
We are bogged down by our conclusions. We carry the past with us in so many different forms. Lack of forgiveness makes us heavy. We are clogged up and slowed down by the weight of our thoughts and our identities.
We make decisions and never question them again. Someone hurts us, and we stay hurt for years, sometimes our whole lives. The sadness and weariness keeps us from realizing our joy. It keeps us from freedom.
We hold on to the future we planned, the way our life is supposed to look. The way other people are supposed to treat us. Our decisions and judgments weigh a tonne.
Ask yourself, “Who am I in this moment without my past or my future or any of the decisions I’ve made?”
As Byron Katie asks us, “Who are you without your story?”
When we let go of the constructs weighing us down, we make room for the experiences which lift us up. We only allow new ideas in when we release the old.
When we let go, we rise and become taller, higher, lighter, freer. We embody our true natures. When we release the burdens of the mind, we become like polished glass, wiped clean and sparkling.
Try this exercise. Close your eyes. Imagine yourself spreading out one foot from your body. Then ten feet. Fill up the whole room. Now try 100 feet. 1000 feet. Fill the space up to the sky. Reach as far as you can go. The whole planet. The moon. Outer space. You’re enormous, aren’t you?
According to ‘The Course in Miracles,’ we created death and suffering. They are not real. Like so much, they are constructs of the mind.
The energetic reality of who we are is all we are. We are not our pasts or our futures or our identities. These are also constructs.
Nor are we our perceptions. If you lose your eyes, you are no less you.
We are something much greater. Only when we let go of all we have been carrying — our labels, our dark thoughts, and our judgments about the world, ourselves and others— can we rise.
Without our baggage, we become the joyful, creative, prosperous creators this Gilded Age of Creativity is so ready for us to be.
In conclusion
I hope these 8 keys to wealth flow have sparked something in you. Maybe a little flame or perhaps a roaring furnace.
My heart’s desire is for you to be inspired. I want my words to mean something.
These words only have meaning if you make the choice to act on them.
If you make the choice to define your own prosperity and free your ideas and come out of hiding. They mean something if you start fully giving to the world and choose to create yourself to your own design, bit by bit, day by day.
Only you can grow your connectivity and help others find connection too. You decide whether or not to listen and respond to the world. Whether to shift your paradigms and loosen your grip on your own mind.
Only you can let go of all that keeps you down and allow yourself to rise.
I wish you everything. Thank you for reading.
