Boost Your Creative Success in 2024: Invest in These 3 Key Areas

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You time, talent, and treasure. Now, you've probably heard those three things put together when it comes to church services or giving offerings or things like that. However, what if I told you that those three areas are also the areas that you must invest in in order to have a successful 2024 to become a thriving, established creative? And there's a specific, specific way that each one of these things has to work in your creative life if you want to have any chance of success. I'm going to share with you how these three areas can become the key elements to help you invest in yourself as a creative in 2024.

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In this episode of the God and Gigs show, give me just a moment to welcome those of you who are new to our show, and then we'll get right into this extremely important conversation. Come here.

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Hello and welcome to our show. Thank you so much for making this podcast a part of your creative day. And if you're new to our show, thank you so much for giving us a chance. Let me tell you why you're in the right place at the right time. As a creative musician, entrepreneur, anyone at the intersection of the arts and entertainment space, but with a faith focused or christian background, you want to become the creative God created you to be by connecting the dots between your spiritual life and your creative life.

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And that's what we help you to do here. We help you solve temporary creative problems with timeless spiritual principles. So, thanks for joining us. Make sure you like and subscribe in whichever app you're using so that you can stay connected with this amazing community of creatives. Now, the three areas that you must invest in in 2024, as I mentioned, are time, talent, and treasure.

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However, there's a specific way you have to use these three things, and the way that you invest in them is going to determine your level of success in 2024 because of the way things are changing. First, let me say that if you are not investing in your craft, this is one of the key elements of our complete, confident, creative blueprint that we share in God and gigs 360, our membership platform. It's also in my book, God and gigs succeed as a musician without sacrificing your faith. So investing in your craft does mean a lot of different things. But here's the first thing it means you have to have a plan to grow.

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If you are not growing, I'm sorry, you're not standing still. You're falling behind. All you have to do is look around at the entire landscape of our economy, of our culture. You can see things are moving faster and faster with the rise of AI and tools. There's simply no way that you can stay still and not invest in yourself and expect to survive as a creative or really as a citizen or a person in this day and age.

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So I'm telling you, you've got to invest into the things that God put inside of you, and then you've got to make those things intentional in these areas of time, talent and treasure. So let's talk about first your time. I believe that investing your time cannot be simply haphazard. If you want to be successful in 2024, you're going to have to invest some time in something specific, and that is your relationships and your community. Now, when I say invest in your relationships and your community, I don't mean social media.

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I don't mean building an audience. I mean building a community by taking the time to really connect with people that's beyond the surface area. Will you follow me? Will you like me? Will you buy my music?

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Will you buy my things? I think that you have to make literal connections offline with people who really will be sewing into you and you will sew into them. Now, building a community is different than building an audience. An audience is a one way street. You build an audience and they watch you and they listen to you, and you give them things and you share things with them.

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But there's really no two way street there. With a community, there's always a dynamic of, number one, you speaking with and to your community. But your community speaking to you and your community speaking to each other without you. So there's so much to be said to investing that time into relationships. Not only into the people that are following you, that are connecting with you or buying from you, but also the people that are next to you.

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The key relationships. One thing I'm doing this year in social media, and I hope you're not feeling bad if this turns out to affect you, but I'm unfollowing a lot of people. But I'm not doing it in this haphazard way of just wanting to dump all these relationships. I'm making sure that I clear space to interact and focus on only those relationships that I'm either maintaining or growing. So if there's a relationship that's really not something that I'm sowing into that person, I don't want to pretend just by a surface connection that we are really making a connection.

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I want to make sure that I'm pouring intentionally into those who are connected with me and making sure that I'm making the effort with my time, whenever I send a message, whenever I pick up the phone, whenever I send an email that is legitimate, that is directly connected to them. That's the first area you've got to invest in in 2024. Building your community, building your relationships, and making sure that you are making that a priority. The second thing that you've got to do as a creative in 2024, you've got to invest your talent. Now, investing your talent, of course, means building your talent, continuing to practice, continuing to get better.

