Are You Experiencing True Freedom? Are you Doing it with or without the Money?
$1,000,000 in the bank isn’t the fantasy. The fantasy is the complete freedom it supposedly allows. — Time Ferriss, Four Hour Workweek.
Are you experiencing true freedom? Are you doing it with or without the money? Does money give freedom? The old answer would be yes because we didn’t know what was possible. Being rich and leading a celebrity like lifestyle still gets a lot of social admiration but all that glamour fades if being rich equals to working non stop or not being able to travel. What’s prestigious and what gets attention and all the looks now is true freedom. If fortune is the way to freedom, we want the fortune. However if fortune makes us prisoners of our lives, there will be a day when we’ll break off the golden handcuffs to experience true freedom, with or without the money.
Many of us do not know how to define freedom. We mistakenly define freedom as all the product choices and options available to us. We are content with freedom of choosing the size of a TV to buy and making a choice of a restaurant we want to go to for dinner. When have we lowered our standards that much?
Because of the transparency of our lives which social media facilitates, we witness and get inspired by others who started designing their lives on their own terms. They take sabbaticals, extend their business trips adding on some extra days to surf, experience a country and socialize. They take mid-week days off and work throughout the weekends. They get a taste of freedom because they are designing life on their own terms. Even if our close friends are conformists and live the life by default, we can follow, reach out and ask for advice of complete strangers whose life we admire. Only you know what freedom means to you and don’t let anyone else influence your definition. We are all at different stages of our lives prioritizing different things.
Do you want to be done with work at 4pm to pick up your children from school? Are you a morning person or a night owl? When you own a business you can run it according to your circadian rhythm, family needs and aspirations. However, freedom in your career doesn’t mean that you will stop hustling. You still will be, probably your hustle will be even more intense but it’ll be on your own terms. Those who understand that living and working on your own terms is about writing your own script and not about finding the system to work less, will succeed.
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Originally published at medium.com