Developing a Millionaire Mindset and How to Make a Living With Your Writing

 

Dear readers,

I was editing The Prosperous Author recently and thought you may enjoy an excerpt (a random assortment of chapters that I enjoyed re-reading).

 

 

Take Your Chance

 

 

Go ahead and take chances because that’s the only way you’re actually gonna find out where your sweet spot is.

—Aaron Sorkin, screenwriter

Multi-millionaire romance author Nora Roberts didn’t start out being ambitious. She didn’t even dream of being an author.

Trapped by snow one bitter winter, she took a chance on romance and decided to write a novel. Even when her first book was rejected, she knew she had found her passion and purpose with writing.

“Writing makes me happy,” she once said. Telling stories nourished something her soul ached for. She found her niche—and the rest was history.

“Before I started writing, you name the craft, I did it. I made my own bread. I made my own jam. I needlepointed. I crocheted. I sewed all my boys’ clothes. I sewed my own clothes. I was looking for something. And it was writing. It fed something in me.”

Feeding your prosperous mindset is as much about feeding your soul as anything. When you create from your heart you tap into your authentic self, passions collide, and more often than not you find your audience and your sweet spot.

In French, chance means “luck.” Coco Chanel, one of the world’s most enduring fashion icons, deeply believed in the power of luck. Taking chances and following opportunities defined her—even when there was no guarantee of success.

This is the same mindset that has defined many successful authors; including Nora Roberts, J.K. Rowling, James Patterson, and Tim Ferris, to name a few from whom I draw inspiration.

If you want to be a writer, take a chance on writing—write, publish, repeat! Pour your whole soul into your writing projects. Commit to completing your great ideas and sharing your work.

Mining for Gold

Success is defined by the things you say “yes” to. What makes you happy?

What irresistible idea or opportunity could you take a chance on?

What are you willing to try, despite not knowing yet whether you’ll fail or succeed?

 

 

The Power Of Passion

 

Of all strata of the pyramid, passion is the most important for your writer’s soul and, almost always, your ultimate success.

~ James Scott Bell, author

“Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion,” the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel once said.

• Passion is energy. Without energy, you have nothing.

• To be passionate is to be fully alive.

• Passion is about emotion, feeling, zest, and enthusiasm.

• Passion is about intensity, fervour, ardour, and zeal.

• Passion is about fire.

• Passion is about eagerness and preoccupation.

• Passion is about excitement and animation.

• Passion is about determination and self-belief.

• Passion, like love and joy, is contagious.

• Passion can’t be faked. It’s the mark of authenticity.

“What you write becomes who you are . . . So make sure you love what you write!” says J.K. Rowling.

Passion fuels inner purpose and fires the flames of your imagination. It gives you a reason for living and the confidence and drive to pursue your dreams. Passion enables you to unleash latent forces and God-given talents.

“We each have passions and skills, but you’ll see extraordinarily successful people with one intense emotion or one learned ability that shines through, defining them or driving them more than anything else,” writes Gary Keller in The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results.

“Often, the line between passion and skills can be blurry. That’s because they’re almost always connected,” Keller says.

When you follow your passion, you’ll find your sweet spot. You’ll be emboldened by love— thus powering your creativity, courage, resolve, and tenacity, and increasing your likelihood of achieving extraordinary success.

Focus on what excites you. “I find things I like and I do them,” says James Patterson, arguably one of the most financially successful authors today.

James Patterson, J.K. Rowling, and other authors have successfully turned their passion for telling stories into a skill, and ultimately a profession, by simply writing.

Mining for Gold

Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.

How can you channel your passions into your writing?

What’s your one thing?

 

What Makes You Happy?

When I don’t write I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire and my colour. It should be a necessity, and I call it breathing.

~ Anais Nin

As Oprah Winfrey once said, “You know you are on the road to success if you would do your job, and not be paid for it.”

When you write with joy, everything is heightened. Your words have spring and bounce, liveliness and vivaciousness—that’s why good writing, even if the subject is dark, has longevity. Readers can feel this infectious energy in your books.

Writing is a powerfully transformative mode of self-expression. Not everyone agrees that you need to write with joy. Many authors write to get themselves out of a funk, to manage anxiety, or to write their way out of pain.

“A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket,” the French poet Charles Peguy once said.

