Why creative people are broke

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]So, a bit of a detour from the commentary I usually make on this channel, but I believe these thoughts are incredibly important given that every person has within themselves seeds of creative genius and a desire for creative expression. The idea that only some people are creative and the majority are not is just nonsense. Most people simply don't have the time or the right conditions.

[00:00:24]So, with this video, you know, I have no interest in seeing creative people get rich.

[00:00:29]You know, I want one thing for you to reach a kind of minimum livable threshold doing what you love. Enough money to stop giving your best energy and hours to work you don't care about.

[00:00:42]So, I was a salesman and I had no degrees. But today I teach university style classes and seminars on the internet. And people enroll because the value is self-evident. I don't need to wave credentials around to prove my worth. The world responds above all to value. Yes, you know, some creatives have access to more money and support and connections. And these things can speed up your success. But they don't change the fundamental law, which is that if you build something valuable, show it to the world and improve it relentlessly, keep honing your craft. And and then promote it honestly, you can make a basic living doing what you love. And this video is about kind of why so many creative people fail to do that. And what follows isn't exhaustive, it's just a few of the patterns that I see most often. So, the first reason is simply that they're not devoted enough. The creative impulse in you wasn't given so you could kind of decorate your personality with it and say, you know, I'm a writer, I'm an artist, I'm a musician and enjoy that little private sweetness of being a creative person. It was given so you could bring something profound into the world that wouldn't exist without you.

[00:01:56]The great Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran wrote that work is love made visible.

[00:02:03]So work is your ideals made real. It's your link to the world. Work in its highest form is a kind of worship.

[00:02:12]So consider a woman who loves classical art.

[00:02:15]True devotion would mean she's not just admiring art in a museum or reading art history books or posting aesthetic collages on her social media. Instead she's intensely engaged in creating or preserving or educating or popularizing such art. You know, she's concerned with making a real difference. She wants to be a standard bearer. And she hopes one day to be her path's representative. You know, that's the ideal. You you are literature or painting or Islam or psychology. You know, when people think of those paths or arts, they think of you. You become the path incarnate.

[00:02:53]So you must stop treating your creative expression as kind of this charming component, this one charming component of your life and start treating it as a cosmic responsibility. Some people talk about having a backup plan when it comes to pursuing your passion. And this to me is nonsense. You know, imagine walking down the aisle at your wedding and having a backup partner in mind. That marriage would be doomed. If you have a genuine burning interest in something, you have to go forward with unimpeachable certainty. You have to be reduced to ashes by it. This is one of the secrets of life. Force commitment does half the work for you. If you give yourself an exit, your lesser self will over time find reasons to quit. But when there's no backup, the mind stops negotiating and just starts building.

[00:03:41]If I had viewed my writing and teaching as simply, you know, an easier or more enjoyable way to make a living, I I wouldn't have lasted and I certainly wouldn't have made any impact.

[00:03:51]Um, was prepared to leave my sales career where I earned about $7,000 a month uh, the moment I was able to earn around $1,200 a month um, from teaching online.

[00:04:02]Uh, I was completely and enthusiastically ready to live below the poverty line at the age of 30.

[00:04:09]The calling just mattered so much more than my standard of living.

[00:04:13]Now, you don't need to be as extreme as I was, but if you're not ready to accept a lower standard of life for the sake of your craft, then you're not devoted enough.

[00:04:21]Um, when I decided to take writing seriously, I also had no idea how much it would actually demand, how much time it would actually require. Not just a few hours in the evening or over the weekend, but four to five hours every morning. So, I forced myself to get up at 3:00 a.m. almost, um, and study and write until the work day started at 9:00, which was a brutal many months.

[00:04:44]Um, I also discovered that the rest of my life, uh, those lingering vices, those late-night habits and small compromises I just had made peace with, were massively capping my, uh, potential. So, now purification of almost my entire life is required.

[00:04:58]Uh, let me just stop and say this that if this resonates with you, that you'll find my mentorship worthwhile. Uh, it's inside my seminar on discovering your life's work and building a meaningful legacy, the link to which is in the description below. And now, the second reason is that they mistake absence of success for absence of progress. The cruelest lie that you can tell yourself is that progress isn't happening because you're not being recognized. Uh, as a lifelong salesman and marketer, I would waver back and forth in my literary aspirations, you know, picking up and then abandoning my writing. Hundreds of unfinished drafts and rejected submissions, editors who never wrote back.

[00:05:37]Uh, by the time I turned 28, I'd been wavering for almost 10 years with really nothing to show for it, which turns out, you know, was a massive lie.

[00:05:46]I did have a colossal amount to show for it inwardly, but nothing outwardly. Um I had the writing, reasoning, and thinking skills of a veteran.

[00:05:54]Uh I just needed to fashion it into shape. Um I needed a vehicle for it. And I finally forced myself to publish essays and videos on the internet, you know, under my own name, speaking from the bottom of my heart, trying to articulate every major truth I knew and convey it in as powerful a way as I could.

