I recently held a meeting with key players in the creative ecosystem in New Haven, Connecticut. The key thing that came out of that meeting was the need for deep financial mastery training among creatives and entrepreneurs in the ecosystem. As a creative entrepreneur who has been in feast and famine the majority of my adult life (in periods when I focused solely on my creativity), I knew that just browbeating creatives with the usual financial literacy training wasn’t going to work. We don’t care.
We don’t care enough about balance sheets and P&L and investing to invest the energy it would take to master them. We care about making art and experiencing art. We care about survival. Thriving. Getting rich off our innate gifts, talents and stories.
So what do we do? You have to make money management an artform.
In the week plus after that call, many ideas have been Divinely downloaded to me. One of which is the power of Hip Hop to cultivate financial creativity and financial wholeness. This segment of the population is so critical for our growth as a race, and yet so restricted in their creativity because of their lack of financial wholeness. Hip Hop and other art forms can fix that.
Two things stuck out in relation to this:
1. Urgent need to overcome financial trauma among creatives. Creatives need help with this, especially from “non-creatives”*. Besides from whatever we experienced in childhood that embedded unhealthy scripts in us regarding finances, the fact that we’ve faced so much financial trauma just struggling to survive off our gifts is a major point of shame that most don’t feel comfortable talking about.
The only solution most creatives have found to survive using their gifts is to a- get a job, no matter how much or how little they like the job; and no matter how much it pays and b- get grants.
With the nature of unrelated jobs being that they limit space for creativity, and of grants being that most applicants won’t get them, that still leaves a healthy segment of the creative population unable to make enough money from their gifts to live a comfortable, healthy, happy life.
This causes a major mental health crisis for people who simply want to make art and be appreciated for their naturally gifted contributions to society.
Because art is for the betterment of society, the fact that creatives don’t get to make as much art as they desire is a loss to all of us. We would not be facing the kind of climate crisis, political crises and economic crises that we face as humans if creatives ruled the world, or were even empowered to create 50% more art than we currently do.
2. Creative financial education is all around us. The kind of financial education that creatives would actually internalize is all around us. Hip Hop and storytelling being two major sources of financial education content. Here you have a group of people who have escaped poverty using their creativity, a particular segment of whom have reinvested that talent-profit back into their communities by literally helping to build business ecosystems, fund nonprofit efforts and influence policy.
Some of these artists have told us, in their music, the very means by which they created their empires. Of course there are complex matters when it comes to the music industry and artists, but let’s just focus on the educational material inherent in Hip Hop for now.
I was going through something and trying to move on from it, and the song, “On to the next one” popped into my head. I wasn’t even thinking about money at the time, but of course this New Haven project was in the back of my head. As I started to listen to the song, I realized how many financial wholeness gems were embedded in it.
“I got a million ways to get it
Choose one
Bring it back
Now double your money and make it stack”
I would love for you to listen to the song and tell me what you hear in terms of what it’s teaching about financial wholeness. I’ll share my learnings in the next piece, but “choose one” was definitely a major lift for me.
Of course as there’s “nothing new under the sun” I went and googled and found that some geniuses are already out here promoting this idea of financial literacy through hip hop. I will be researching and sharing more from them here. I do want to speak more to wholeness, not just literacy. But we’ll get to that.
“Y’all should be afraid of what I’m goin do next…” 😉
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