The Wealth of Creativity

By Patricia Aburdene

An excerpt from CONSCIOUS MONEY: Living, Creating, and Investing with Your Values for a Sustainable New Prosperity.

As conscious individuals, we appreciate the importance of values-driven businesses that honor a higher purpose beyond making money. Similarly, in the marketplace where we spend our Conscious Money, we carefully select products that mirror our personal and practical values. To become a conscious earner, we must embrace a similar practice.

Most people earn their income from a job, occupation, or profession, which is therefore the primary source of their Conscious Money. Naturally, people want to affiliate with employers whose values match their own. But there is another consideration to bear in mind as well and that is the value of creativity. To be genuinely creative, you must nurture and readily access your personal connection to higher consciousness.

In the New Economy of Consciousness, creativity is the single most important way that an individual can add value to any economic activity or enterprise. That means your earning power today is largely dependent on your ability to be creative, which is also an excellent investment in job security. In a competitive global economy, where jobs head overseas every day, there’s one function that cannot be outsourced — creativity. Apple computers, iPhones, iPods, and iPads are manufactured to Apple specifications in China. But they are designed through the power of human ingenuity at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California.

Your creativity is essential to your success, whether you’re self-employed, run a small business, work at a Fortune 500 company, or serve in a government agency or nonprofit. Because your occupation also determines how you spend most of your time, it has an enormous influence on your feelings and well-being. So it is well worth your while to develop the ability to access higher consciousness and translate it into creativity at work.

Fortunately, this is exactly what most people already want to do: 96 percent of Generation Y wants a job that “requires creativity.”1 Besides, when you use your creative gifts and talents, you experience greater meaning and fulfillment. Early in the twenty-first century, more than one third of Americans made a living through work requiring creativity, estimates creativity expert Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class. I’d wager it is now 40 percent or more.

Today we have entered a new economic era in which creativity and the genius of human consciousness are increasingly recognized as the primary factors that generate success and wealth creation. It is the New Economy of Consciousness. Whenever we undergo such a massive and dramatic shift, it can leave people feeling unsettled. In the 1982 book Megatrends, John Naisbitt and I declared the Industrial period was over and that the Information Age had begun. It was a very controversial idea at the time. “How can you make any money on information?” cried skeptics. “It is not land; you can’t grow food on it. It’s not steel; you can’t make a car out of it.”

When I relate those responses now to audiences in their 20s or 30s, it generally gets a pretty good laugh. But as many young people today have realized now, the Information Age is in its twilight.

In the New Economy of Consciousness, creativity and human consciousness are a “raw material,” which is both precious and limitless. Today, conscious creativity is more valuable than financial capital, oil, or the latest technology. From this remarkable “commodity,” we shall forge solutions from business and technology to social and environmental issues. That’s why in workplaces in both the private and public sectors, the capacity to creatively resolve challenging problems is prized above all other abilities.

Creative problem solving impacts your role as a conscious earner, no matter where or how you work — and the reason is simple. We are abandoning the obsolete economic framework of traditional capitalism and adopting the superior model of Conscious Capitalism. Nevertheless, many people cannot as yet perceive or understand this new operating system. As a result, instability is rampant and problems abound. But so do opportunities — for creative people who can accept ambiguity, embrace the unknown, and appreciate exciting new solutions. Such visionaries are positioned to earn a great deal of Conscious Money in this transition time. •

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