[00:06:12]And within a few months, I was writing and teaching full-time online.

[00:06:16]So, we rush our souls for no good reason. We're obsessed with visible progress and tracking and measuring and displaying our progress. But the most important transformations are happening invisibly.

[00:06:29]You know, just as it takes months of working out before you see any visible fat loss, it will take years to notice visible changes to your creative and intellectual powers. So, no matter how much you want things um to change right now, there's often nothing you can do but just continue to endure and and aspire. And before you you know it, you you will have arrived.

[00:06:51]You know, so I tell people to expect success, especially in creative domains, to take far longer than than you think.

[00:06:57]Be prepared to give it years of serious, intelligent, humiliating, and mostly invisible effort before the world gives you anything back.

[00:07:07]Now, the third reason is that they don't take um the entrepreneurial side uh seriously. And this is probably the single biggest reason creative people struggle financially because the skills that make someone good at their craft are not the same skills that make someone good at earning a living from their craft. Uh most creatives are bad at the second set of skills. And even worse, they actively resent having to learn it. You know, they feel that their work should speak for itself, that marketing is somehow beneath them, that self-promotion just contaminates the purity of what they're doing.

[00:07:40]And this is kind of the most expensive belief in the creative world. It's the best way, the surest way to end up brilliant and broke and alone uh with your craft. Um the reality is that, you know, a writer who refuses to to market his work a bit is like a chef who refuses to plate his food well. Um a musician who refuses to promote is like an architect who builds a gorgeous house, you know, deep in the woods with no roads leading to it. You're not protecting your artistic integrity.

[00:08:10]You're just refusing to do kind of the rest of your job. I know this sounds anathema, but I like to remind creatives that America's legendary poet, uh Walt Whitman, wrote fake positive reviews of his Leaves of Grass to drum up attention.

[00:08:25]I wouldn't even recommend going that far, but the point is that even the greatest artists had to contend with the vulgarities of the marketplace.

[00:08:32]Now, the good news is that you know, these entrepreneurial skills are um easy to learn and they become second nature with practice. You just have to put in the reps. Um what are some of these basic skills? Framing is one. Um you present your work in a way that's most likely to land, you know, clear and relevant and digestible and tuned to what people actually care about and enjoy. Second is compression. So, a lot of creatives have a solid body of work but have never made a compelling uh post, short post, punchy 30-second video, or video series about it.

[00:09:05]Offer creation is another. You don't create a compelling offer that aligns with your knowledge and interest and skills and and promote it well. Naming is another basic skill. The difference between just titling a video, you know, theories on meaning in life versus why modern life feels meaningless well, is actually the difference between 10 viewers and and 10,000. It's the same content, same ideas, just a completely different result.

[00:09:29]You you have to understand that in the internet world, which is the world we create and sell in now, uh people encounter your work through the tiniest of doorways, a title, a a clip, a sentence, a short post, a a thumbnail.

[00:09:44]So, if your doorway is boring or confusing or abstract or self-indulgent, they'll never get to enter your cathedral.

[00:09:52]Uh, another skill is identifying and removing bottlenecks.

[00:09:56]Some of the most common bottlenecks, right? No one knows about your work. The solution, if that's the case, is is that you're not promoting it enough or not in the right way.

[00:10:05]Uh, another bottleneck, if no one's buying, um, then then your offer or messaging or pricing is off. And of course, uh, if people buy but aren't satisfied, then obviously the product or service needs to get better. Now, creatives love to default to, you know, I'll just create more or, uh, I'll just make the work better because that's the part that they enjoy.

[00:10:24]Uh, it's important you don't default to that. Um, you could lose months or years applying effort in the wrong place.

[00:10:30]Creatives think they need to get better when they really just need to be more visible. Um, they think they need to be more visible, uh, when they really they need a better offer.

[00:10:39]So, you want to find the bottleneck and crucially, you know, work on nothing else until it's relieved. Now, of course, your work could just suck, but pursuing mastery should just be a given.

[00:10:49]It shouldn't be a bottleneck.

[00:10:51]Now, returning to the point, uh, about compression, I'm amazed at how many creatives refuse to take short form, um, seriously. It's the easiest way to build an audience today is through short form content. Um, short, sharp pieces, especially videos, delivered on platforms where people already spend their time, you know, Instagram, YouTube, Substack notes, TikTok or X. These platforms reward new creators with completely asymmetric reach. So, you could have 50 followers and post a 90-second video that reaches 100,000 people. That's the power of algorithmic discovery. And you simply won't get that kind of exposure with long-form work when you're just starting out. Now, let me be very clear here. This emphatically does not mean putting out low-quality junk. Uh I've proven, I think, with my own work, and I've seen it with others, that short-form can be incredibly sharp and intelligent and high-quality. The idea that short-form uh forces you to dumb yourself down is just an empty excuse. In fact, it's the opposite. Brevity demands uh intelligence. To condense an insight into a single paragraph without losing its punch is often harder than meandering for 20 minutes. So, if you feel that your work is bastardized by shortening it, not really shortening it, just, you know, clipping it or uh making a short post, then you're hiding behind length uh as as as a kind of crutch. You know, Nietzsche wrote aphorisms. Uh Pascal wrote fragments. La Rochefoucauld wrote maxims. Okay, now, fourth reason I see is that creatives believe that monetization will just corrupt their creativity.

