Creatively Rich (Finance and Neuroscience for Artists and Writers)

Maintain Your Love of Your Creative Work––and Your Sanity––By Taking Meaningful Steps Toward Financial Wellness

“Choose a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” This oft-repeated quote could win an award for the biggest bait-and-switch in all of capitalism. Because the fact is, choosing to merge the work that you love with what you do for money doesn’t necessarily simplify life. Sometimes it complicates it. Loving what you do can set you on an emotional, financial, and professional roller coaster that is, by every definition, work. But if you have the tools to orient and stabilize yourself, then that work can be deeply meaningful, even transformative. And that’s just the emotional and financial part of it! You still also get to make cool stuff.

Creatively Richdefinitively retires the stereotype that artists are bad with money by exposing the hidden structural and physiological dynamics that shape creative workers’ experiences. Blending cutting-edge somatic research with economics, psychology, and personal finance, the book dives deep beneath the surface of real-life cases of people navigating career, life, and money in a variety of creative industries. In addressing what makes day-to-day life in the creative trenches so challenging, rediscover why you fell in love with creativity in the first place, and how you can maintain that in the midst of all those challenges.

Integrating neuroscience, behavioral economics research, and exercises and stories from Amanda Clayman’s twenty-plus years as a financial therapist, Creatively Rich brings a “yes and” approach to the tensions and dilemmas at the heart of creative life.