Refiners,
Good things that have happened:So your problem is not poverty, but lack of meaning and/or splendor?
Ive paid my house off, and we sit quite comfortably, but God, my life is so ordinary. Im disappointed that this is as much as I seem able to achieve.
The first step in being able to direct your own life is to find out what you want. There's no point in getting An Education until you have some idea of what you want to know. This is why they don't let you declare your major until you've had two years of general courses -- which are supposed to be exploration time.
So I'm not going to suggest any self-help book. I will suggest a course of exploration. Read anything. Study anything. If something doesn't pan out, drop it! You don't have time to waste on anything boring or pointless or incomprehensible.
And look hard at how you define success. Glance at the careers of famous poets. A few examples: William Carlos Williams was an unknown country doctor -- and a poet. Allen Ginsberg was a college dropout and was brought up on obscenity charges because of his most widely-known work, Howl. Arthur Rimbaud, in his late teens, wrote a few dozen poems that changed French literature forever (and English-language and South American, too!), and then gave up writing forever. Died young, of cancer. And I haven't even mentioned the other arts, or politics, or the careers of activists.
Find out what's important to you -- what causes or wonders you would die rather than give up -- and then do art or politics or neighboring about it.
And good luck!
Gently Feral
P.S. I haven't gotten over the poverty yet; still living pretty much hand to mouth, and I'll be fifty in a few years. But, hey, isn't it about time to start planning for that second career, even though I missed the first one?