[00:12:31]Now, like anything, monetization is what you make of it. There are noble and scammy ways to monetize. If your aim is vanity or greed, money will corrupt you.

[00:12:40]If your aim is mastery and service, money will beautify you.

[00:12:45]The most important point to make um about monetization is just that it makes total devotion to your path possible.

[00:12:54]It pains me to no end thinking of the countless people who let their creative powers wither for want of money. You know, thousands of Oscar Wildes and Beethovens killed before their time. Thousands of Rumis and John Coltranes alive right now stuck in desk jobs uh and or debt.

[00:13:13]The creative uh who's not trying to concern himself with monetization, you know, he's well-intentioned, he wants to be pure. Uh but I speak with creatives almost every day, and I see how their hearts have turned gangrenous from disuse, from their unlived life. You know, first they become restless, then anxious, then depressed.

[00:13:30]It's simple math. You spend one or maybe two hours on creative work in the morning followed by eight hours of empty career work.

[00:13:38]In which direction do you think you'll be shaped in?

[00:13:41]Which will leave the deeper mark on you?

[00:13:43]You're going to become what you spend your time on, no matter how passionately you protest otherwise. The hours are going to decide your fate. So, when you're able to make a living from what you love, no matter how small, your effort and your soul now can grow comfortably in the same direction.

[00:14:00]A second point to make about monetization is is also that it allows you to forge your cause. When asked about money, the legendary conservationist Steve Irwin, you know, said, "Money's great. I can't get enough of it. And you know what I'm going to do with it? Buy wilderness areas with it." And this is exactly the right relationship to money, ultimately, as fuel for the cause. The more he had, the more wilderness he could save. And the more you have, the more of your art and your ideas and your traditions you can carry into the world.

[00:14:29]If you believe your work can inspire and help people, then remaining in obscurity isn't humility, it's negligence. If I'm If I'm serving truth with all my heart, I have a duty to propagate it.

[00:14:41]Especially given how aggressively untruth is being propagated. The serious creative has to learn to hold a paradox, which is to be inwardly humble and outwardly ambitious. And this is true for any serious believer of anything.

[00:14:56]You're nothing before the ideal.

[00:14:59]But yet the ideal depends on you. The Quran and the Bible are empty pieces of paper without living representatives.

[00:15:06]The Bhagavad Gita and the the Tao Te Ching are the the same. The ideals of the American Constitution mean nothing unless they're lived by serious men and women.

[00:15:17]Ideals become real so long as someone is living them.

[00:15:21]So, money is wasted, right, on unbelievers, people with no ideals, no higher purpose beyond comfort or material success. A true believer with money is a force in the world. So, you know, if you still feel that money's going to contaminate your craft, understand what you're really confessing, that that protecting your sense of purity is more important than carrying your path forward in the world.

[00:15:44]Finally, a fifth reason is that um uh creatives lack systems. Now, this is an obvious point, but it has to be repeated just because how many creatives I I I see not living by it. You know, passions and goals won't carry you forward, systems will.

[00:15:58]Uh I I know this very well. Creativity hates repetition, um loves novelty, but audiences and careers are built on showing up with valuable work at kind of predictable intervals.

[00:16:10]You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems, uh James Clear wrote.

[00:16:16]And systems eliminate decision fatigue, and they absorb, you know, your great swings in motivation. You should have broad life systems uh and narrow project-specific systems. So, broad systems govern how you work kind of in general. Mine include, right, I work on one thing and only one thing at a time until it's finished. The best work usually shows up at the end uh when I just push through on one thing.

[00:16:39]Another is that um I'm always seeking out new challenges and problems, so I'm always learning.

[00:16:44]And then of course uh I always have make sure to have deep uninterrupted work every morning. Now, uh narrow systems uh are governing how individual projects are done, and they spell out exactly how a piece of work gets produced on a regular basis. So, for example, if you want to publish a weekly essay, your system might look like this: 2 days of research, 3 days of writing, uh and then 2 days of uh editing and publishing. So, this creates a repeatable pipeline in your mind. You don't wake up wondering what to do, you just you kind of following that system.

[00:17:16]Now, of course, please remember that systems are far less important than your motivation and interest. Um your passion is the engine. Systems are just kind of the steering wheel. The point of a system is to give your efforts just a basic daily rhythm. Don't try to perfect the perfect system. There isn't one.

[00:17:31]Just find one that reliably works for you and stick with it. Well, if this resonates with you, you'll find my mentorship worthwhile. Uh it's all inside my seminar on discovering your life's work and building a meaningful legacy. The link to which is in the description below.

[00:17:45]And until next time.