What You Were Told About Your Worth Is Still Shaping What You Let Yourself Build

**Matthew Gottesman** (0:02)
Welcome to The Niche Is You. My name is Matt Gottesman, at Matt Gottesman on Instagram, and this is my daily podcast where I create short, quick hitting episodes to help you uncomplicate life, creativity, and the pursuit of your highest self. There's only main character energy here. Now let's get into it.
Welcome to episode 832 What you were told about your worth is still shaping what you let yourself build. What you were told about your worth is still shaping what you let yourself build. Let me explain. I was watching this video, which I am going to play the audio here momentarily from Nicholas Wilton. And he was talking about how when he was younger, his father told him, there's money in art. There's money. You can find money in art, you know, in being creative. And he was saying how he was very fortunate that his father, you know, was who was this like trusted authority in his life very early on, basically gave him the permission that you won't have to be a starving artist, that there's money in art, there's money in creativity. And so he grew up with that notion that you don't have to be a struggling artist. Again, I'm going to play the audio here momentarily. And I wanted this to also be a permission for all of you.
Sometimes we have to look back to our early days of who are our influences. You hear me talk about The Sun and The Niche Is You all the time, right? You always hear me bring up about, well, when you're younger and you want to do certain things, and you get kind of the people in society, whether they're the school teachers or guidance counselors or parents or whoever, and they say, no, you need to be more responsible and no, that's not the route you should take. And they don't realize what's happening when they do that is they're almost removing the very essence of maybe A, what you're here to do, but also B, you're kind of establishing, the society is establishing the child's worth based off of an external way of doing things. And it's shaping, not almost, it is shaping the way we make decisions about our own worth and what we should be spending our time doing. So I love that this artist was, Nicholas was talking about that. And so I'm gonna play the audio and then we're gonna dive further into this, but it's something to really think about in terms of what shaped your value when you were younger. Because I get people, you know, all the time who ask about, well, how do you learn like what to charge and how do you know how to price things and, you know, will people really buy this and is there really a market for that? And the answer is always like, yes, yes, yes, people, there's always a market for something.
The size of the market just depends, I think, more on your visibility to the work and what you create and bring to the world, right? So let me play this video for you all so you can hear the audio, actually, I should say, and then we're going to talk about the rest of the episode.

**Nicholas Wilton** (3:01)
So I grew up being taught by my dad that there was nothing but money and art. That's what he always said to me, and I believed him. It's amazing when your influence is early, and someone in an authority that you love, believe in, tells you something. It wasn't until halfway through college that I started to realize that people had this fear that they would starve if they made art. So I just never had that. And as a result, I always was able to use creativity to make a living. I was an illustrator in the first part of my career. I never worked for anybody else. And I just presumed that because I was an artist, because I was creative, there was this great need. It was the first lesson for me, looking back now, that if you believe something, that goes a long way to making it true.

**Matthew Gottesman** (3:58)
That last line, if you believe something deeply enough, well, I added deeply enough in my notes, it goes a long way toward making it true.
He was very fortunate that he had a father that was basically saying, listen, there's money in art, there's money in creativity. And so he didn't grow up with a boundary that it wasn't. And there's so many different layers to this conversation when you think about it, because regardless of whether it's art or anything else, a barrier wasn't created for him for thinking about his worth. And in essence, he actually saw it more as like, oh, there is no ceiling if I choose creativity. Isn't that interesting, by the way? Creation, right? Co-creation. We're made abundantly in the eyes of the Lord. Like, I mean, God, like, we're made in the eyes of the Creator. We are made in the image of the Creator. Abundant. Creation. Creativity.