RPF0697-Seven_Rings_of_Freedom-Business

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00:00:30.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

00:00:41.000 | My name is Josh Rasheeds and I am your host.

00:00:43.000 | Today we continue our 7 Rings of Freedom series.

00:00:47.000 | This is a series focused on giving you some practical, actionable ideas so that you can generate and achieve increasing levels of freedom in your life and your lifestyle.

00:01:00.000 | One of the reasons that many people pursue financial independence is so that they can have more freedom, however they define the word.

00:01:09.000 | I'm convinced, however, that you don't need to be totally financially independent in order to build freedom for yourself.

00:01:15.000 | So if you know that the end that you're pursuing is personal freedom, why not enjoy it on the pathway to financial independence?

00:01:23.000 | This episode is the fifth episode in this series.

00:01:27.000 | First episode was I talked about spiritual liberty, how if you are spiritually free, then you can go through any outward circumstance of bondage or lack of liberty and yet sail through it.

00:01:39.000 | And yet if you are spiritually in bondage, no matter how great the external circumstances can be, how that will affect you deeply personally.

00:01:47.000 | The second episode I talked about spousal liberty and the third about family liberty.

00:01:51.000 | I made a pitch to appreciate the value of a stay at home life and also of homeschooling.

00:01:58.000 | I talked about how those lifestyle decisions can massively increase your personal freedom.

00:02:04.000 | And I think those ideas are under discussed in the modern world.

00:02:07.000 | Then I pivoted towards a more traditional financial discussion.

00:02:11.000 | I talked about spending liberty.

00:02:12.000 | I talked about the personal freedom that you can enjoy by being and staying debt free and also by having some amount of savings.

00:02:20.000 | And I made the argument that the amount of savings can be much more modest than is commonly considered to be.

00:02:27.000 | Yes, a million dollars is useful.

00:02:29.000 | Ten million dollars is probably more useful.

00:02:31.000 | But I made the arguments that a thousand dollars, ten thousand dollars, and a hundred thousand dollars of savings sets you on a pathway to freedom where you have the ability to do almost anything but not the ability to do nothing.

00:02:44.000 | And since that's a fairly healthy position to be in in life, to have the ability to do anything but not the ability to do nothing, then you can achieve a significant level of personal liberty and spending liberty by simply being debt free and accumulating and targeting those three levels of wealth.

00:02:59.000 | And then you'll just continue on from there after you've achieved those.

00:03:02.000 | But I think that the amount of liberty that you achieve as you go on from there is really only marginal.

00:03:07.000 | There's not a lot that you can do with five hundred thousand dollars that you can't do with a hundred thousand dollars.

00:03:12.000 | There's not a lot you can do with three million dollars that you can't do with a hundred thousand dollars except do some bigger deals and perhaps be in that place of true financial independence.

00:03:21.000 | Today we're going to talk about business liberty and discuss the topic of entrepreneurship.

00:03:26.000 | Because I'm convinced that entrepreneurship offers the ordinary person more opportunities for liberty than almost anything else.

00:03:36.000 | Most entrepreneurs enjoy a lifestyle of liberty.

00:03:40.000 | Not all.

00:03:41.000 | And I want to be clear with one caveat that entrepreneurship is not perfect.

00:03:46.000 | It's not.

00:03:47.000 | And I would guess if we were sitting down and having a friendly gentleman's wager, I would wager a few bucks that you probably couldn't find an entrepreneur anywhere in the world that would say to you that they haven't at times thought if they wouldn't be much better simply being an employee and having a job.

00:04:08.000 | Entrepreneurship comes with tremendous benefits but also comes with a tremendous cost.

00:04:13.000 | And I've personally observed a number of people who are entrepreneurs and when observing their situation, observing their lifestyle, I think they'd be better off in a job.

00:04:24.000 | Especially a job that you can go to work, do your work and leave it there.

00:04:28.000 | I've often been envious of jobs like driving a truck or delivering mail.

00:04:34.000 | I had a friend of mine who was a mailman and I was always envious of his job because his job never followed him home.

00:04:39.000 | He went to work, he did his job and then he left and his job stayed there.

00:04:45.000 | And there are many jobs like that and I often think about, "Man, wouldn't it be nice to have one of those jobs?"

00:04:52.000 | But then something happens and usually I'm very glad to not have one of those jobs.

00:04:56.000 | So I want to be clear.

00:04:58.000 | This is not a panacea.

00:04:59.000 | This is not a perfect prescription.

00:05:00.000 | But in today's show, I'm going to make 10 arguments to you.

00:05:03.000 | I'm going to go through a list of 10 things specifically that I particularly value about entrepreneurship and how entrepreneurship and freedom go hand in hand.

00:05:14.000 | How you can build tremendous levels of freedom for yourself as an entrepreneur.

00:05:18.000 | And then if you'll stay tuned, number 10 is going to be my favorite one.

00:05:22.000 | The other ones aren't unimportant.

00:05:24.000 | But number 10 is going to be my favorite one and I'm going to give you one bonus at the end that I think is also quite powerful.

00:05:30.000 | So let's start on the 10.

00:05:31.000 | Oh, and then after the 10, I'm going to give you some suggestions as to how you can work your way gradually toward entrepreneurship.

00:05:38.000 | Because I don't think that the best solution to freedom is to say, "That's it. I'm done with my job today and I'm just going to go and start any business at all."

00:05:44.000 | Rather, there are a lot of ways to think about it and I want you to behave thoughtfully and intelligently as you make your decisions.

00:05:50.000 | So thing number one that I really value about entrepreneurship is freedom of schedule.

00:05:57.000 | Freedom of schedule.

00:05:58.000 | And I've chosen to lead with this one because I think it's especially applicable to people who are pursuing financial independence.

00:06:04.000 | When I talk to people who are gung-ho about financial independence and I ask them, "What do you want?"

00:06:10.000 | A lot of times they share something that's involved with freedom over time and daily schedule.

00:06:17.000 | Sometimes they'll say things like, "I want to have time to get really healthy and work out a lot."

00:06:23.000 | Sometimes they'll say things like, "I don't want to have to get up with an alarm clock," or, "I don't have to want to commute into the city and sit for two hours in rush hour traffic."

00:06:31.000 | There will often be something that's expressed in terms of freedom of schedule.

00:06:36.000 | And I personally deeply value that.

00:06:39.000 | It's something that I really, really value.

00:06:42.000 | The ability to control your day.

00:06:44.000 | I think that fundamentally it's very human, as an adult human, to want to and to be able to control your day.

00:06:53.000 | And you can understand why in many work environments the boss or the employer needs people to be on a common time schedule.

00:07:03.000 | And I don't think that that common time schedule is actually all that bad.

00:07:06.000 | For example, though I have the ability to work at any time of the day that I work, I work pretty standard hours.

00:07:15.000 | I generally work a pretty standard schedule, which is about the same that I would be doing if I were an employee.

00:07:22.000 | But at the end of the day, it's a lot different to work when you want to and to choose the hours, choose the standard schedule because you know it fits your needs, than to have to be there because you have to.

00:07:33.000 | And I think that's incredibly valuable.

00:07:36.000 | Now, I'm not such an unusual person.

00:07:39.000 | I don't have many unusual things that need to be catered to.

00:07:42.000 | But if you do, then you can often meet those things in entrepreneurship.

00:07:46.000 | For example, one of the real benefits of entrepreneurship is you can do your work at the time of the day when you work most effectively.

00:07:53.000 | I think some people genuinely work really well in the morning.

00:07:56.000 | Some people work really well in the afternoon.

00:07:58.000 | Some people work really well at night.

00:08:00.000 | As an entrepreneur, depending on the structure of your business, you have the ability to work when you work well.

00:08:05.000 | I personally, I work well early in the morning.

00:08:08.000 | I don't work well late at night.

00:08:10.000 | I have never been effective late at night.

00:08:12.000 | When most people in college would stay up, I would get to a certain point, usually around 9 or 10 o'clock and say, "Nah, doesn't matter.

00:08:18.000 | Don't even care if I get an F. I'm going to bed."

00:08:20.000 | But I can get up at 4 o'clock, 5 o'clock in the morning and work very effectively.

00:08:24.000 | Now, there are people who are the exact opposite.

00:08:26.000 | One of the great ways to get a lot of benefit from your working hours is to work when you're at your peak.

00:08:32.000 | I think that's so important, and especially if your work is something that you can do in a fairly solitary way.

00:08:38.000 | For example, my work is fairly solitary.

00:08:41.000 | I can choose to work when I'm at my peak, and that helps me to get more work done in less time, not necessarily because of anything except just choosing to work when I'm at my best.

00:08:52.000 | This also fits well. The freedom of schedule on a daily basis fits well into an ordinary life.

00:08:57.000 | An ordinary life involves a basic schedule but exceptions to that schedule.

00:09:03.000 | So you might have a normal breakfast time with your family or a normal dinner time, but then there are exceptions.

00:09:09.000 | And when you have the ability to come and go as most fits you, then those exceptions don't have to be—you don't have to freak out about them.

00:09:18.000 | This morning, got a late start. I had been traveling this last week, taking a number of red-eye flights.

00:09:24.000 | I was tired, woke up early, got up, was tired, went back to bed.

00:09:29.000 | And our whole family schedule just shifted back a couple of hours, and it was no big deal because I have the control over my day.

00:09:35.000 | That helps me to feel like my work is not something that I'm a slave to, because if I can control my work and put it into the normal times that I want to do it, then I don't feel like I have to do it.

00:09:47.000 | And that's different than perhaps an employee who has to get up and you have to report for work at 7 a.m. because the students are going to be arriving, and you have to be there.

00:09:56.000 | And so, yeah, you took a couple of red-eye flights and you're tired, but, well, you got to do it.

00:10:02.000 | And so I very much appreciate that daily freedom of schedule.

00:10:07.000 | And I think that it's something that many entrepreneurs do appreciate very much.

00:10:12.000 | And so I would commend to you if one of your reasons for pursuing financial independence is to have control over your daily schedule, recognize that you can do that with entrepreneurship.

00:10:22.000 | Now, I can hear the response that you may be thinking.

00:10:26.000 | You might be thinking, "Well, Joshua, not all businesses are like that.

00:10:29.000 | You can be an entrepreneur and yet still have to be at the office at 7 a.m."

00:10:32.000 | That is true, which is why entrepreneurship in and of itself offers benefits.

00:10:37.000 | But there are even more benefits to your thinking carefully and critically about the kind of business that you pursue and choosing one that fits your desired lifestyle.

00:10:47.000 | More on that on the fifth one today.

00:10:51.000 | Other benefits of freedom of schedule is just simply weekly, monthly, and yearly rhythms.

00:10:56.000 | I find that having control over your schedule on a weekly, monthly, and yearly basis is really powerful.

