WHEN it comes to money, you have the power to decide what is real and what kind of reality you want to live in.
POOR ARTIST, RICH ARTIST
What’s my relationship with money as an artist?
As I asked myself this question a little more than a year ago, I hated money, artist or not. Why did I hate it? Well, because money was avoiding me like the plague, that’s why! We had had much happier days money and I; days when she was much more faithful, always there for me to fulfill my needs and comfort me.
I was a poor artist back then; an artist who worried about paying his mortgage, car loan, and credit cards; an artist who was jaded about paying his home insurance, car insurance, phone bill, internet bill, and other bills; an artist who routinely took a deep breath before checking his bank account, expecting to see a negative balance. In short, I was an artist who may have been rich artistically but was poor financially. I was poor AT THAT TIME!
And I think it’s important to emphasize that temporary aspect of my poverty because I wasn’t always poor. Well, I had never been rich either and I’m still not, but I’m doing a lot better. That made me realize that financial poverty is only a state that can be changed and that change is related to one thing only, your state of mind.
The day I decided to refuse my financial poverty and took action to change it, things started to change for me. I applied for higher-paying jobs as a French translator (which is what I’m trained as). I rapidly got three interviews with three different companies, and the three of them made me a job offer! Since then I’ve been working as an English-to-French translator-revisor while building this website and working on my craft almost daily.
Why? Because I want to be a rich artist and not just an artist who gets by. I want to be a rich artist in my lifetime preferably, unlike Van Gogh, Monet, Vermeer, Gauguin, and many others, whose paintings sold for millions after their death. I want to be a rich artist because I have dreams of freedom, travel, discovery, greatness, and pleasing my loved ones. I want to be rich, because, in all honesty, I think I can.
And even if I don’t succeed, at least I will have tried and will end up in a nice suit, smiling in my coffin with no regrets. So let me dream of becoming a rich artist, for dreams, however crazy they may seem, are the seeds of reality.