What does real financial freedom actually look like? Is it unlimited choices or is it something else entirely? Today, I'm sitting down with my friend Grant Sabatier, best-selling author of Financial Freedom and the Inner Entrepreneur, to explore how our definition of freedom evolves as we build our wealth. But there's a catch, and as Grant says, So the older that I've gotten, I've realized that freedom really actually only exists within limits.

We are going to get really tactical about achieving that freedom, including how to set limits, balance financial independence with personal happiness, and we'll even debate whether entrepreneurship might be a key part of this equation. And if you've ever wondered how to define enough and how to create a life you truly love, I really think you'll like this one.

I'm Chris Hutchins, and if you enjoy this episode, please consider sharing it with a friend or leave a comment or review. And if you wanna keep upgrading your life, money, and travel, click follow or subscribe. Grant, you have talked a lot about money in your life, but what does freedom actually look like to you?

Yeah, that's a great question. So my definition of freedom has definitely changed as I've gotten older. When I was younger and I was broke and I didn't have any money, freedom just simply meant having enough time to do whatever I wanted with my life, not being limited by money, being able to live the fullest life that I could without being restricted.

So it was this limitless idea. And that really was my thinking when I started my financial independence journey. I just need the money to get out. I just need some space. I just don't ever wanna be constricted. I don't wanna limit what my family can do. I don't wanna limit what I can do.

I wanna make the most of this one life. But interestingly, as I acquired more money, I started to change my definition of freedom. And I realized that freedom really wasn't about unlimited choices. It was just about having the ability to do what you love when you want to do it.

And those are two different things. So for me, I really struggled with this idea of how am I gonna spend my time when I reach financial independence? What am I gonna do? And I realized that I needed to create some limits in my life. So the older that I've gotten, I've realized that freedom really actually only exists within limits.

And we obviously have the natural limit of death in our lives and we don't know how long we're gonna be here. And so how we spend our time is really important and it really matters. But we're just constantly under siege for our attention. There's just so many things distracting us.

And especially when you have a little bit of money, when you're successful, when you have a big community, there's so many people that wanna do things with you, so many opportunities that it becomes really important to construct your own filters for your life. And this was a hard lesson for me to learn because I just tried to do everything all the time and ended up not only getting burnt out, but just really kind of distancing myself from a lot of the people that I love.

But once I realized that, hey, I can control and create my own space of freedom that ultimately allowed me to create more freedom in my life and has led me to a life that I really love with a by-product being, I have a fair amount of peace in my life just because all the things that I don't care about, those opportunities, those distractions, no longer show up.

But what about you? How's your thinking of freedom changed? Yeah, I mean, I think when I started, freedom was I just, like you said, you know, you wanna be able to do anything, go anywhere. And then thinking about that pursuit can lead you to feel like you just need unlimited money, right?

It's just like, how do you make more and make more? And then you realize, I don't need everything. Like, I'm very happy with the life we have. And so I think you mentioned limits and you talked about them in the constraint of demands on your time. I think this year, my wife, Amy, and I had talked about, let's make sure that we're in charge of what we wanna do.

Just because someone invites us to do something doesn't mean we have to say yes. Just because someone sends you an email doesn't mean you have to reply. And so there's limits on your time, but are there other kind of limits you put in place? Yeah, so think about your life as a space of freedom.

It's a container. And around that container are all the ways in which you spend your time, from what you eat to where you travel to how you spend your money to the content that you ultimately consume. We're naturally a balance between our inputs and our outputs. And there's times in life when you wanna create, there's times in life when you wanna consume.

And I think it's really important to take some time to think through not only what does an ideal day look like, what does, you know, you want your life to look like, and then build a space around that. This goes beyond just saying no to things and really helps you ultimately construct limits around everything in your life.

So a good example is I only use my phone for six hours a day, right? That's a limit that I've constructed that really isn't about my time. That's just about keeping myself sane and not getting distracted and being able to be present, you know, with my family. Another limit is that I don't travel for work at all.

And that's really less about the time and more about kind of the wear and tear that I take on when I'm traveling. You know, I get invited to speak, you know, fairly often and I've refused, you know, large amounts of money to do that because one of the least happy places that I am in my life is when I'm sitting in some random town on some random evening, you know, just, you know, missing my family.