00:11:02.000 | Now, the weekly is up to you.

00:11:04.000 | If you want to have weekends off, great.

00:11:06.000 | If you want to work on the weekends, great.

00:11:07.000 | You can choose a business that fits that.

00:11:09.000 | There are many people who are entrepreneurs who make a living going to festivals on the weekends and selling, running a food business, a festival-focused food business.

00:11:20.000 | Or they go to trade shows and they make huge amounts of income in just a short amount of time and they have their other days of the week off.

00:11:26.000 | I think that's great.

00:11:28.000 | Other people really like to work Monday through Friday and like to have their weekends off.

00:11:32.000 | Some people want to work Monday through Thursday and have Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off.

00:11:36.000 | Entrepreneurship gives you the ability to structure your life in the way that you think is best.

00:11:42.000 | Now, what I have found is that I'm fairly boring.

00:11:45.000 | I work basically a standard Monday through Friday week most of the time because there are real benefits.

00:11:51.000 | The 40-hour work week, the 50-hour work week from Monday through Friday has a lot of benefits and it feels good socially.

00:11:59.000 | It kind of fits the normal expected social calendar that most of us have.

00:12:03.000 | But if that's not you and you want to do something different, go for it.

00:12:06.000 | I appreciate the flexibility on a monthly and yearly basis to schedule things when I want to schedule them.

00:12:13.000 | I think that one of the great benefits of entrepreneurship is you don't exist in a world of specific days, specific holidays as much as many people do.

00:12:23.000 | Your world might revolve around the holidays back to your being working in a food business or a festival business.

00:12:32.000 | In that situation, then the holidays might be the time that you work.

00:12:36.000 | But on the other hand, you might just simply ignore holidays.

00:12:39.000 | I tend to ignore the majority of holidays personally and I just work when I want to or I work on most holidays.

00:12:47.000 | But then I do have a lot of things in my personal life that fit in and I schedule them when they're most convenient.

00:12:53.000 | And I like that personally.

00:12:55.000 | It fits well with my personality.

00:12:57.000 | It fits well with my family's schedule.

00:12:59.000 | It also has some benefits of being financially efficient and you don't have to travel in peak times.

00:13:04.000 | You can travel at other times, et cetera.

00:13:06.000 | But you can structure your day and your week and your life in the way that you want.

00:13:11.000 | For many years, my ambition has been I've noticed that I have about a three-month time ability to focus for about three months on a project before I get worn out.

00:13:21.000 | And so for years, I've had the intention of working on a three-month on, one month off schedule.

00:13:27.000 | January, February, March work, take April off.

00:13:30.000 | May, June, July work, take August off.

00:13:32.000 | September, October, November take December off.

00:13:34.000 | And so that's been my ambition for years.

00:13:37.000 | So far, I've not done it and part of that has been just simply because I've never scheduled the things that I wanted to schedule during those times.

00:13:44.000 | I've taken other interesting times off.

00:13:46.000 | But this year, I'll be taking the month of June off and the month of December off and I'm working on a five-month schedule right now, five months on, one month off.

00:13:53.000 | And because of that, in a way, it's almost like constant mini-retirements.

00:13:58.000 | But for me, a month off from work and I start to get really antsy and really ready to get back to it, which means that I'm always working at my peak.

00:14:06.000 | And that's a real, real benefit of entrepreneurship, to structure things in a way that allows you to constantly work at your peak.

00:14:15.000 | And I think there's a huge benefit in seasonality.

00:14:18.000 | An entrepreneur's production schedule, depending on your job, can include massive amounts of free time and that in and of itself can enhance your productivity.

00:14:27.000 | Years ago, I read Dan Sullivan's book on the entrepreneur's time management system.

00:14:33.000 | And the argument that Sullivan makes is that most people approach their work with a mindset basically of a factory worker and basically with this concept that you have to work to earn a vacation.

00:14:49.000 | And so the standard model is you work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, and when you finally worked enough, then at that point in time you say, "Okay, now I deserve a break."

00:14:58.000 | Whereas Sullivan makes the claim that entrepreneurship is much more like a performance art, much more like an athlete or an entertainer in terms of the schedule where you do your best work when you're at your peak.

00:15:11.000 | And you're at your peak usually when you come from a period of rest where you start with rest, you start with rejuvenation, and then you do your work.

00:15:20.000 | And you do your very best work.

00:15:21.000 | So think of it if you played a professional sport.

00:15:25.000 | You wouldn't go and say the best way to prepare for a professional sport is to work, work, work, work, work all week long, and then you've got your Sunday football game, and you're going to just do your hardest workout on Saturday so that you can prepare and launch it on Sunday.

00:15:41.000 | You don't do that.

00:15:42.000 | In football you need to be rested.

00:15:44.000 | So yes, you do need to have workouts, but then there's going to be a rest time so that when you hit the game, you arrive at it very well rested.

00:15:54.000 | And the performance during the practice week in some ways doesn't matter.

00:15:59.000 | A football player doesn't get paid or recruited based upon their performance during practice on a random Tuesday.

00:16:06.000 | They get paid or recruited based upon their production on a Sunday or a Monday night or whenever their game actually is.

00:16:13.000 | And so there's a very tiny percentage of time that makes all the difference in the world in terms of their overall compensation.

00:16:19.000 | It's not just the practice schedule.

00:16:21.000 | The practice schedule matters, but it's their performance.

00:16:24.000 | And so in entrepreneurship it's the same way.

00:16:26.000 | There are very few key activities, few key decisions, a few key things that an entrepreneur is in charge of that will massively dictate the results that entrepreneur gets with their business.

00:16:35.000 | And so by performing those things at your best, you get tremendous benefits.

00:16:43.000 | And so you always start with rest, with relaxation, with rejuvenation, and then you schedule your high performance activities during the time when you're the most productive.

00:16:52.000 | And what that means is that in entrepreneurship, especially if we talk about financial leverage, which is one of the later points, you can have a lifestyle where you don't have to choose between increasing amounts of income and increasing amounts of free time.

00:17:05.000 | Rather, you can pursue those things simultaneously.

00:17:08.000 | You can pursue massive levels of increasing income and massive levels of increasing free time.

00:17:14.000 | And often, if the person who's in charge of the business values free time, you'll often see that the larger and more productive an entrepreneur is in terms of their financial productivity, the more free time they have.

00:17:26.000 | And to me that's one of the most powerful things because it doesn't put your time and your so-called personal life in conflict with your financial productivity.

00:17:36.000 | What it means is that you can constantly refine both of them.

00:17:39.000 | You can constantly increase your income while increasing the quantity and quality of your non-work time, of your free time.

00:17:46.000 | And when you're in a situation like that, it makes both of them so much more valuable and it solves fundamentally the classic problem of the early retirement that the early retirement crowd is pursuing.

00:17:58.000 | This idea that, "Well, I've got to work, I've got to work, I've got to work so that I can get away and do free time."

00:18:01.000 | But when you've sat around and engaged in just free time for a long time, you're ready to do something productive.

00:18:07.000 | And so people who are early retired, they do things that are productive to solve that problem.

00:18:15.000 | And so my point is if you can do something productive and you can simultaneously enjoy massive amounts of free time and massive amounts of income, then why not pursue that path?

00:18:25.000 | It seems like basically the best path.

00:18:28.000 | And most of the downsides of that path can be mitigated with different decisions, with a different type of business or a different way of structuring the business or your willingness to accept different results from your business.

00:18:41.000 | So freedom over schedule is tremendously important.

00:18:46.000 | Now, point number two of what I value about entrepreneurship is arguably a subset of point number one.

00:18:53.000 | But I wanted to highlight it differently because I believe that entrepreneurship also solves one of the major challenges of fitting work into the normal cycle of family life, and that is seasonality.

00:19:06.000 | Life ebbs and flows in seasons.

00:19:10.000 | I'm not here referring to the quarterly seasons based upon the natural cycles.

00:19:15.000 | I'm referring to the seasons of your personal life.

00:19:18.000 | There's a season of childhood, a season of adolescence, a season of young adulthood, hopefully a season of marriage, childless marriage, hopefully then a season of young children and middle-aged children, older children, adult children, season of grandchildren.

00:19:33.000 | Hopefully you're blessed enough to have a season of great-grandchildren.

00:19:35.000 | And there are these different seasons of life.

00:19:38.000 | The challenge is that this seasonal understanding of life doesn't fit in well with the mainstream factory work system.

00:19:48.000 | If you're a factory worker and your boss is depending on you to be there for a certain number of hours per week in order to assemble a certain number of widgets, your boss is not looking to your personal life and asking you how much you'd like to work this week or this month or this year or this decade.

00:20:06.000 | Because they need your presence there.

00:20:10.000 | And if you're not there, the whole factory line system falls down.

00:20:13.000 | But for an entrepreneur, you can adjust your work activities to different seasons of your life.

00:20:19.000 | Because you don't have to please another person's production schedule.

00:20:23.000 | If you own your own company and that company is privately held, you have the ability to adjust your work in that company based upon your personal capacity.

00:20:34.000 | So one of the reasons why over the years, although I believe that I would be more effective in many ways if I had a business partner other than my wife, I'm very slow to do that.

00:20:44.000 | Because I don't want another person's expectations, which may not be aligned with mine, to be weighing on my shoulders.

00:20:51.000 | Because if I took on a business partner, I would have a responsibility to that business partner.

00:20:55.000 | And their goals might be different than my goals.

00:20:58.000 | And as an entrepreneur though, you have the ability to look at your goals and decide how aggressive you're going to be with those goals based upon the season of life that you're in.

00:21:10.000 | And then you adjust your business activities accordingly.

00:21:13.000 | One of the people that I found most inspiring on this years ago, I was an early reader of Joshua Kaufman's work.

00:21:21.000 | He was the man who wrote the book Personal MBA as well as four or five other ones.

00:21:27.000 | And he created the Personal MBA out of his own personal project and then it became a book.

00:21:33.000 | Well, he went on and he applied the principles of the Personal MBA project into his life.

00:21:38.000 | And I've admired him as being one of the most disciplined and clear thinking writers that I've often come across.

00:21:45.000 | And one of the things that I appreciate is on his website for years he maintained basically a current status.

00:21:52.000 | Here's what I'm doing.

00:21:53.000 | And he and his wife had a number of small children and he just simply said, "I'm not pursuing projects.

00:21:59.000 | I'm not pursuing big opportunities.

00:22:00.000 | Here's what I'm working on.

00:22:01.000 | I'm not pursuing.

00:22:02.000 | I'm not accepting speaking engagements.

00:22:03.000 | I'm not pursuing this.

00:22:04.000 | I'm not pursuing that, etc."

00:22:06.000 | And I've basically done in many ways a similar thing with my own life.

00:22:10.000 | As the demands of my family and my personal goals have caused me, I've laid aside certain business goals.

