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You will find throughout various schools of thought similar ideas relating to person growth, and in particular spiritual growth. I’m not talking about improving skills that relate to personal growth such as communication or responsibility, but rather ideas about leveling up the baseline from which all of these skills supposedly stem.

In Buddhism there’s this idea of the four stages of enlightenment. The idea is that we all have these things called fetters which bind us to suffering. The fetters are things like getting annoyed, or being attached to a certain thing. In Buddhism, reaching a stage of enlightenment means overcoming some of these fetters and thus liberating the mind and functioning at a higher level. If you’re not getting annoyed then you’ve freed up some mental real estate to focus on what matters.

In the philosopher Nietzsche’s book Thus Spake Zarathustra he talks about the three metamorphoses of the soul. These are a little bit different than the stages of enlightenment in Buddhism, but there are some commonalities. The metamorphoses are all about liberating yourself from the traditional value structure so that you can eventually get to a point where you are free to let your creative juices flow and add value to the existing structure. To be a creator.

Buddhism doesn’t explicitly state that you become more creative if you become enlightened, but after the Buddha became enlightened he went on to create an entire religion. That’s some serious creation! I’m not trying to compare all of us to the figurehead of a religion, I’m just trying to illustrate a point. If you focus on spiritual transformation, then you can become more creative, and this will allow you to pour your energy into building something that matters to you, whatever it is.

Another example is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The idea here is that if you gradually give yourself the things you need in life then you will grow at each stage, eventually reaching what he calls self-actualization. The cornerstone of self-actualization is, you guessed it, creativity.

I think there’s a general lesson that can be learned here that is independent of any ideological framework of spiritual growth. The idea being that all people have a nascent creative ability that will flourish to a greater extent if we are free from certain roadblocks, whether or not they are internal roadblocks or external roadblocks.

Another commonality between these different definitions of spiritual transformation is that happiness is the light at the end of the tunnel. However that’s no reason not to be happy right now.

Where I think these frameworks are really useful is for a person that is interested in creating something with their life, and they are interested in being happy while doing it, which I personally think is the best way to go about entrepreneurship or any other creative pursuit.

So if you’re an entrepreneur, an artist, or just a creative person in general, give spiritual transformation some though, and you might find that it serves you well.

Where I really recommend focusing on spiritual transformation is if you’re someone who really wants to create something, but has no idea what they want to create. This would be a great time to just focus on enhancing your creativity capacity through spiritual transformation, so that when the idea strikes, you’re ready to go.