Some authors believe that to write well they must sit at the keyboard and bleed. This may be more to do with disciplining themselves to sit down and do the work.

But many prosperous authors say that when they enter the energy of their book, they transcend their worldly state of mind and commune with the divine.

“I write because it’s fun. Writing is play for me,” says James Patterson. “Do not torture yourself. That’s how people get blocked.”

I write joyfully when I write in 15-minute cycles, and when I write outside in the sun surrounded by the birds and the hills and the trees. I write joyfully when I affirm to myself that I love writing and tell myself that I’m an excellent writer. Sooner or later, even if I’m in a funk, reality catches up!

Mining for Gold

When are the times you feel happy writing?

How can you write more joyfully?

 

 

Imagine Better

 

To create the life of your dreams, the time has come for you to love You. Focus on Your joy. Do all the things that make You feel good. Love You, inside and out. Everything will change in your life, when you change the inside of you. Allow the Universe to give you every good thing you deserve, by being a magnet to them all. To be a magnet for every single thing you deserve, you must be a magnet of love.

~ Rhonda Byrne, author

No doubt you’ve heard the saying, “Out of sight, out of mind.” But what, if anything, are you doing to keep your dream of making a living from your writing visible?

“What practical strategies are you going to implement as a result of reading this book?” I wrote to an advance reader.

Her reply was, “Drawing/painting and writing all the things I have in my mind about my project. Getting my specific passion journal that is solely for my new project out and having it constantly with me, feeding it every day.”

In my book How to Find Your Passion and Purpose, I share tips and links to help you create a passion journal. Another variation of this is to create a prosperity dream board. This is where manifesting your preferred future really happens.

I have covered the wall of my writing room with images of the books I have written and plan to write, feedback from people who have encouraged me on my writer’s journey, and feeling-based images of what prosperity means to me—including a photo of me and my partner on vacation (feeling awesome, happy, and free).

Every time I sit in my writing chair looking at my prosperity board, it is a motivational kick-start; a feeling-based affirmation of not only what I yearn for, but the successes I have already manifested.

So many things I’ve visualised and affirmed on my prosperity board are now my living realities. And the others? I have no doubt that they soon will be!

“If you think vision boards are bogus, then the joke’s on you. They work, and there’s actually a really simple explanation of why they work so well,” writes Elizabeth Rider in The Huffington Post.

“Creating a sacred space that displays what you want actually does bring it to life. What we focus on expands. When you create a vision board and place it in a space where you see it often, you essentially end up doing short visualisation exercises throughout the day.”

Visualisation is one of the most powerful mind exercises you can do.

“The law of attraction is forming your entire life experience and it is doing that through your thoughts. When you are visualising, you are emitting a powerful frequency out into the Universe,” writes Rhonda Byrne in her popular book The Secret.

Whether you believe that or not, we know that visualisation works. As Rider writes in her article “Olympic athletes have been using it for decades to improve performance, and Psychology Today reported that the brain patterns activated when a weightlifter lifts heavy weights are also similarly activated when the lifter just imagined (visualised) lifting weights.”

Brain Gym

In the traditions of Napoleon Hill, Earl Nightingale and Maxwell Maltz, author Jack Canfield also emphasises the importance of focusing on a vision and creating compelling and vivid pictures in your mind in order to achieve your goals. Canfield cites neuropsychologists who study expectancy theory to support his view on the significance of visualisation.

Scientists once believed that people responded to information flowing into the brain from the outside world. But today, they’ve figured out that we respond to what the brain, based on prior experiences, expects to happen next.

Scientists have discovered that the mind is such a powerful instrument, it can deliver literally everything you want.

But you must believe that what you want is possible . . .

This is where visualisation works its magic. Seeing is believing! By programming your brain to expect that something will happen a certain way, you achieve exactly what you anticipate.

How do you create a vision or prosperity board that works? It’s simple: Your vision board should focus on how you want, or expect, to feel. Because you’re aiming for prosperity, you’ll expect to feel great! So, be sure to evoke these feelings on your prosperity wall.

Mining for Gold

Manifest your preferred future—imagine better by bringing your vision of prosperity into being.

It doesn’t have to be a wall—it could be a poster board you can move around.  Or, as my partner and I once did when visualising the million-dollar property we dreamed of buying (and later purchased), you can create a manifestation fridge!

 

 

Protect Your Dream

 

We celebrate success, but I think we should also just celebrate giving it a go.