00:22:17.000 | But not forever is the point.

00:22:19.000 | Not forever.

00:22:20.000 | I don't have to be either out of the job market or in the job market.

00:22:22.000 | I can maintain some things and then you can ramp up your activities up and down as you feel able.

00:22:28.000 | To me, that's a powerful thing.

00:22:30.000 | When you're not responsible to another person to produce for them at the level that they need.

00:22:36.000 | And you can adjust your business larger, smaller, as you want in a certain phase of your life.

00:22:43.000 | It allows your life and your business to be very compatible.

00:22:46.000 | And so when you can align your money-making activities and your personal life in a seasonal way,

00:22:52.000 | depending on the season of life you're in and the demands of that season,

00:22:55.000 | it gives you a tremendous level of personal freedom.

00:22:58.000 | Where you don't have to run from your work, run from your job.

00:23:00.000 | But you can adjust your work and your job to fit where you are at that season of life.

00:23:06.000 | Freedom number three that I appreciate deeply is freedom of location and jurisdiction.

00:23:12.000 | Freedom of location can be very simple.

00:23:16.000 | For example, some people really enjoy working in an office environment.

00:23:19.000 | Some people don't like to work in an office environment.

00:23:23.000 | As an entrepreneur, you can largely choose the type of work that you do.

00:23:27.000 | Now, you don't need to own your own business to do that.

00:23:29.000 | You can choose a job that fits you.

00:23:31.000 | Perhaps you say, "I like seeing the open road."

00:23:34.000 | And so my form of entrepreneurship is to be an over-the-road trucker or a hot shot driver or something like that.

00:23:40.000 | And your office becomes the cab of your truck.

00:23:43.000 | That's reasonable.

00:23:44.000 | For other people, they prefer their office to be the local cafe.

00:23:47.000 | And they really enjoy working in coffee shops.

00:23:50.000 | Other people really prefer working in an office.

00:23:53.000 | One of the things that I've found--one of these days I'll do a show--I have the outline done.

00:23:58.000 | I just never done it.

00:23:59.000 | But basically, like things I was wrong about in my life.

00:24:02.000 | I keep a list of all the things that I've once said quite vigorously or thought to myself

00:24:05.000 | and have turned out to be totally wrong.

00:24:07.000 | One of the things on that list is the value of an office.

00:24:10.000 | For years, I never wanted to work in an office because I felt office environments were kind of stifling and constraining and whatnot.

00:24:16.000 | I just wanted to work from home or whatever random place that I wanted to be.

00:24:21.000 | What I found was I was wrong.

00:24:22.000 | Yes, it was nice to be able to do the work in random locations, but I was not nearly as productive in those locations.

00:24:27.000 | And all I want is just an office to go to every day.

00:24:30.000 | But I want that office to have certain characteristics.

00:24:32.000 | I don't miss rush hour traffic.

00:24:34.000 | And so the simple ability to have an office that's at your house or next to your house is ideal.

00:24:40.000 | My vision has always been to have an office that's on the second floor of a connected building on my property where I walk to work,

00:24:47.000 | but it's a couple hundred feet away from my house, and I walk up to my office and I do my work.

00:24:53.000 | But it's on my property but not in my house.

00:24:55.000 | That's my current ideal scenario.

00:24:57.000 | But yours may differ, and that's really nice to have the ability to choose your location of where you work.

00:25:03.000 | It's really valuable.

00:25:05.000 | There are other benefits of it, though, as well, because you have the ability to choose where your company does its work.

00:25:10.000 | And that can be simple things like we work in the middle of the city or we work in this neighborhood in the city

00:25:17.000 | and/or we work in this country or this state or we work out in the country.

00:25:23.000 | Just the simple ability to choose whether you set up your office or your business in the city or out in the country is really powerful

00:25:30.000 | because there are very clear lifestyles that are associated with both of those choices.

00:25:35.000 | And so if you have a bias towards one or the other, you can fulfill that with entrepreneurship in many ways, which is really powerful.

00:25:43.000 | I find one of the even more powerful measures is just the ability to control which state you live in or province or whatever the inside,

00:25:52.000 | the national borders of your country of residence happen to be called, but also even to control what country you do business in.

00:25:59.000 | I find that the ability for an entrepreneur, especially today with so many businesses that can be adapted to be a global business,

00:26:07.000 | your ability to choose which government you're going to be responsible to is really, really powerful.

00:26:15.000 | In the next episode in the series, we're going to be talking about liberty from the state.

00:26:20.000 | How do you get free of excessive government control?

00:26:24.000 | I'm going to share with you some ideas on how to do that.

00:26:26.000 | But one of the things that is such a valuable tool is to have a business that can be moved from one jurisdiction to another,

00:26:35.000 | from one country to another without that business collapsing.

00:26:39.000 | Not all businesses are well suited to that, but many people can build businesses that have that benefit if you have that as a personal goal.

00:26:47.000 | And so I greatly appreciate the freedom of location and the freedom of jurisdiction.

00:26:53.000 | This brings so many powerful benefits even to your individual life.

00:26:58.000 | This type of freedom allows you to engage in geographic arbitrage on every level.

00:27:03.000 | If you have a business, a product or service that can be sold into a high-priced market,

00:27:09.000 | you have the ability to generate possibly high amounts of revenue.

00:27:14.000 | If you can simultaneously deliver the quality of that business using labor that is in a low-wage market,

00:27:21.000 | you have the ability to generate a very high profit margin.

00:27:24.000 | If you then can compound that with your own personal tax efficiency to structure your company in such a way that it incurs a very low level of tax liability,

00:27:34.000 | you have an even higher profit margin.

00:27:36.000 | And then if you take that tax efficiency to your own personal life and then possibly even transform it into engage where you can live in a low-cost living area

00:27:47.000 | or you can spend in a low-cost living area, then you have tremendous leverage in your personal wealth.

00:27:53.000 | People are often looking for ways to increase their efficiency in their investments as they should.

00:27:59.000 | But you can, for example, you can look at your mutual fund portfolio and you can generate a certain amount of efficiency by improving your mutual fund portfolio.

00:28:06.000 | Great. Or perhaps improving the financing terms on your real estate portfolio. Great.

00:28:10.000 | But in a business, you have the ability to generate huge amounts of efficiency on a global basis.

00:28:16.000 | And how you do it would vary depending on the business that you choose.

00:28:20.000 | But that's a tremendous opportunity.

00:28:23.000 | That freedom of location and freedom to choose the jurisdiction that you are involved with brings you so many opportunities.

00:28:31.000 | So that's one thing I really appreciate.

00:28:33.000 | Next, somewhat related but I think distinct enough for me to highlight, is the freedom of association.

00:28:39.000 | One of the things that I really deeply value about entrepreneurship is simply the freedom of association.

00:28:45.000 | The ability that I have to work with people that I want to work with and to discriminate as however I see fit.

00:28:52.000 | And when you actually gain the freedom of association and recognize that you have it, it's one of the most powerful concepts in life.

00:29:00.000 | Many people have never fully grasped their freedom of association.

00:29:06.000 | You don't get to choose the family that you're born into.

00:29:09.000 | And as a minor, you don't get to choose whether you're part of that family or not.

00:29:12.000 | Legally, barring exceptional levels of abuse, you are going to be a part of the family that you were born into.

00:29:18.000 | You didn't choose that.

00:29:20.000 | And then, however, most people then get indoctrinated into systems where there's lack of freedom of association.

00:29:25.000 | You don't generally get to choose the school that you're sent to.

00:29:28.000 | You don't get to choose the schoolmates that you have.

00:29:30.000 | You don't get to choose how those schoolmates treat you.

00:29:33.000 | And then, if they treat you poorly, you often don't get to choose how to disentangle yourself.

00:29:38.000 | Many people have had the unpleasant experience of going home and saying, "Mom, Dad, so-and-so is bullying me."

00:29:44.000 | And yet, you're not allowed to drop out.

00:29:47.000 | Unless your parents are wise enough to pull you out and homeschool you, you're pretty much stuck.

00:29:51.000 | Which has the unfortunate side effect of creating these lifelong problems in many people based upon the way that they're treated by other people.

00:29:59.000 | And this continues.

00:30:00.000 | You start to, as you get out of high school, you start to gain a little bit of freedom of association.

00:30:06.000 | You get to choose what college you go to.

00:30:08.000 | And people, usually during their college years, they start to appreciate that they have the ability to choose who they're friends with.

00:30:16.000 | But still, you're stuck in classes with people that you don't get to choose.

00:30:18.000 | You do have more freedom there.

00:30:20.000 | And then, you go into the work environment.

00:30:22.000 | And if you go into the work environment into the traditional job market, you don't get to choose who your coworkers are to any significant degree.

00:30:29.000 | But as an entrepreneur, you get to choose all of your coworkers.

00:30:32.000 | You get to choose everybody that you work with.

00:30:34.000 | You get to choose the people that you sell to, that you work with, the customers that you have.

00:30:38.000 | You can fire a customer anytime you want.

00:30:41.000 | You can hire or fire as you please.

00:30:43.000 | And that ability to choose the people that are in your life and to surround yourself with people who are a positive influence on you is one of the most powerful things that really leads to tremendous happiness.

00:30:54.000 | Imagine this.

00:30:56.000 | Back to the stories that I hear people tell as to why they're pursuing financial independence.

00:31:00.000 | Many times, people just don't like their coworkers.

00:31:03.000 | But if I say to you, "You can handpick the 5 or 10 or 50 people or however many you want.

00:31:10.000 | You can handpick the 5 or 10 or 50 people that you most enjoy spending time with.

00:31:15.000 | And you can go to an office and work with those people every day."

00:31:19.000 | That's kind of a dream come true for a lot of people.

00:31:21.000 | You say, "I get to go to work and hang out with my friends, these people that inspire me, that are fun to be with, that really enjoy the work they do."

00:31:28.000 | You can handpick and make sure that there's nobody working in your company that doesn't want to be there, that doesn't like the work that they have.

00:31:33.000 | You can choose them and make sure they're a perfect match between their personality and the job.

00:31:38.000 | You have that clean canvas that you can paint on as an entrepreneur.

00:31:42.000 | But in almost no other lifestyle do you have that freedom of association.

00:31:48.000 | And that freedom of association is really, really powerful.

00:31:52.000 | It's something I really, really, really treasure.

00:31:56.000 | And then back to the previous one.

00:31:58.000 | I use the word "discrimination" advisedly.

00:32:00.000 | I say, "You have the right to discriminate as you see fit."

00:32:03.000 | Now, unfortunately, that word "discrimination" has become a loaded term, where generally people associate that word with some behavior that they consider to be unhealthy.

00:32:12.000 | You're discriminating against somebody based upon this thing that you don't like.

