Financial freedom is a phrase most people feel as though it is unreachable and even unrealistic. I can tell you personally that sometimes it feels like it is. Sometimes, I myself want to give up on my pursuit of it and get a 9-5 job with a paycheck. Then I remember that trading your time for money is something that I am not interested in. Money can be replenished; however, time is a precious commodity that is gone forever once it passes. Time being a finite resource is so important to me. I want to max out life to the best of my abilities. At 20 years old (about to be 21), I can say that I am building the systems to set me up for the future right now. Have I gone through a ton of hardships, learning curves, and failures? Of course I have, and I’m just getting started. But to say that the hardship, the failure, and the frustration isn’t worth the payoff and satisfaction of financial freedom would be you just lying to yourself to justify your choice of reality. Over the course of the last year and a half that I have pursued financial freedom, I have learned many valuable lessons. The most important and counterintuitive lesson that I have learned is in order to make more, you need to work less. Many of you that are new to this blog may be scratching your heads right now. “But I’ve always been told that if I want more I need to work more and work harder. All or nothing” as the common adage states in today’ society. This train of thought is extremely destructive and for whatever reason is the groupthink that society has put upon us. First off, lets break down why the “all or nothing” mindset sucks.
Analyzing All Or nothing
All or nothing is meant to be sort of a motivational kind of phrase. However, the truth of it could not be further from that perception. The implication of saying “all or nothing” is that if you fail at something once, essentially you should give up. Since you didn’t receive the “all”, you deserve the “nothing”. Success is not done this way. It takes failure after failure, hardship after hardship, and learning experience after learning experience to reach the highest levels of success. All or nothing will not get you there. As a society, we should disband this phrase from our mainstream language as it is counterintuitive to success. Now that we got this out of the way, let’s move on to the next part of the common perception.
Working Harder and longer doesn’t work
The modern perception of money is that it comes hand in hand with the time put in to receive it. This is how most jobs work. Getting paid a certain amount of money per hour emphasizes the time/money tradeoff that plagues our world. Many people won’t attempt to reach financial freedom because they don’t know how and they’re afraid to find out, learn, and make mistakes. It is because of this most people live their lives in complacency abiding to the perceived laws of society. As it turns out, reaching financial freedom or at least financial literacy is much simpler than it has been made out to be. Simply invest your money in the stock market, invest into real estate, or use any other tool that will help you reach financial freedom by compounding your money over time. This is a simple and effective way to gain financial independence, yet so many don’t do it. This is due to many reasons such as fear, laziness, ignorance, and many other factors. Simply, put your time into working on one financial vehicle that will take you to financial freedom. Make mistakes and learn from them. Don’t fear failure and understand that financial freedom is a process that takes time and effort, but it is one that does not take nearly as long as 40 years at a 9-5 job with no time to do what you love most. Working harder and longer hours won’t get you to where you want to be. Trial and error in any sort of tool that is scalable and compounds your money over time will.
Outsourcing your work in exchange for your time
For so many people including myself that like to chase excitement, taking on the challenge of starting side hustles and businesses can be something that someone of this mindset may want to explore. If you are content with slicing your time at a 9-5 in half or sometimes even less by investing in the stock market, by all means that is an approach you can take. If you’re like me however and want to build things that work for you and like to create businesses rather than work a 9-5 for any amount of time, this is your section. The biggest thing I’ve learned over the past year and a half is that successful businesses aren’t built alone. You can’t be a solopreneur and expect to have any sort of scalable success. In addition to this, being a solopreneur is no better than having a 9-5 job in that you are essentially trading your time for money the same as an employee. Your job as the creator is as the name implies, to create systems that run businesses for you, and then outsource those systems to others who are capable of running them. For example, today I hired an account manager for my Amazon business. Their responsibility is to upkeep my account and manage my products and their sales. I have an amazing marketing manager for my blog who is helping me perfect and scale my blog to extents that I never could have reached alone. This is just the beginning of my hiring process. We have talked about Vivid Visions a lot of this blog, and if you haven’t read my post on them, I will link it here. For those who don’t know, a Vivid Vision is a basic outline of what your business will look like, feel like, and act like in 3 years’ time. I have put my vision on paper, and now am in the process of hiring individuals to meet that vision. As you can see, it isn’t about trading time and putting in extreme hard work that will get you to the next level. Of course, working hard is always important, but understanding your limitations is even more important. Reaching financial freedom in this case is about scaling using other people’s time and effort, and then using the money made to make investments in vehicles that will grow your money such as stocks and real estate. The formula is simple yet so open for personal interpretation as to how to get to the end goal. There are many paths to reach financial freedom. Here, I have provided a basic outline of my plan in action. Take this plan however you will and develop your own to reach the same goals. Which path will you choose?