You have got to stop buying into that struggling creative, tortured artist bullshit. Because that’s what it is–BULLSHIT.
The only creatives who struggle or who feel “tortured” are the ones who haven’t set themselves up for success as a creative.
Setting yourself up for success will look diferent for every artist, but as a professional creative myself, here are my thoughts on what it requires:
When I quit my day job in March 2012 to turn my then side business into a full-time thing, my original goal was to fully step into being the author I’ve always known I was meant to be. And at first, that’s what happened.
Right after I left my day job, I immediately began writing my second eBook that I’d been wanting to write for years but hadn’t made the time. It was a quick write and the book was out within a couple of months after my last day in corporate America.
I was SO happy. This is what it was meant to be about for me.
And then I got caught up on chasing money.
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Imagine if you invested all of the money you’ve spent trying to figure out how to make more money into doing the thing you know you’re meant to…
That is the realization I came to recently as I looked at all of the money I’ve invested in my coaching business over the past decade—upwards of $100k and I’m still paying some of it off.
And then I thought–Wow! If I had invested that $100k into my books, into being the author I know I’m meant to be, into my creative work, into my art… imagine what I could’ve created. Imagine where I’d be right now.
The Amazon ads that $100k could’ve paid for. The fabulous professional cover designs. The hiring of team members who are specifically focused on helping me to sell more books and get my books out to more people.
But no.
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When I was 11 years old, I started writing short stories. When I was 13, I wrote a 120-page novella in three days.
Inspired by R.L. Stein’s Goosebumps, and Lurlene McDaniel’s One Last Wish book series, and all of the many, many books I’d read leading up to that point, I just decided to sit down and craft my own stories.
And then not long after that, I heard about a movie called “Message In A Bottle” that was about to debut in theatres (this was 1999 LOL). I knew it was based on a book and I wanted to read the book before I saw the movie.
My mom’s friend had a copy of the book and said I could borrow it when she was finished. In the meantime, she gave me another book by the same author to read. That book was The Notebook, by Nicholas Sparks.
And reading it sparked something in me that day (no pun intended). A remembrance. A knowing. A certainty.
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Right after my divorce went down in Jan 2019, I downloaded the word “Worthy” during one of my meditation sessions. It felt powerful. It felt like something I was meant to do something with, I just didn’t know what yet.
Well, without realizing it, I spent all of last year getting back in touch with my worthiness and with my good-enoughness. And correcting the things and areas of my life that didn’t align with that.
Up til that point, I had been editing books and coaching writers on how to write books. (Shadow work for part of what I really knew I was meant to be doing, which was writing and publishing more of my own books.)
Then this year rolled around and the Quarantine happened, which gave me the time, space and freedom to do something I’d been wanting to do for several years, but hadn’t had the guts to do: burn my old business to the ground and build the business I truly desired.
So I did just that.
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