abundance vs meaning: an excerpt from the art of earning

The following is an excerpt from Tara Gentile’s The Art of Earning.

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People are tuned in to the vast array of what’s available to purchase and are hungry to consume it. Never before has so much been available to us for so little. Thanks to cheap labor, cheap materials, and ever-increasing technology, companies can afford to sell us some version of what we want at a price we can afford.

We even cultivate desire – need? – for things we never knew could exist.

Abundance exists all around us.

We have become so comfortable with the abundance of “stuff” all around us that it is no longer enough to satisfy us. Stuff was always a diversion, anyhow. Now we seek meaning.

If there’s anything we’ve learned from our love affair with stuff, it’s that what we seek can be purchased.

That’s why more people – liberated by prosperity but not fulfilled by it – are resolving the paradox by searching for meaning. … Visit any moderately prosperous community in the advanced world and along with the plenteous shopping opportunities, you can glimpse this quest for transcendence in action.
– Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind

The business of art is not a business of abundance or mindless consumption. The art business is the meaning business. Being a working artist means that you are actively engaged in the pursuit of finding deeper meaning in everything around you.

Whether you are a yoga teacher, wellness coach, chef, poet, marketer, sales rep, or shoe designer, “greater things” ooze into your work. Your job is to ponder the questions others don’t ponder, consider the unconsiderable, question the status quo. It doesn’t take a degree in philosophy or a fine arts background to see what lies beneath the surface. You’re already doing it.

You must identify what’s behind your art – the greater meaning – to truly understand the value of your art.

If you can nail the meaning of what you’re providing, you are upping its value. People will pay more for things that help them go deeper, tell a story, see the bigger picture, engage a community, live a lifestyle.

It’s not a tactic – it’s a strategy for changing the world as you grow your business. It’s both/and – not either/or.

Making money should be beautiful. To get your own copy of The Art of Earning, come right this way.