~ Phil Keoghan, television personality

In the movie The Pursuit of Happiness, Will Smith, who plays the role of a homeless man, says to his son, “You got a dream, you gotta protect it. People can’t do something themselves, they wanna tell you that you can’t do it. You want something? Go get it. Period.”

People who are impatient to see the realisation of your dreams may say, “Show me the money,” “You’ve left it too late,” or some other “downer” message.

Ignore them.

“It’s already been done,” people said to Tim Ferris when he shared his idea of starting a podcast. Instead of letting others talk him out of starting his show, he did it anyway.

His podcast is now ranked as the #1 business podcast on all of iTunes. It was the first business/interview podcast to pass 100,000,000 downloads. It was also selected as iTunes’ “Best of 2014” and “Best of 2015.” Tim Ferris has also been called “the Oprah of radio.”

“Always believe in your work—it will carry you through any difficult situation, but learn to adjust your thinking every once in a while to fit the moment. Never give up. You won’t always get everything right every time—but you have to keep trying. Have the commitment to persevere,” architect Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid once said.

If Hadid’s wise words of encouragement could have reached F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others like him who have been plagued by critics, the world would be made richer.

As Jeff Goins writes in Real Artists Don’t Starve: Timeless Strategies for Thriving in the New Creative Age, in 1923, when Fitzgerald began writing his third novel, the author was feeling supremely confident. “‘Artistically,’ he wrote in a letter to his editor, Max Perkins, ‘it’s head [and] shoulders over everything I’ve done.’”

But the more he worked, the more self-conscious he grew. As the new novel approached publication, Fitzgerald grew nervous. “‘The Great Gatsby is weak,’ he said of the title, casting his vote instead for On the Road to West Egg or The High-Bouncing Lover.

Fitzgerald worried the book wouldn’t appeal to women, that the reviews would be bad, and that it wouldn’t sell well enough to pay the publisher back his advance.

“As Fitzgerald expected, almost all these fears came true. The Great Gatsby was published on April 10, 1925, with one New York paper headlining its review: ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Latest a Dud.’

“The rest of the literary world was equally critical, with H. L. Mencken calling it ‘no more than a glorified anecdote’ and referring to the author as ‘this clown.’

“A bit more bluntly, Ruth Snyder wrote, ‘We are quite convinced after reading The Great Gatsby that Mr. Fitzgerald is not one of the great American writers of today.’

“Gatsby did not achieve the success its author had hoped for, selling fewer than half as many copies as any of his previous novels. The failure crushed him.”

He died in 1940 at the age of forty-four regarding himself as a failure. However, the novel experienced a revival during World War II, and became a part of American high school curricula and numerous stage and film adaptations in the following decades.

In 2013, the book was again adapted into a movie, and today The Great Gatsby is widely considered a literary classic and a contender for the title “Great American Novel”—something Fitzgerald dreamed of achieving but died disbelieving.

Mining for Gold

Set your horizons high, believe in the beauty of your dreams and don’t settle for less. Go for it—try!

How can you protect your dreams and strengthen your ability to persevere?

 

 

Consult The Oracles

 

Faith in the guidance of Spirit gives you the courage to take risks, because you’re assured that whatever happens, a Higher Power is on your side and you will survive.

~ Colette Baron-Reid, intuitive & author

Subjects such as astrology, psychic phenomena, spirituality, and a fascination with tarot and oracle cards have helped many creative people and successful entrepreneurs overcome doubt, strengthen their beliefs, clarify their direction and find meaning in challenging situations.

As I share in my book The Art of Success: How Extraordinary Artists Can Help You Succeed in Business and Life, Coco Chanel, like many people, found great wisdom, peace, comfort, and healing from oracle cards and an eclectic array of spiritual rituals.

It is also believed that one of the cards in Coco’s Lenormand deck inspired one of the secret ingredients contained in Chanel N°5.

My first experience with psychic phenomena and the Tarot was when I was a teenager in New Zealand in the late 70s. Like Coco, it’s a fascination that stayed with me throughout my life and which continues to provide inspiration, courage, and fortitude—both personally and professionally.

My daughter is also a gifted intuitive and offers angel card readings professionally via her business Co-Creators of Joy.

