The Art of Money - Turning Financial Success Into A Creative Pursuit
The Art of Money - Turning Financial Success Into A Creative Pursuit
Jacob Schroeder
What do you consider the act of ‘making money’? Is it an act of accounting and measuring? Or, is it an act of imagining and contemplating? Our finances involve numbers and data, but they’re intractably tied to our personal ideas, experiences, feelings and behaviors – intangible things you can’t formulate in a spreadsheet. Therefore, to manage the human side of money, it’s better to think more like an artist than a scientist. It’s a shame many famous artists had financial troubles.
Johannes Vermeer is said to have left behind 10 young children, a house full of paintings no one wanted and enormous debts, causing his wife to declare bankruptcy.
Mozart wracked up massive amounts of debt, too, to feed an extravagant lifestyle. Not to be out done, Oscar Wilde lived far beyond his means, until he eventually fell into poverty and supposedly spent his last bit of money on booze. When he took his own life, Vincent van Gogh was poor and destitute.
It’s a shame, because some principles great artists follow to make art could also apply to making money.
Art and money share more similarities than we like to think. Money, like art, is a means of self-expression; it helps you turn the life you imagine into reality. They’re both deeply personal. There is no one right way to sculpt a Greek goddess or invest in stocks. Most of all, money offers a lot of insights into human behaviors and sensations.
It is often those human elements that lead to financial problems, but that also give our financial decisions meaning. Therefore, when trying to create a financially successful future, we may need a little more right-brain than left-brain thinking.
Take it from Andy Warhol, an artist who loved to blur the lines of commerce and culture, who declared:
“Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” Andy Warhol
Why it helps to think of money as more art than science
Is personal finance an art or a science?
The juncture of art and money has gotten most attention as it relates to investing. Investor Howard Marks said: “Investing, like economics, is more art than science.”
Why?
Investing encapsulates the vagaries of human nature in the face of uncertainty. There is an element of personal intuition that guides the algorithms. That element of variance and uncertainty is what Barry Ritholtz expands upon in his definition:
“Investing is the art of using imperfect information to make probabilistic assessments about an inherently unknowable future.”
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