And so that's just a limit. No matter how much someone offers me to come and pay and speak, I just say no. And that's less about the time and more about, you know, just not wanting to, you know, have the wear and tear and just put myself, you know, ultimately in that space.

And then around money, you know, money is one of those interesting things where our relationship with money is just like time, just, you know, is always evolving, is always changing. And I think for myself, there's a lot of limits that I've set around money. And, you know, one of those things is, you know, how much money I spend on food.

And I don't really budget, but I naturally try to look for those opportunities where I know that spending is going to be able to create a memory as opposed to just some throwaway spending. And so over time, at first, this is quite logical. And you can simply sit down and write down, here are the 20 things that I don't like to do.

And this can be in your full-time job. This can be, you know, with your friends. This can be with your diet. This can be with, you know, anything. Look at those things and use those things that you don't want to do as the place to start setting your limits and pushing your limits, you know, over time.

As you do this more and more, naturally, your intuition just gets better at assessing opportunities. It's just, you have more data inputs. And so if someone asks you to do something and you immediately just know, ah, that's not going to make me happy. That doesn't fit within my limits.

That doesn't really give me freedom. And then, you know, you're able to say no. And the last thing I'll add is, for me, the most important thing of all of this is time freedom. And so I never schedule more than two meetings a day. I try to work out every day.

I want to leave space in my life. And that's always been, you know, the most important thing because it's the space in your life that you open to when new things ultimately show up. And that has really rewarded me because I'm able to, you know, follow my curiosity and it generates, you know, a lot of happiness, you know, in my life.

But, you know, what are some limits that you have, Chris? Okay, so I have some limits, but I want to make sure I... I'll come back to them. But I want to follow up because a lot of the things you mentioned, you're in a fortunate position to do. And so I'm curious how you think these limits might apply to someone who's working in a job and can't afford to just be free for hours a day or not be on their computer or not travel for work as they might need to.

How do some of these things translate for people that aren't in your situation in life? Yeah, I think the first step is you have to do a bit of an assessment. So, you know, if you have a job that you feel stuck in and maybe you don't like or that is really stressful or back to that point about traveling, if you have to travel a lot for work and, you know, it's impacting your health and you're spending more time away from your family and you don't really want to, it's important to be honest with yourself about that.

And some simple things that you can do are, you know, for your full-time job, write down a list of 20 things that you just really don't like doing in your full-time job and you'd rather limit them and then prioritize those. And if possible, think about how you can reach out to your manager, reach out to your HR department.

Maybe if you're really tired of traveling, there's another role that you can take on in your company or maybe you can limit travel to a certain period or time of the year or work and be proactive about, you know, trying to adjust your full-time job and your role to fit more of what your ideal life looks like and protect your space of freedom.

You know, this is about being proactive instead of being reactive. If we don't choose our, you know, own choices and set our own limits, the world naturally sets them for you. And this happens within any company. You know, the reality and I talk about this a little bit in my first book is that most companies are just legal Ponzi schemes, right?

It's like, that's how entrepreneurship works. It's like, there's the boss at the top and there's the shareholders and there's all the employees. And the way that you build a profitable business or have, you know, a successful company is that you need to get some level of return on your investment on your employees.

Naturally, entrepreneurs default to trying to get as much out of their employees, you know, as they can, right? It's like the revenue multiple or profit multiple that you get pure employees. And so your company is always going to set limits and they're going to try to push those limits.

And they know more about those limits than you know about those limits. And they're thinking about you, the person, and they're like, how do I give this person enough to keep them happy and to keep them here and to stay, you know, because it costs the average company 40 to 60% of an annual salary to, you know, replace an employee.

So they're thinking about how to keep you just happy enough. And so this is important if you just accept what they're offering you, if you don't go in and push a little bit where you can, naturally you're going to get pigeonholed with a lot of limits around your life that you didn't set and it's going to be difficult to escape from them.

And so make that list within your full-time job, make that list in how you spend your time outside of your job. This is important too. And you talk about your friends and your family and even me, you know, for the holidays, typically, we travel for Thanksgiving and Christmas and other holidays and that ends up creating a lot of stress for our family.