00:32:17.000 | And the laws in many places are ramping up to where you're not supposed to discriminate upon this or upon that.

00:32:23.000 | Well, everybody discriminates on something.

00:32:25.000 | The key is you should be able to choose what that is.

00:32:28.000 | And it's your right to do what you want with your money and with your business.

00:32:33.000 | Now, you may have to choose a jurisdiction.

00:32:34.000 | I can't imagine in general why many people discriminate on the things that are illegal.

00:32:39.000 | But even if you wanted to, it's your right to choose a jurisdiction in which you can discriminate as you want to.

00:32:45.000 | And so that freedom of association is tremendously powerful.

00:32:48.000 | Just the ability to surround yourself with coworkers that you really want to be with.

00:32:52.000 | In addition, though, a corollary of this one that I really appreciate in terms of freedom of association is the freedom from discrimination.

00:33:02.000 | One of the things that you'll face throughout your lifetime is you'll face, at different points in your life, discrimination.

00:33:07.000 | Now, it may be based upon something you can control.

00:33:11.000 | It may be based upon something you can't control.

00:33:13.000 | People will discriminate against you based upon how you look.

00:33:16.000 | You may be able to change your wardrobe, but it's more difficult to change the length of your chin.

00:33:21.000 | People will discriminate based upon your sex, based upon your skin color, based upon your personal beliefs, your religious beliefs, your political ideology, your level of intelligence.

00:33:33.000 | People will discriminate against you based upon your age, based upon many other factors that they decide to discriminate against.

00:33:41.000 | And so one of the things that's so beneficial about being an entrepreneur is while you have the freedom to associate with those that you want to, you also have the freedom from discrimination of other people.

00:33:53.000 | One of the most concerning ones that really impacts people through the seasons of life is the ageism that you experience, both in the young age, but also at older ages.

00:34:04.000 | It becomes very difficult as people face their 50s and their 60s and their 70s.

00:34:09.000 | It becomes very difficult to do well in the traditional corporate environment.

00:34:13.000 | Often, you're looked upon, if you don't keep your skills current, often you're looked upon as somebody whose skills are declining.

00:34:20.000 | You're looked upon, usually, as being very expensive because perhaps you've been with a company for a while and your wages are high.

00:34:26.000 | And it's hard to keep a job and it's hard to stay as motivated about doing that job.

00:34:30.000 | When I consult with people who are in their 60s, they often tell me, "You know, I'm as good as I once was, but I have to work really hard to maintain my edge over my younger competition, and I don't really want to do that anymore."

00:34:42.000 | Well, as an entrepreneur, one of the things that you have that really benefits this ageism that you face is you have the ability to transform your experience into wisdom.

00:34:52.000 | And now that wisdom can be applied in smaller doses.

00:34:55.000 | You don't need to work, work, work harder, harder, harder to exercise wisdom.

00:34:58.000 | You need more judgment and more perspective, and those things come naturally with age.

00:35:02.000 | But in addition to that, you don't have to compete with anybody else.

00:35:05.000 | No one has to know how profitable your business is.

00:35:07.000 | If you're the one who does the hiring and the firing, you're just simply responsible to appeal to your customers with what your customers want.

00:35:14.000 | And generally, customers don't really care the age of the entrepreneur as long as the service or product is delivered appropriately.

00:35:21.000 | And so, it's tremendously beneficial.

00:35:24.000 | In addition, you have the ability to express your ideas and your opinions as you like.

00:35:29.000 | And one of the things that many people live in fear of is expressing their opinions, especially in the modern cancel culture of 2020.

00:35:37.000 | Many workers understand that if I say openly what I think and what I believe, I won't have a job tomorrow.

00:35:43.000 | And that's a very worrying thing because even if though you say, "Oh, it's no big deal," you know that that's always there.

00:35:49.000 | You know that if your past history of all your opinions was laid bare, then all of a sudden, you'd be canceled.

00:35:53.000 | And that's very frustrating.

00:35:54.000 | Well, as an entrepreneur, largely, you can avoid that.

00:35:57.000 | Not entirely, but largely, you can avoid that.

00:36:01.000 | And so, that freedom of association is one of those things that makes life extremely, extremely impactful.

00:36:08.000 | The next thing that I value tremendously about entrepreneurship, the fifth thing, is the freedom to focus on your personal skills and abilities, your personal genius, your personal unique ability.

00:36:22.000 | Many times, when you're fitting into another company's job, the job description was written based upon the needs of that company, not based upon your personal areas of skill.

00:36:33.000 | And is that wrong?

00:36:35.000 | No.

00:36:36.000 | Can you find better jobs?

00:36:37.000 | Of course.

00:36:38.000 | But often, as an entrepreneur, you can focus in exclusively on the handful of activities that you are really, really good at.

00:36:48.000 | There is often a learning curve on this.

00:36:50.000 | It does often take time.

00:36:51.000 | It takes investment.

00:36:52.000 | But you can largely outsource and hire somebody to do all the things that you are not good at and that you don't enjoy doing.

00:36:58.000 | And you can focus exclusively on doing the things that you are good at and that you do enjoy doing.

00:37:05.000 | And when you're working in those areas, work is not a problem.

00:37:09.000 | It's a real skill.

00:37:10.000 | It's a joy.

00:37:12.000 | Right now, what I'm doing in this context at the moment is something that I love to do.

00:37:17.000 | I love to do it.

00:37:18.000 | Because it's something where I feel I'm uniquely skilled at and I want to get better at.

00:37:22.000 | It's a unique ability for me to share something, an idea that I think is so powerful.

00:37:28.000 | And I see the impact of this idea.

00:37:29.000 | I see the ability for it to transform lives.

00:37:31.000 | And I think this is fun.

00:37:32.000 | And I enjoy the process of thinking, "How do I articulate this more effectively?"

00:37:37.000 | It doesn't feel like work in the sense that I have to do this.

00:37:41.000 | It feels like something that I love to do.

00:37:44.000 | Well, the nice thing is that I, as an entrepreneur, I can take this skill and I can major on that basic skill and build a business around it.

00:37:54.000 | Now, there's a process of growth.

00:37:56.000 | Very hard in the early years to just figure out how to not do anything else.

00:38:01.000 | But if you continue to focus on it as an entrepreneur and you continue to hire people who are very good at the things that you're not good at

00:38:06.000 | and surround yourself with a quality team that supports you, you can spend all of your time working in your area of personal unique ability.

00:38:15.000 | And that is powerful.

00:38:17.000 | It's a tremendous freedom.

00:38:19.000 | Because when you focus on the thing that you do better at than anyone else, you get better and better at it.

00:38:23.000 | And that sets you apart more and more in the world.

00:38:27.000 | So the freedom to focus on your personal genius, your personal unique ability, is so tremendous.

00:38:34.000 | And it completely transforms your work life.

00:38:37.000 | Now, thus far, I've not talked about money.

00:38:40.000 | But I want to paint a picture for you with these first five points that I have made.

00:38:45.000 | If you have total freedom over your day, the ability to work when you want, during the hours that you want to work,

00:38:53.000 | the days of the week that you want to work, the weeks and months of the year that you want to work,

00:38:57.000 | when you have the ability to adjust those days, weeks, hours and months based upon what's actually happening in your life with your children, with your aging parents, etc.

00:39:07.000 | When you have the ability to choose anywhere in the world that you want to work.

00:39:11.000 | If you want to have an office in Maui, you have an office in Maui.

00:39:13.000 | If you want to have an office in Hong Kong, you have an office in Hong Kong.

00:39:16.000 | When you have the ability to leave the places that strangle you and that stifle you and that overwhelm you with all kinds of unjust and crazy laws that restrict you

00:39:26.000 | and go to places that you really want to be.

00:39:28.000 | When you have the freedom to fill your office or lack of office, non-office, whatever you call it,

00:39:33.000 | when you have the freedom to fill your office with people that you genuinely want to be around,

00:39:38.000 | people that you genuinely enjoy, people that have viewpoints and skills that complement yours,

00:39:44.000 | where you're all better for being together and you can choose the work that you're doing with those people.

00:39:50.000 | And when you have the freedom to spend your time working in your specific area of real genius,

00:39:55.000 | that thing that doesn't even really feel that difficult for you, but that you really love to do.

00:40:00.000 | Does that not sound like the recipe for a high quality life?

00:40:06.000 | Does that not sound like the kind of thing that you would probably want to do if you were a multimillionaire?

00:40:13.000 | To me, it does.

00:40:14.000 | To me, that's a dream life.

00:40:16.000 | But notice that I've said nothing thus far about money.

00:40:20.000 | And the reason I've said nothing thus far about money is as long as you're making enough money to support yourself,

00:40:26.000 | the money probably doesn't matter.

00:40:29.000 | Because that's the job or the lifestyle or the business that you probably don't want to retire from.

00:40:34.000 | And so you need enough money to support yourself at an adequate level, but you don't need to make millions.

00:40:40.000 | And I say that because so many people often think that I either have to have this job or I have to go and make millions.

00:40:48.000 | There are many businesses that will pay you a living and do so in a really fascinating way.

00:40:54.000 | And that can be enough.

00:40:56.000 | It can be enough.

00:40:58.000 | But it doesn't have to be all.

00:41:01.000 | The sixth thing that I deeply value about entrepreneurship is the opportunity for massive profits.

00:41:09.000 | The first thing I would argue is there is no bigger numeric opportunity for massive profits than to be an entrepreneur.

00:41:18.000 | There was a headline from last week.

00:41:20.000 | Jeff Bezos is $12.8 billion richer after Amazon delivers strong holiday sales.

00:41:26.000 | Basically, the stock price went up by 12% in one day because of an excellent earnings report.

00:41:33.000 | And that added almost $13 billion to Jeff Bezos' personal fortune.

00:41:38.000 | The numbers of that are obviously stunning, but there's nowhere else in the world that you have the opportunity to make such massive increases.

00:41:45.000 | Now, clearly, that's an anomaly.

00:41:48.000 | But it's not an anomaly in principle, only in the actual size.

00:41:54.000 | Most business owners have the ability to increase their profits massively with a few key decisions.

00:42:01.000 | And when you have that ability, you recognize how you can do it in fairly quick order, and you recognize how there's almost nothing that surpasses it.

00:42:14.000 | Here I want to tell you a story about my experience as a financial planner.

00:42:19.000 | I've gone through two phases in my life as a financial planner.

00:42:23.000 | In the first phase of my life as a financial planner, I was a mainstream financial advisor, largely selling financial products, insurance policies, and investment products in different formats.

00:42:37.000 | At the time, I wanted to work with entrepreneurs because I've always enjoyed the subject of entrepreneurship.

00:42:43.000 | And I pursued entrepreneurs because entrepreneurs can make a lot of money.

00:42:46.000 | But what I found in the world of working as a product representative, a product salesman, that there were only limited amounts of business that I could do with an entrepreneur.

