What is freedom?

We’ve been told since kindergarten that America is “The land of the free.” I have some misgivings about this around mid-April, but I digress; overall, this place has the most going for it, and that’s it.

However, in your personal life, what constitutes freedom?

Are you sitting around waiting on someone else to grant it to you? If you are, you’re probably already behind the 8 ball. Look, man, I don’t really want to go back to my mid-2010s cringe-libertarian rage days, but if you’re sitting around waiting on a public servant to grant you freedom…well, I hope you like waiting.

Freedom is something that comes exclusively from within you. Now, this is assuming you live in America and are afforded all of the inalienable rights as your neighbor. Good, bad, or indifferent, the easiest and most influential way to change the trajectory of your life and induce higher levels of personal autonomy, i.e., freedom, is to make more money. And ultimately, not just make more money but do so on your own terms. You choose who you work with, you choose the tempo, you choose the medium. Personal choice is freedom.

I’ll detail my experience with these a little later (if I remember to/get around to it), but by far, the quickest way to do this is with a service-based business/service, like writing. Writing is probably the most common service because the threshold to entry is so low, especially if you are a native English speaker (this is a most underrated life hack btw).

You don’t have to learn coding, Excel, or anything that you didn’t already learn in school. The downside is that there is so much competition because the entry requirements are non-existent. But this model is a great way to start generating cash, and you can scale by continuously upping your rates.

Again, I’ll talk about how I did it with some specifics later on.

But the point is that freedom lies in economics. I don’t love money, and I don’t hoard money. I use it as a tool to exchange for the things that create freedom. Time independence, location independence, and the independence to get out of things I don’t want to do, like mandatory sexual harassment training, HR briefings, and other garbage.

Freedom doesn’t necessarily look like what we think it looks like. In our modern world, it means some more banal like getting out of a crappy commute, only working until noon, and being able to actually spend time with your family on your own terms whenever you feel like it. That’s freedom.

My pathway to freedom started on Upwork, and that’s where I still go to find my best leads. Check out my ebook on exactly how to get started with Upwork.