“Increasing numbers of people are looking to ancient oracles to receive personal guidance because they are not getting the answers and insights they need when they consult the usual sources of psychology and science,” says intuitive counsellor Colette Baron-Reid.

However, there are some highly influential psychologists who honour the wisdom and intuitive guidance that oracles herald.

Of all the psychological theories in the West, that of revered Swiss psychologist Carl Jung stands out as most applicable to Tarot.

Jung wrote about Tarot on several occasions, seeing it as depicting archetypes of transformation like those he found in myths, dreams, and alchemy.

He described its divinatory abilities as similar to the ancient divination text I Ching and to astrology, and later in life established a group which attempted to integrate insights about a person based on multiple divination systems including Tarot.

Applying Oracles to Your Writing Day

As Colette Baron-Reid writes in the foreword to her newest Tarot deck The Good Tarot, “This version of the tarot is all about goodness, birthing our awareness of our true selves, and expressing that in our lives.

“It’s about happiness, compassion, love, and finding our faith and living it regardless of temporary outer conditions.”

At the time of writing this chapter, I felt a little discouraged by some personal challenges. I drew a card at random from The Good Tarot. The card I drew was “2 of Fire.” I smiled when I saw the image on the front of the card—a girl sitting astride a beautiful golden giraffe.

I love giraffes. Blue Giraffe Publishing, the company I founded for my self-empowerment books, is of course inspired by these gracious creatures with their huge hearts.

Instantly I felt a surge of joyful connection. The message which Colette provides in the accompanying guidebook is provided below—I’m sure it will have relevance for you:

2 of Fire

Creative planning for the future, mapping progress, trusting in the unknown, Spirit inspired ambition.

Whenever I can’t see how my dreams will coalesce into form, I can trust in the process of co-creation and engage more deeply in the process of envisioning something new.

I have already started to make progress, and soon my passion will attract the perfect situation for me. The light go Spirit helps me to see my way and feel the Universe and aligning to bring me what I need.

This card reminded me that even when I can’t see the results of my intentions, I must continue to trust Spirit and the magnetism of writing and creating with passion.

As Dame Anita Roddick, founder of the organic skincare company The Body Shop once said, “We create with passion and passion sells.”

The lantern on the oracle card which dangles from the giraffe’s mouth also reminds of the message I share in the chapter “Chase the Light.”

“Although its messages are about positivity and how to find meaning and attain a positive result no matter what the flow of results,” says Colette Baron in her introduction, “The Good Tarot doesn’t shy away from the truth of our sufferings.

“Instead, it gives us hope that no matter how many times we stumble, we nevertheless find immense treasures as we discover our true natures as spiritual beings expressing ourselves through the art of living in the realm of form.”

I notice oracles everywhere. You will, too, when you tune your mindset to listen to the wisdom that surrounds you.

As I write this chapter at my favourite café, a song with the lyrics “I won’t stay in a world without love” is playing. There is a love heart infused within the froth of my coffee.

And these signs, combined with the giraffe on the tarot card, all reaffirm to me the importance of writing with passion and sending love letters to the world to help and encourage other authors like you.

Not everyone believes in mysticism—and that’s fine. But I do. And so do a great many people.

“If you want to be a serious writer or intellectual you can’t say you’re a mystic because no one will talk to you again,” says American author (and professional tarot card reader) Jessa Crispin, slightly tongue-in-cheek.

Crispin, Colette Barron-Reid, and other creative people like myself are proud to join many others who invite people to experience a new, or rather an old way, of living an inspired life.

Mining for Gold

Experiment with tarot—either have a reading with an experienced tarot card reader or study the cards and their meanings for yourself.

Feed your curiosity—take note of the places and circumstances where tarot, astrological symbols, and other mystical and occultist philosophies are used—in business and life.

 

 

 

 

The Prosperous Author: How to Make a Living With Your Writing

Book One: Developing A Millionaire Mindset

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You might like:

 How to be the rock that resists adversity—mind, body and soul food during COVID-19

Emotional alchemy—the spontaneous healing power of joy

 Why Being Inspired Matters: The Spontaneous Fulfillment and Healing Power of Joy

 

Here are three more things you might like:

Interesting interviews: Listen to my best interviews on topics like overcoming obstacles, finding joy in adversity, following your passion to prosperity.

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Keynote speaking: Hire me to speak to your organization or team about Resilience, wellbeing, innovation, and motivation.

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