00:42:57.000 | Usually, there'd be some basic insurance policies.

00:43:00.000 | The entrepreneur would buy some insurance.

00:43:02.000 | And the nice thing about it was a good market to be in because entrepreneurs had more complex agreements and more complex needs.

00:43:09.000 | And so, yes, you could do some life insurance for a husband and for a wife and some life insurance for children.

00:43:15.000 | Yes, you could possibly do some disability income insurance.

00:43:18.000 | Yes, you could come in and do some investment products.

00:43:21.000 | But entrepreneurs did have interesting things.

00:43:23.000 | You might have a buy-sell agreement that you'd fund with life insurance, disability insurance.

00:43:26.000 | You might set up a retirement program.

00:43:28.000 | There were a lot more things that I could work with with an entrepreneur.

00:43:30.000 | But I was always facing this problem where they would look at the value of my financial products.

00:43:36.000 | And they would say, "Yeah, but I got a lot more profit potential over here in my business."

00:43:40.000 | And so I might say, "Listen, Mr. Entrepreneur, give me a million dollars and we'll manage it and we'll charge you, you know, X number of--X percent of the portfolio and we'll deliver 8 percent rate of return."

00:43:49.000 | And they'd say, "Yeah, but I can make over here 48 percent rate of return or 148 percent rate of return."

00:43:54.000 | They just often weren't that excited about it.

00:43:56.000 | Now, I believe that entrepreneurs shouldn't have everything in their business.

00:43:59.000 | That's a tremendous risk.

00:44:00.000 | I think there's still real value in investing in something like a mutual fund or other investments.

00:44:05.000 | But their interest was always dwarfed by their ability to make more money in their business.

00:44:11.000 | That was phase number one where I liked working with entrepreneurs because there were a lot of individual pieces of business that they might need and I could place more business with them than a lot of people.

00:44:21.000 | But there wasn't a lot that I could do on the investment side of things.

00:44:26.000 | Well, fast forward.

00:44:27.000 | The last few years, I've done a little bit of private coaching where I have a handful of ongoing private coaching clients that I work with on a weekly basis.

00:44:34.000 | I don't really advertise it because I figure if somebody has to ask me how much it is, they're probably not a good fit.

00:44:40.000 | It's a very high-priced service, et cetera.

00:44:42.000 | But I do it on an ongoing basis.

00:44:44.000 | And one of the things I quickly learned is that, in essence, I should only do it with entrepreneurs.

00:44:50.000 | The reason was if working with an individual, in a couple of hours of work, you can usually square away just about everything that needs to be squared away with somebody who has a job.

00:45:00.000 | And then your options are fairly limited.

00:45:03.000 | What you need is simply time for the plan to work.

00:45:05.000 | A few hours of consulting, though, for somebody with a job, about all you could do.

00:45:09.000 | But with an entrepreneur, the options were endless.

00:45:12.000 | And so entrepreneurs went from being difficult for me as a mainstream financial advisor who was selling products to being the world's greatest clients for me as a financial advisor who sells no products.

00:45:23.000 | Because now we have an infinite canvas upon which to work.

00:45:28.000 | And there's always something that can do when you start looking at the levers of business.

00:45:32.000 | And since I don't care about selling products anymore, it's just a world wide open.

00:45:37.000 | And I have the ability, in order to justify my fees, I have the ability to make huge transformations in an entrepreneur's life, to add hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of revenue to their business.

00:45:47.000 | In which case, my fees seem paltry by comparison.

00:45:50.000 | So you go and work with an individual who has a job and only modest opportunities to increase their income, and the fees seem significant.

00:45:58.000 | Whereas you have the opportunity to make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of change in a person's life, and the fees seem totally paltry.

00:46:06.000 | And that, to me, is one of the great things, the great lessons that I've really just seen in my own life.

00:46:12.000 | That if you want to have the opportunity for massive profits, and you want to have the opportunity for quick wealth, entrepreneurship is really your only solution.

00:46:24.000 | That's where you make the most money, potentially, the fastest, potentially.

00:46:30.000 | And to me, that's tremendously valuable.

00:46:33.000 | So I appreciate the opportunity for massive profits as an entrepreneur.

00:46:37.000 | Because when you have the opportunity to make massive profits, it's exciting.

00:46:42.000 | Yeah, make an extra 5% on your income, it's not going to change your life all that much.

00:46:47.000 | But 5x or 10x your income, that's life changing.

00:46:51.000 | It's exciting, and that keeps you in the game, it keeps you engaged in the thrill of it.

00:46:57.000 | Keeps life fun, keeps business fun.

00:47:01.000 | Next, I appreciate that as an entrepreneur, impact and money are not in conflict.

00:47:11.000 | Impact and money are not in conflict.

00:47:15.000 | If you look at your life and you say that my money, my ability to earn money, is going to have a damaging impact on the world.

00:47:24.000 | It's going to do harm and destruction in the world.

00:47:26.000 | Stop.

00:47:28.000 | Whatever you're doing, stop.

00:47:30.000 | Because no amount of money is worth your doing damage to other people's lives, to other people's fortune, to the world.

00:47:41.000 | Stop doing that and go and engage in something that's going to be a positive contributor to the world.

00:47:47.000 | That's going to make a positive impact in the world.

00:47:50.000 | Now this doesn't have to be so high-minded.

00:47:53.000 | You don't have to be the guy who's developing a machine to rid the world's oceans of plastics.

00:47:59.000 | Although that's a fine entrepreneurial idea if you want to pursue it.

00:48:02.000 | There is certainly a need for people to develop machines to rid the world of plastics.

00:48:08.000 | But you don't have to do that.

00:48:10.000 | You can just simply do work well and work that matters.

00:48:12.000 | Let's say that you sell real estate.

00:48:14.000 | You can go and you can sell real estate and do it in a way that your clients are thrilled.

00:48:18.000 | And as an entrepreneur you have that ability, back to that ability to discriminate and freedom of association.

00:48:23.000 | You can work with the people that you get excited about working with that really value your work.

00:48:26.000 | You can choose who your clients are.

00:48:28.000 | You can choose the area of business that you work in so that you can make sure that you're excited about it.

00:48:32.000 | And because you're excited about it and you can deliver good work, you know that they're going to be excited about it.

00:48:37.000 | But as an entrepreneur you have the ability to create a business where the more positive impact you have, the more money you make.

00:48:46.000 | And the more money you make, the more positive impact you have.

00:48:50.000 | And the more positive impact you have, the more money you make.

00:48:53.000 | The more money you make, the more positive impact you have.

00:48:56.000 | And it's just a virtuous cycle that goes on and on and on.

00:48:59.000 | And so now you don't have this sense of, "Wow, my work is just damaging to people."

00:49:03.000 | Rather, you can just simply pursue it with gusto, knowing that your ideas are perfectly aligned.

00:49:09.000 | That's powerful.

00:49:11.000 | You don't have to.

00:49:12.000 | That doesn't only have to be done in entrepreneurship.

00:49:15.000 | It can be done in a job.

00:49:16.000 | But entrepreneurship provides you an opportunity to do that.

00:49:19.000 | And the reason why this is so core is that as an entrepreneur you have to go out and deliver something that people want.

00:49:28.000 | And you have to do it in a non-coercive way.

00:49:31.000 | So an entrepreneur, an entrepreneurship is actually the most noble and the highest calling in the work environment.

00:49:40.000 | Because you have to create something that people want in a voluntary transaction where they're willing to bring you their money and say,

00:49:48.000 | "Please, take my money because I want your product.

00:49:51.000 | Please, take my money because I want your service."

00:49:54.000 | And that is the purest, best form of free association, of voluntary relationships, of liberty, of non-coercion.

00:50:04.000 | It's the freest and best form.

00:50:06.000 | Now, don't get involved in areas where it's corrupted.

00:50:08.000 | Don't get involved with government contracts and those things because then you do have that problem.

00:50:12.000 | You do have that area where you're thinking, "Man, what I'm doing is kind of questionable.

00:50:17.000 | I'm not so sure if it's really doing good in the world."

00:50:19.000 | Go and choose something where you have the opportunity to work with people freely, where your impact and your money are not in conflict.

00:50:28.000 | Then you know that when somebody gives you their money and they walk away happy, you're not only richer, but you're better for it.

00:50:39.000 | To me, I think that's so valuable.

00:50:42.000 | The next thing I value deeply about entrepreneurship, number, I think this is eight.

00:50:48.000 | Is the freedom to pursue what interests you.

00:50:52.000 | Freedom to pursue what interests you.

00:50:55.000 | Now, for me, this is important because I have a lot of interests.

00:50:59.000 | And I found that one of the things that bored me to tears about my previous job structure was a mainstream financial advisor.

00:51:06.000 | I couldn't see how to pursue all the things that interested me in the context of work.

00:51:11.000 | I was interested in mainstream financial planning for a time, but then I mastered the subject and I was ready to move on.

00:51:16.000 | But I couldn't move on because my business was built upon mainstream financial planning.

00:51:20.000 | Which is why when I designed Radical Personal Finance, I designed it as something that where I could adjust to my interests.

00:51:27.000 | Everything in this series that you've heard are topics that are interesting to me.

00:51:32.000 | And so because they're interesting to me, I can adjust it.

00:51:35.000 | And I see the value of them.

00:51:37.000 | You judge the value for yourself.

00:51:39.000 | But I see the value and they keep me engaged in the show.

00:51:42.000 | If I were doing another show on Life Insurance 101, I don't have the interest anymore.

00:51:48.000 | But I do have the interest in these ideas that can transform lives and transform families and transform communities.

00:51:54.000 | And so that freedom to pursue what interests you allows you to stay engaged in it.

00:51:58.000 | In any business, as the entrepreneur, the leader in that business, you have the ability to change the focus of the business based upon where you want to go.

00:52:06.000 | And you can do this over time.

00:52:08.000 | And if you don't have to be responsible to anybody else who says you have to keep in this line of business because we've got to squeeze the last maximum drop of profit out of it, you can adjust your business over time.

00:52:18.000 | Now you can do this within one industry.

00:52:20.000 | You can expand across an industry.

00:52:22.000 | You can expand to different industries.

00:52:24.000 | You can do all different things.

00:52:26.000 | But this ability that you have to pursue what interests you allows you to stay engaged in life and in business.

00:52:33.000 | And I think that this is one of the most important things to do to keep people from retiring.

00:52:37.000 | Let's say that you are an architect and you cut your teeth designing style A of buildings.

00:52:43.000 | But you work for somebody and this firm becomes known as creating this style of building.

00:52:48.000 | And they want you to keep doing that style of building again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.

00:52:53.000 | Well, over time you're going to get tired of it.

00:52:55.000 | And then you're going to go and want to retire just so you can go do something else.