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But I think there's a key way that you can invest in your talent, and that is making sure that your talent is going towards some specific areas that you are going to be focusing on for 2024. This means not trying to do all the things that maybe your creative friends are doing. Maybe, like me, you're deciding to focus on a very specific part of your skill. While I can play all kinds of music, I have really decided to focus on my acoustic piano playing, which has meant I've walked away from some top 40 gigs. I've walked away from some much easier and maybe even more lucrative gigs.

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But I know that focusing on my acoustic piano playing and practicing that and doing more gigs in that space is going to help me in the long run. So I'm investing in my talent by investing more time and more focus in that specific area so that I am not trying to be all things to all people. And I suggest that if you want to stand out in 2024, you're going to have to do the same thing. This doesn't mean that you can't do lots of different creative things with your talent, but it does mean you're going to have to start making some choices because you simply can't be good at everything, and you definitely cannot be great at everything. So start to think about how you can hone your gift in your talent and make that investment into your talent.

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Very specific so that you know where you're growing and how you're growing in your creative skill. And then finally, I mentioned the third one, which is treasure, which most of the time gets a lot of people's attention because, you know, the Bible says where your treasure is, that's where your heart will be. Well, guess what? I believe that your treasure as a creative, as a business person, we got to think about this in terms of business. How can you invest your money, even if it's tight, even if the economy is very hard to come by, in terms of taking care of all your responsibilities, if you're not investing your money into your business?

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You are not a business, and you're definitely not going to be a thriving creative if you're not willing to put your money where your mouth is. And this area that you have to put your treasure in is coaching and education. You can no longer simply go to YouTube University, even if you're watching me on YouTube right now for free, and expect to grow. Yes, there are many times where you can get a lot of information from these YouTube creators or from TikTok or from podcasts. But until you put your money into a program to get a coach, to get an online course, whatever it is, and make sure that you are actually doing the work that you paid for, because people that pay attention, it is clearly something that will force you to take this seriously.

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The information that you're getting to take it seriously, to do your research, to make sure that the people that are sowing into your career, that you're growing by following their courses or being coached or mentored by them. And this puts a different demand on your creative life and your mind and your faith. So if you want to grow in 2024, there's no way you can do this by doing it on the cheap. This doesn't mean that you cannot continue to get resources that are for free. But if you really want to level up in 2024, I have not interviewed a single creative in over 260 episodes of this show that did not level up simply by saying, okay, I'm going to put some of my hard earned money and invest it into my business, invested into my creative growth, invested into my entrepreneurial growth and not seen a hundred fold return on that.

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And when I say 100 fold, I mean like what the Bible says, 100 fold. The complete amount, biggest amount possible from that investment was what they got back when they invested into coaching into some type of educational sphere. It can be formal, but most of the time, for us, it's often informal, but it has to be something where you are putting your money in investing it into growing as a creative entrepreneur, business person and or creator. So just make sure that you are thinking about these three areas, time, talent and treasure. That you're picking time to invest into relationships specifically to grow them and to help sow into people and to make that a stronger relationship.

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Make sure that you're investing in your talent to grow in specific areas and make sure that your treasure is going towards some type of educational program, a community, a mentorship, a mastermind. Because without it, you're going to be stuck in the same rut that you might have been stuck in in 2023. And we don't want that. We want you to grow. And as the saying is probably going to be all year for 2024, we want you to be more in 2024.

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Now, if you are looking for a community that can help you with all three of those, check out godandgeeks.com gold. Our God and gigs 360 gold program has the accountability, has all kinds of things that can help you to invest in yourself in all three of those areas. Cannot recommend it enough. Why? Because I've seen it work in many of our members.

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So check out the link in the description to join us there and you could probably take care of all three of those areas with just one click. But no matter what you do, make sure that you spend your time investing into yourself so that you can get all of the returns, all the benefits, all the blessings that God has put into your creative life and that he love to see you take a harvest on. Until next time, my friends, thank you so much for listening and I hope that you will continue to become the creative that you were created to be. God bless and I'll see you next episode.

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Thanks for joining us here at the God and gigs show. Please leave us a review on iTunes, like our Facebook page, or visit godandgigs.com and tell us what you thought of this show. We'll be back soon. In the meantime, go create something amazing.