Look at the gestalt.

If you can create art, why not simply extrapolate your ability?

Create your life in the shape and form of prosperity. Draw upon the creator force within. You have the power. Like a floating decimal point, you can instantly move the dot—your own self—and raise the ante at any time.

And the point is this: to build your world, you must begin, you must start somewhere, anywhere.

As a brilliant, undisciplined, and unconventional thinker, the 18th Century French deistic philosopher and author Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778) spent most of his life being driven by controversy—back and forth between Paris and his native Geneva. Orphaned at an early age, he left home at sixteen, working as a tutor and musician before undertaking a literary career while in his forties. Although not an immediate success (his first opera failed), the time for his ideas was ripe as unrest and change were stirring in the air of aristocratic arrogance and injustice. The French Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789.

Rousseau sired but refused to support several illegitimate children and frequently initiated bitter quarrels with even the most supportive of his colleagues. His autobiographical Les Confessions (1783) offer a thorough (contagious if somewhat self-serving) account of his turbulent life.

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An artist carves out new territory with no preconceived notions about pleasing a public. Until the artist’s work is recognized by his audience, creating can make for tough times in the marketplace.

A hack (you know who you are) produces something he feels the public wants, which is inverse to the artist’s nature. Like Damocles, the hack works with the sword of a focus group dangling precariously overhead. A hack can have the potential to be a great artist; it is fear of exposing his true self that keeps him in the land of mediocre.

The true artist knows that a visceral reaction to his art is better than a lukewarm comment. I love it, or even I hate it is better than hearing: “Oh, it’s interesting.”

In the beginning, I thought I heard the muse calling to me, beckoning me to write, enticing me to live a life that went beyond the suits and boots existence of business and going to brunch on weekends.

After many years of heeding a voice only I could hear, I ultimately realized that the muse, that goddess who encouraged me to swim upstream against the torrent of tradition and dogma, was not a construct of Greek mythology but my intuition—a faculty that has an assortment of definitions. Among other interpretations, intuition is the divine speaking directly to you, which I know to be so.

Still, this definition of intuition in all its clarity remains abstract until you hear and feel the voice of intuition for your own self. After that, there is no need to define it further because you have struck bedrock in the ways and means department of epistemology.

There are many different types of freedoms. Most people rank political freedom and financial freedom high on the list.

There is, however, only one true freedom and that is self-discipline, which sets the stage for all possibilities.

After a while it becomes evident to the evolved soul that it is not only pointless, but impossible to control others. It is much simpler and more effective to be in control of your own self. When you change your self, you do change your world—and the muses love the disciplined artist.