00:52:58.000 | But if you're the head of the architecture firm and you can adjust on the periphery and you can say we're going to do that style of building, yes, because that's our bread and butter.

00:53:04.000 | And we really value that and I enjoy that because that's what I started off in the first place.

00:53:08.000 | But I'm also going to create this over here and that over there and adjust this over here and add this activity over there.

00:53:14.000 | Then it creates opportunities for you and it allows you to grow and to adjust and to change and to stay engaged with the work.

00:53:22.000 | That freedom to pursue what interests you is so valuable.

00:53:28.000 | Number nine, one thing I appreciate about entrepreneurship is the freedom to pursue multiple opportunities simultaneously.

00:53:38.000 | You probably have things in your life that you're interested in, but there's no natural connection of them one to another.

00:53:46.000 | I have many things that I'm interested in that are not at all connected to radical personal finance.

00:53:51.000 | But the cool thing about entrepreneurship is if you're thoughtful about how you design your life and your business, you can pursue and work in multiple things simultaneously.

00:54:01.000 | You can have multiple businesses and those businesses don't have to have anything to do with each other.

00:54:06.000 | And in fact, I'm convinced that that's actually one of the most profitable and joyful ways to build a life and a lifestyle.

00:54:14.000 | If I needed to support my family, I would go back and take a job.

00:54:19.000 | But before I would do that, unless I were totally out of money, and if I had to go back and do that, then I would as quickly as possible go and try to figure out how to save money so I could start businesses.

00:54:30.000 | But I could put together half a dozen different businesses, each in and of themselves, each one of which would not support me.

00:54:37.000 | But cumulatively, they would support me and would allow me to be engaged in all kinds of interesting different areas.

00:54:43.000 | And this also helps to solve some of the problems that people have with work.

00:54:48.000 | If you think about many of the historic forms of work, something such as agriculture, it's not just one activity all the day, all along.

00:54:56.000 | It's a lot of different activities that complement one another, providing for the needs of your family in all different ways.

00:55:03.000 | If you go back to, let's just say, a classic 1800s farmer, 1700s farmer in the United States of America, well, that farmer wasn't just doing one thing, sitting in a tractor all day.

00:55:13.000 | The farmer was planting. The farmer was plowing. The farmer was harvesting. The farmer was pruning.

00:55:19.000 | But the farmer was also cutting wood and building a house and building a barn and caring for animals and going hunting and going fishing and going foraging and going making, you know, brewing beer and making apple cider and making pies for sale.

00:55:33.000 | And you could go on and on and on. And that keeps those, that diversity of activities keeps life largely interesting.

00:55:40.000 | Now, what happened was the, and I'm not arguing to go back to that, it was a hard life. Give me a chance to switch with somebody in the 1700s and I wouldn't go back a single time.

00:55:51.000 | I would stay in 2020. But speaking broadly, what happened then is you had the Industrial Revolution and the factory system.

00:55:59.000 | Now, translate or compare the life of a farmer who experienced the seasons, who experienced the sunlight and the moonlight, who experienced the mornings and the night, who experienced the animals and the smells of the seasons and just a tremendous diversity of life.

00:56:14.000 | Compare that to a factory worker, somebody who had to be at the factory at 7 a.m. and work till 6 p.m. every single day.

00:56:21.000 | And they had to do that whether it was cold, whether it was hot. And every single day, their environment looks exactly the same.

00:56:27.000 | There's a light over their workstation. The work that they do is the same.

00:56:30.000 | Well, in the modern, much more office-centered work, many of us work in factory systems.

00:56:36.000 | And it's hard to stay engaged in that kind of life and lifestyle.

00:56:40.000 | And because of that, it makes life very boring. And a lot of people say, "I can't wait to get out of here."

00:56:44.000 | But it doesn't have to be that way. If you are an entrepreneur, you have the ability to pursue multiple opportunities.

00:56:51.000 | And so you might have one expression of your life that is a little bit mundane.

00:56:55.000 | But when you only do that 10 hours a week and you have this whole other set of things that you do, you have a lot more interest in your life.

00:57:03.000 | Maybe you create a business as a seasonal tax preparer and you simultaneously work to think of the seasons to work out.

00:57:11.000 | I think they would work out pretty much. Yeah.

00:57:13.000 | You simultaneously work as a seasonal wildland firefighter.

00:57:17.000 | Well, these are two radically different jobs. And if all you did all day long, every single month of the year, was push around spreadsheets, that's a little bit frustrating.

00:57:27.000 | But when you bring two different entrepreneurial activities or two different jobs together, you have the ability to pursue multiple things simultaneously.

00:57:36.000 | If you also have a real estate license, you sell a little bit of real estate here and there, and then you have a part-time handyman business where you take some high-profit activities from that,

00:57:45.000 | you could put together a few of these things that make life interesting and pick whatever version of that is appropriate to you.

00:57:52.000 | That freedom to pursue multiple opportunities simultaneously, I think, allows you to keep some of the joy in life and not to be in that dreadful factory system where you got to get out as soon as you can.

00:58:05.000 | Thing number 10 that I appreciate about entrepreneurship and how I believe it gives me tremendous freedom.

00:58:12.000 | Thing number 10 is entrepreneurship gives me the ability to reinvent my life incrementally.

00:58:22.000 | To reinvent my life incrementally.

00:58:25.000 | If every year I change 10% of my activities, a decade from now, I will be living a completely different life.

00:58:38.000 | If this year you change 10% of your activities, a decade from now, you will be living a completely different life.

00:58:50.000 | You don't have to be an entrepreneur in order to do this.

00:58:55.000 | But I think you can do it more easily with entrepreneurship.

00:58:59.000 | It's difficult to change from one business that's working to a brand new business.

00:59:05.000 | But the changes at the margin can very quickly move you into a totally different life and lifestyle.

00:59:11.000 | And that means that you can always make your future bigger than the past and do so by design.

00:59:17.000 | As an entrepreneur, I feel this sense of unlimited potential.

00:59:22.000 | I look at the world and I recognize that I can change from what I'm doing into anything else that I want to.

00:59:27.000 | Anything else that sounds great.

00:59:29.000 | Anything else that seems like something worth doing.

00:59:31.000 | And I've chosen a business design, a core business design that gives me flexibility.

00:59:35.000 | Now I have other business things that I do, but a core business design like radical personal finance gives me flexibility.

00:59:40.000 | I chose that title because I wanted a basic structure under which I could have a wide degree of things that I would talk about and engage in.

00:59:48.000 | But the same thing can apply to my life.

00:59:50.000 | There's so many things that you can do off of a core business.

00:59:54.000 | And so if you every year look at your life and you say, "What 10% of things do I want to stop doing so that I can replace them with things that I more enjoy doing?"

01:00:03.000 | You can iterate your life.

01:00:06.000 | You can, over time, in an iterative manner, completely transform what you're doing.

01:00:11.000 | And so there never has to be a boring year.

01:00:15.000 | I shudder at the thought of, my apologies if you work in a factory, but I shudder at the thought of not being able to differentiate between my 20s and my 30s and my 40s and my 50s in terms of the work that I did.

01:00:31.000 | I don't care how good the pension and the gold watch is on the other side of it.

01:00:34.000 | I even shudder at the thought of doing something in the same way over the decades.

01:00:41.000 | But if your 20s can have one major area of focus, but your 30s look totally different and your 40s look totally different and your 50s look totally different, all the while being things that you're choosing, you're not reacting and being subject to the market forces.

01:00:59.000 | You're looking at the market and you're moving into new areas that excite you.

01:01:03.000 | Then what happens is in your 50s you can look forward to your 60s being totally different and your 70s being totally different, your 80s being totally different, your 90s being totally different.

01:01:12.000 | Why would you ever want to quit a lifestyle like I've described, where you do the things that you want to do, when you want to do them, with the people that you want to do them, and you're doing things that you're uniquely well suited to, and you generate huge amounts of money.

01:01:25.000 | And you know that your meaning and your impact is not against the money, but rather the more money you make, the better your impact.

01:01:32.000 | And you can do many things all at once and you can move your business in any direction.

01:01:36.000 | Now you have the ability to create a life that you don't want to quit, because you can always make your future bigger than your past.

01:01:43.000 | And you can do it by design.

01:01:46.000 | That to me is the thing that out of this entire list, I value more than anything.

01:01:53.000 | I could give up many things on this list.

01:01:56.000 | Yes, I value freedom of schedule, but on the other hand, my schedule looks pretty typical.

01:02:02.000 | I value seasonality, but the reality is I work through most seasons.

01:02:06.000 | I value freedom of location and jurisdiction, but I'm pretty easygoing and I could do well in just about any location and jurisdiction.

01:02:14.000 | I value freedom of association, but I also value diversity of association, and so I try to hang out with people that challenge me, because it gives me an opportunity for growth.

01:02:24.000 | I value the ability to work on my personal genius and my area of real unique ability, but sometimes I get bored with that and I want to do other things.

01:02:34.000 | Yes, I like money and I like profits, but at the end of the day, it's not the only thing.

01:02:38.000 | It's just one nice thing.

01:02:40.000 | The thing I really value is the ability to change my life incrementally.

01:02:47.000 | To me, that's powerful.

01:02:51.000 | That's something that is a lot harder to do in a job environment than in an entrepreneurship environment.

01:02:59.000 | Those are my 10 things, with number 10 being the most important.

01:03:03.000 | Bonus point, however, bonus point that I think is also very significant, number 11.

01:03:08.000 | One of the things I value most about entrepreneurship is the opportunity for personal growth, because when you're an entrepreneur, you have to face yourself every day.

01:03:20.000 | And you have to face the fact that all of your excuses fly out the window.

01:03:24.000 | No one is stopping you, but you.

01:03:28.000 | The starting point of personal growth is to take complete and total responsibility for your life.

01:03:38.000 | That's the well-agreed upon starting point for personal growth, is to take complete and total responsibility for your life.

01:03:45.000 | To take responsibility for where you are, for who you are, for what you are, and to recognize if it's to be, it's up to me.

01:03:54.000 | Now, is that actually true?

01:03:55.000 | Are you only responsible for your life?

01:03:57.000 | Of course not.

01:03:58.000 | No, it's not actually true.

01:04:00.000 | You can't say where you were born.

01:04:02.000 | You can't say when you were born.

01:04:04.000 | You can't take responsibility for all those things that happened to you.

01:04:07.000 | So obviously, it's not actually true.

01:04:10.000 | You could blame lots of people.

01:04:12.000 | But blaming other people is totally useless.

01:04:15.000 | And thus, even if it's true, it doesn't help you.

01:04:18.000 | Whereas when you take total responsibility for where you are and who you are and what you are, you take ownership of your life.

01:04:23.000 | And that gives you the tools and the abilities to start pressing forward and making change.

01:04:29.000 | And yet, it's so easy to constantly blame other people.

01:04:34.000 | "No, we can't move to Maui because, well, I can't find a job."

01:04:43.000 | "No, we can't go to Spain because my company doesn't have any locations in Spain."

01:04:52.000 | Or, "No, I can't afford your college education because I just don't make enough money."

01:04:58.000 | And entrepreneurship takes all those things away.

01:05:01.000 | Because the reality is in every one of those situations, you can't say, "I can't" anymore.

01:05:06.000 | You can only say, "I'm choosing not to."

01:05:09.000 | "I'm choosing not to pay for your college education because it's not important enough for me to work enough to build a bigger business to make the money to pay for your college education."

01:05:16.000 | That's the truth.

01:05:18.000 | And that's the truth for both the employee and the entrepreneur.

01:05:21.000 | But the employee has an easier time hiding from that truth.

01:05:25.000 | Whereas the entrepreneur, by recognizing the reality of life, has a harder time hiding from it.

01:05:33.000 | "No, we're not moving to Maui because I'm not willing to do the work to get a job there or to retrain in something that they want."

01:05:41.000 | Well, that's the truth.

01:05:43.000 | And it's true for employee and entrepreneur.

01:05:45.000 | But the entrepreneur sees the world in a different way than the employee does often.

01:05:51.000 | So you don't have to become an entrepreneur in order to engage in personal growth.

01:05:56.000 | You can today, right now, take complete and total responsibility for your life.

01:06:01.000 | You can take ownership of everything in your life.

01:06:05.000 | But as an entrepreneur, because you recognize the day-to-day impact of your decisions in perhaps a more direct way than an employee,

01:06:13.000 | it's a lot harder to hide from that truth as an entrepreneur than as an individual.

01:06:19.000 | And so when I compare this aspect of personal growth and I look at then those things that I really appreciate,

01:06:25.000 | the ability to reinvent my life incrementally, the ability to pursue the things that I'm really interested in,

01:06:31.000 | I often recognize that the only thing standing in the way between me and my dreams is my personal growth.

01:06:39.000 | And although sobering, it's also empowering.

01:06:43.000 | Because personal growth is exciting.

01:06:46.000 | And there's no limit to it.

01:06:49.000 | Change is exciting.

01:06:50.000 | And there's no limit to it.

01:06:53.000 | And as an entrepreneur, since you control all of those daily decisions, all those weekly decisions,

01:07:00.000 | you control where the money goes, where the money is spent, the opportunities that are pursued,

01:07:04.000 | the ones that aren't pursued, you can never hide from that.

01:07:06.000 | But you can know, if I'll grow and become a more competent person, a better entrepreneur, a better marketer,

01:07:13.000 | if I'll become better at this key skill, a better manager, whatever it is, if I'll grow,

01:07:19.000 | then I can have these results that I want.

01:07:21.000 | And that leaves that sense of boundless opportunity in life in a really powerful way.

01:07:28.000 | That's what I've learned.

01:07:30.000 | I don't consider myself a natural entrepreneur.

01:07:32.000 | I don't consider myself a born entrepreneur.

01:07:34.000 | I don't buy that stuff.

01:07:36.000 | You know, I've never looked at one of my children and said, "There's a born doctor," or, "There's a born salesman."

01:07:41.000 | It's silly.

01:07:42.000 | You simply pursue different things because you want them.

01:07:46.000 | But as I've pursued entrepreneurship for the freedom that I thought it would offer me,

01:07:50.000 | these are the things that I've come to appreciate about it.

01:07:53.000 | I repeat, you don't have to become an entrepreneur to enjoy many of these things.

01:07:58.000 | You can get a lot of them with changing jobs.

01:08:00.000 | But entrepreneurship is certainly a direct path that includes a lot of these things, includes a lot of freedom.

01:08:07.000 | Let me give you some practical advice here to help you to achieve this change if you desire to pursue entrepreneurship.

01:08:15.000 | The first point I'd like to make is you can pursue entrepreneurship with a simple decision.

01:08:22.000 | When you decide to pursue entrepreneurship, you'll start to see the world differently.

01:08:27.000 | So if anything that I've said has been persuasive to you or you've decided that you want to change something, then go for it.

01:08:32.000 | A simple decision is where it starts.

01:08:36.000 | When you go to work every day, you're going to work because you're choosing to go to work instead of choosing to run a business.

01:08:42.000 | So take responsibility even for that decision.

01:08:46.000 | When you come home at night and watch YouTube or Netflix or whatever you do,

01:08:50.000 | you're choosing to do that instead of writing words and publishing them on the Internet

01:08:55.000 | or instead of cultivating mango trees and selling them out of your front driveway

01:09:00.000 | or instead of buying a pressure washer and going and getting a job doing pressure washing.

01:09:05.000 | So these are decisions.

01:09:09.000 | Think carefully about your decisions because I think that most entrepreneurs...

01:09:18.000 | I can't prove this is just my sense.

01:09:21.000 | Most entrepreneurs, if they like being entrepreneurs, then in many ways they don't really care where they start

01:09:26.000 | because they recognize that they can change.

01:09:29.000 | You can start with a pressure washing business, morph that into a landscaping business

01:09:33.000 | and morph that into a real estate business, real estate management business,

01:09:37.000 | and then morph that into selling courses on real estate management.

01:09:40.000 | That's the freedom of entrepreneurship is you can change those things over time.

01:09:44.000 | So the key thing is that decision.

01:09:46.000 | Now sometimes that decision is forced upon you.

01:09:48.000 | Can't find a job, got to do something.

01:09:50.000 | Sometimes it's just an intentional decision.

01:09:52.000 | I want a lifestyle of freedom.

01:09:54.000 | For me, I wanted the ability to have control over my daily schedule.

01:09:59.000 | Back in 2008 when I became an entrepreneur, that was the key for me.

01:10:03.000 | I wanted freedom over my daily schedule.

01:10:05.000 | I wanted freedom over movement.

01:10:07.000 | I didn't want to be stuck in an office every day.

01:10:09.000 | I used to escape from the office, go to the bookstore and read books every day

01:10:12.000 | because I was miserable with being in the office every day.

01:10:14.000 | I just wanted control over my day.

01:10:17.000 | Since 2008, when I became a financial advisor for the first time, since 2008,

01:10:22.000 | for the first more than 10 years, I've never been accountable to anybody for my daily schedule.

01:10:32.000 | Now that has come with late nights.

01:10:34.000 | That has come with early mornings.

01:10:37.000 | But that's something I've always valued.

01:10:40.000 | I've not asked anybody for vacation since 2008.

01:10:44.000 | I've not gone to somebody and said, "Can I take some time off?"

01:10:47.000 | And I've taken months off at a time.

01:10:51.000 | I value that.

01:10:54.000 | It's not perfect.

01:10:55.000 | I'm trying to be very realistic.

01:10:56.000 | It's not perfect.

01:10:57.000 | There are times when I'm on vacation and I know that emails from unhappy people are piling up

01:11:02.000 | or I know that I'm not doing something in a way that I could do it,

01:11:05.000 | but at least it's my choice and I know that I can fix those things in time.

01:11:10.000 | And so it was largely a decision to pursue a different path.

01:11:15.000 | So when you make that decision, you'll start to see opportunities.

01:11:18.000 | Number two, you don't necessarily have to quit your job to enjoy some of these benefits of entrepreneurship.

01:11:24.000 | There's a phrase that's often used called "intrapreneur" or "intrapreneurship,"

01:11:30.000 | and the way I define that is simply thinking like an entrepreneur even if you're not technically a business owner.

01:11:36.000 | In your company, taking ownership of the company and pretending it's your company

01:11:40.000 | and thinking like an entrepreneur is what intrapreneurship is,

01:11:45.000 | working like an entrepreneur inside the company.

01:11:47.000 | And I think that if you will do that, what will happen is you'll quickly start to move up in the company.

01:11:52.000 | And many of the things that I've talked about above can be achieved by simply being at the management level of a company.

01:12:02.000 | If you're at the management level in a company, you have the ability to enjoy more freedom.

01:12:06.000 | You have the ability to enjoy freedom of schedule.

01:12:09.000 | CEO is often not quizzed about why he's coming in at 10.30 in the morning.

01:12:14.000 | And the reason is because the CEO takes ownership of the company.

01:12:17.000 | Sometimes he's coming in at 10.30 in the morning because he's been at meetings, important meetings since 7 a.m.

01:12:21.000 | Sometimes coming in at 10.30 in the morning because he's been on the golf course since 7 a.m.

01:12:25.000 | Sometimes having important meetings, sometimes not.

01:12:27.000 | Sometimes coming in at 10.30 in the morning because he's been at breakfast with his grandkids since 7 a.m.

01:12:33.000 | But nobody really bothers the CEO all that much about why they're coming in at 10.30 in the morning.

01:12:39.000 | And so similar things happen with freedom of location.

01:12:42.000 | As you rise in a company, then the office environment becomes much less important.

01:12:46.000 | The number of people that you have to report to about your whereabouts and your whenabouts is much smaller.

01:12:52.000 | If you rise in the management of a company, you often have more personal freedom to do the job where it wants

01:12:57.000 | or you have the ability to influence where the company winds up going.

01:13:01.000 | And as you rise into management and to higher levels in a company,

01:13:05.000 | you have the ability to pursue the things that you're good at, to possibly move the direction of the company, et cetera.

01:13:11.000 | And so in many ways, you could go back through all of my 10 points, even all my 11 points,

01:13:15.000 | and say, "Well, this could be achieved if I just simply moved into a more managerial position."

01:13:19.000 | And it's true. It can be.

01:13:21.000 | Because, and the reason is, as you grow into a managerial position,

01:13:24.000 | you become more responsible for results than you are for appearances.

01:13:31.000 | As an entrepreneur, all you care about is results.

01:13:33.000 | You don't care about appearances.

01:13:35.000 | The best, the most listened to show on Radical Personal Finance,

01:13:39.000 | I'll actually tell you what it is.

01:13:41.000 | Years ago, I recorded a show called "How to Arrest Proof Yourself" from the police.

01:13:48.000 | And it was basically about how to arrest proof yourself and your children from the police.

01:13:53.000 | To this day, that is the most listened to show on Radical Personal Finance.

01:13:57.000 | It's had, I can't remember, but 100,000 people have listened to that show, something like that.

01:14:03.000 | But that show was not created with a long period of preparation.

01:14:08.000 | If memory is correct, I was having that show in the time,

01:14:11.000 | I did that show in the context of when my wife and I were having a baby.

01:14:15.000 | I can't remember if the baby was already there or something,

01:14:17.000 | but it had been a couple of weeks since I'd recorded,

01:14:19.000 | or a little bit while since I'd recorded a show.

01:14:21.000 | And I had to get something out in the show, but I was busy with a new baby.

01:14:25.000 | And I sat down, and I had read the book that I quoted from recently.

01:14:29.000 | I really was impressed with the book. I'd been thinking about it.

01:14:32.000 | I had no outline. I just had the book in front of me.

01:14:34.000 | I sat down, I hit record, and I just simply spoke.

01:14:36.000 | I think it was a two-hour show.

01:14:38.000 | To this day, that's the most popular show on Radical Personal Finance.

01:14:42.000 | And I say that just simply to say that the thing that's been amazing to me over the years

01:14:47.000 | is often the shows that I put the most work into

01:14:50.000 | are the shows that aren't very successful in terms of the number of people that listen to them.

01:14:56.000 | But the shows that are the most successful are often the ones that cost me the least amount of work.

01:15:01.000 | Now, if I could figure out how to influence that and do that directly,

01:15:05.000 | then I would always just do the least amount of work, obviously.

01:15:07.000 | But I haven't been able to figure that out. I can't predict it in advance.

01:15:11.000 | But the point for saying that is that in my world, it's only the results that matter.

01:15:17.000 | It doesn't matter how much work I put into something.

01:15:20.000 | It doesn't matter that I put 10 hours into this show but zero into the other.

01:15:23.000 | It only matters that the results.

01:15:26.000 | How much do I listen to, and then what do people do on the other side of it?

01:15:30.000 | Do they go and consume my other things? Do they buy my products? Do they visit my advertisers, etc.?

01:15:34.000 | The results matter.

01:15:35.000 | And as you move up in a company, it's exactly the same way.

01:15:38.000 | When the CEO goes and gives a report to the board of directors,

01:15:41.000 | the board of directors is looking at results.

01:15:45.000 | They've got financial results.

01:15:48.000 | They've got sales results.

01:15:49.000 | They've got trends sitting there.

01:15:50.000 | They've got a presentation there.

01:15:52.000 | And they're not asking the CEO, "Where were you three months ago from Tuesday through Thursday?"

01:15:57.000 | They're saying, "What are the results?"

01:15:58.000 | And so if the CEO can get those results and only be in the office one or two days a week, fine.

01:16:03.000 | If the CEO can't get results by being in the office six days a week,

01:16:07.000 | well, the problem is not that you put in time.

01:16:09.000 | The problem is that you didn't get results.

01:16:11.000 | And so as long as you focus on getting results,

01:16:14.000 | you'll often move into a situation where you have more control over your time,

01:16:17.000 | over your schedule, over your profits, etc.,

01:16:20.000 | even if you're working in a company,

01:16:22.000 | even if you're not strictly an entrepreneur running your own company.

01:16:26.000 | Next, consider carefully what jobs you take

01:16:30.000 | and recognize that there are jobs that are more entrepreneurial

01:16:33.000 | and jobs that are less entrepreneurial.

01:16:36.000 | If I went broke today and I had to start over again

01:16:38.000 | and I didn't have enough money to start a business,

01:16:40.000 | I didn't have enough time to start a business,

01:16:42.000 | I would go and take a sales job.

01:16:44.000 | And the reason I would go and take a sales job is I have control over my income

01:16:48.000 | and I have control over my schedule.

01:16:52.000 | Because in sales, salespeople are only held accountable for results, basically.

01:16:56.000 | And so though I spent six years working as a financial advisor

01:16:59.000 | and I was technically an employee, a statutory employee of a company

01:17:02.000 | with contracts with a couple dozen other companies,

01:17:05.000 | the reality is I was self-employed.

01:17:07.000 | Nobody told me when to come, where to go, etc.

01:17:10.000 | Because although I was an employee, I was selling something

01:17:13.000 | and thus all that mattered was my sales results.

01:17:17.000 | And this is the situation that most salespeople have.

01:17:19.000 | It doesn't really matter where you go, when you come and go,

01:17:22.000 | it just matters that you produce results.

01:17:24.000 | And so something like sales is a career that is very well suited

01:17:29.000 | for an entrepreneur mentality, an entrepreneur personality.

01:17:35.000 | And it solves the problem of figuring out a need in the marketplace.

01:17:38.000 | Somebody else has created the product, somebody else has created the solution,

01:17:42.000 | they're managing the product and solution, you just go out and do it.

01:17:45.000 | I could today very happily go and sell life insurance again

01:17:47.000 | and only sell life insurance because I have dozens of companies

01:17:50.000 | and it's their job to maintain the product and it's my job to simply sell it.

01:17:53.000 | I sell it and I make a commission and I can make a great living doing that.

01:17:56.000 | And you can do that with anything.

01:17:57.000 | You can go sell jets, you can go sell yachts, you can sell pencils.

01:18:01.000 | I mean there's anything, you can do all kinds of things like that.

01:18:04.000 | But sales is a very entrepreneurial activity

01:18:07.000 | and then there are different expressions of sales.

01:18:09.000 | So you have some sales where you're selling intangible products

01:18:13.000 | like life insurance, some products where you're selling tangible products

01:18:16.000 | like houses.

01:18:18.000 | But sales is the kind of thing that really fits well

01:18:21.000 | into many of those benefits without having to go all the way to saying

01:18:25.000 | I'm going to open the local business.

01:18:28.000 | So consider options such as sales or jobs that are more entrepreneurial

01:18:34.000 | if you are interested in the subject, possibly as an actual good fit for you

01:18:39.000 | for long term or possibly as a transition to help you test out

01:18:43.000 | the waters of entrepreneurship and see if you like it.

01:18:46.000 | And then final point, choose your type of entrepreneurship very carefully

01:18:51.000 | and consider all of its ramifications because all entrepreneurship

01:18:56.000 | is not created equal.

01:18:58.000 | Give an example, I like farming or at least I like the idea of farming.

01:19:03.000 | I'm not a farmer, I've never been a farmer, but I like the idea of farming.

01:19:06.000 | I think that farming is a very rich and rewarding type of way to earn a living.

01:19:15.000 | I've known a lot of farmers, I come from a family of farmers

01:19:17.000 | and I think it's a very rich and rewarding way of earning a living.

01:19:22.000 | Farming can be profitable or it can be not profitable.

01:19:26.000 | But farming is very much a lifestyle.

01:19:28.000 | Now I think it's a lifestyle that has a lot to offer,

01:19:31.000 | especially in my opinion if it looks more like the traditional model of farming

01:19:35.000 | versus the model of professional farmer.

01:19:38.000 | I have a family member who's a professional farmer, works for a big company,

01:19:40.000 | it's a huge farming corporation, it's a job,

01:19:43.000 | it just happens to be a job in a farming business.

01:19:45.000 | I also have known people who were kind of more traditional farmers,

01:19:48.000 | they lived on a family farm and they had many of the expressions of that.

01:19:53.000 | And I think that that can be a very rewarding lifestyle.

01:19:55.000 | You get to feel the seasons, you get to work with the soil,

01:19:59.000 | you get to improve the land, you get to improve your animals.

01:20:03.000 | There are many non-tangible and non-financial benefits of that lifestyle.

01:20:08.000 | And there are many freedoms that you get with that lifestyle.

01:20:10.000 | For example, as a farmer, you don't have to ask,

01:20:14.000 | nobody has to tell you when to get up and go to work.

01:20:16.000 | Now chances are you're going to be getting up and going to work early.

01:20:19.000 | I've never known a farmer who routinely slept late,

01:20:22.000 | but nobody has to tell you that.

01:20:24.000 | And so if you want to get up and go do your chores

01:20:26.000 | and then come home for breakfast with the family, you can do that.

01:20:29.000 | So you have freedom over the day's events.

01:20:31.000 | But there are freedoms you don't have.

01:20:33.000 | For example, you don't have freedom over your geography.

01:20:36.000 | Your farm is probably planted where it is.

01:20:39.000 | Now you can pursue mobile infrastructure that you can move

01:20:41.000 | from least farm to least farm.

01:20:43.000 | But if you want to just pack up on an airplane

01:20:45.000 | and move from Canada to Argentina, that's hard to do as a farmer.

01:20:50.000 | There's a good chance that if you're a farmer in Canada

01:20:52.000 | and that's the business you're in, for as long as you're a farmer,

01:20:55.000 | you're going to be a farmer in Canada.

01:20:57.000 | So you don't have a lot of freedom over geography.

01:21:00.000 | If the Canadian government decides they don't like farmers

01:21:03.000 | and they're going to impose new laws that affect you to the detriment,

01:21:07.000 | to your detriment, you can't leave easily.

01:21:09.000 | And so you've got freedom over your day's events

01:21:11.000 | but not freedom over your geography.

01:21:14.000 | Now you can choose other types of businesses.

01:21:16.000 | You can choose a business such as an online business.

01:21:20.000 | Now you might have freedom over your day

01:21:22.000 | and you might have freedom over your geography,

01:21:24.000 | but that also comes with a whole set of downsides.

01:21:28.000 | There are a whole bunch of things that you don't get

01:21:30.000 | when running an online business that a farmer gets.

01:21:33.000 | It's harder to be part of a local community.

01:21:36.000 | You don't get as much of ability to see the impact of your work.

01:21:39.000 | Your work is much more intangible,

01:21:40.000 | which is not nearly as satisfying as tangible work.

01:21:43.000 | And there's lots of things.

01:21:45.000 | No business is perfect, but you'll have a bias in the type

01:21:48.000 | and the direction of a business that really fits you well.

01:21:51.000 | You'll have a bias in terms of,

01:21:55.000 | "I like these things but I don't like those other things."

01:21:57.000 | So as much as I'd like to be a farmer,

01:21:59.000 | I don't know if I could ever do it because I like to travel.

01:22:02.000 | And to me that's important.

01:22:03.000 | It's important to be able to leave.

01:22:05.000 | And so I'd either have to be a farmer in a business structure

01:22:09.000 | where I could profitably have workers handling the day-to-day work

01:22:13.000 | so that I maintain my geographic mobility,

01:22:16.000 | or I'd have to do another business.

01:22:18.000 | Now it's possible.

01:22:19.000 | I've known farmers that had no geographic constraints,

01:22:25.000 | but it's a different model.

01:22:27.000 | So think carefully about the kind of business that you want

01:22:30.000 | and think about the kind of lifestyle that you're trying to get from a business.

01:22:34.000 | My final point would be this.

01:22:35.000 | My goal is not to make you dissatisfied if you are satisfied.

01:22:43.000 | I do routinely work with people and talk to people

01:22:47.000 | and discuss the opportunities that they have and say,

01:22:51.000 | "You know, your job is great.

01:22:53.000 | I don't see how you get anything better.

01:22:55.000 | It's a great job."

01:22:56.000 | And there are many jobs that are wonderful jobs

01:22:59.000 | that provide tremendous opportunity,

RPF0697-Seven_Rings_of_Freedom-Business_Liberty