And so we've put these limits around where we'll travel and how we'll travel and we're very honest with our family. We have a daughter and so we can say, hey, this is better for our daughter that we don't go on this trip. And so setting those limits, if you, you know, have 10 days off of vacation a year and you have to spend seven of those traveling for the holidays and then you come back and you're burnt out and, you know, you don't get rejuvenated and, you know, it's not really how you want to spend your time.

You have to be honest with your family and friends and set those limits as well. And I often find if you're very upfront, it can be a little jarring to people when you say, hey, I can't do this. But when you express why you're doing it and that, you know, it's important, hey, I, you know, need to prioritize self-care.

I need to prioritize my own family. You know, people will understand and your friends will still be your friends and your family, you know, hopefully won't won't be too upset. So it's really about doing an assessment and all of this is just about being mindful about what you're letting into your life and the impact that it's having having on you.

And this whole thing is a journey, right? This isn't something that you just woke up one day and said, oh, I have limits. I have money and we're done. This is something that you can decide what you don't like about your current job. You can make some of those changes at your current position.

Maybe you try to explore whether you could make more of them, move positions, move companies. We'll talk a little bit later about entrepreneurship. You could start something on the side. But just to be clear, I'm pretty sure and correct me if I'm wrong, you're not suggesting that you necessarily put up all these limits and change everything all in one go after thinking about, you know, the conversation we're having right now.

No, it's really about paying attention to how you feel. And I think this is the biggest disconnect for me is that I spent my whole career with kind of this Western mind, this trying to think my way and outsmart my way through everything. But you have to really listen to how you feel and how your body is responding to something.

And, you know, this is one of those perennial, timeless debates within philosophy and spirituality where it's like, do I, you know, do I try to think my way through this or do I trust my intuition? And I, the longer that I've been an entrepreneur, the longer I've been financially independent, the more I recognize that your intuition is actually the strongest gift that you have.

And most of us just silence it. We just keep doing the thing that we've always done because we feel like that's what we are supposed to do and it's often the easiest thing to do. And so you end up in a place in your life where all these limits have been set by someone else and you're like, geez, how did I get here?

How can I change this up a little bit? And you're right. It's all about it takes time. You don't have to be dramatic. You don't have to quit your job. You just have to pay attention and listen and recognize that how you feel really matters here. If you feel stuck, you probably are.

That doesn't mean you have to make massive shifts. It's just you can make smaller choices that move you towards a life you love. And then the other piece, Chris, I'll tell you, I've talked with so many people and it's so fun in the work that I do because I could just get to hear people's life stories and all about their jobs.

And I realized that so many people are so much closer to a life that they love than they recognize. And so they tend to over-focus on the stress and on the negative. And especially when we're pursuing financial independence, when we're working, it's like 80 or 90% of our brain is taken up by the energy and our thinking around our work and our money.

And then you add family into this. I had a daughter, you know, after reaching financial independence and just the how much less time I have is just ultimately staggering. And so if you're working for money and you're stressed about your job and you have a family, there's very, very little space and time in your life for you to pay attention to your intuition, for you to take care of yourself and for you to construct your own space of freedom.

And so you have to work a little bit harder to carve out that time. One of the things that I recommend everyone do, if you don't meditate, you should start meditating and just try it. But I recommend everyone schedule at least a one to two day personal retreat, you know, every year or ideally, you know, every six months or once a quarter.

And hopefully it can be even a silent retreat where you're alone or you go to, you know, a Buddhist center. You know, there are all these kind of small retreats that you can do that you can create a space and an opening in your life that allows more of your intuition to come out and helps to give you more perspective because it's very, very difficult in life when you're so busy and you're so stressed to actually self-reflect.

You just get stuck in the grind. And that's one of the biggest takeaways for me and the biggest thing that I recommend is that you have to create space in your life to figure out how you really feel about something. And so anyone can carve out that space, you know, today just by being intentional about it and then paying attention and then not only listening to how you feel but then taking small actions.

And so if you don't like your job, can you move to another career over time? Are there some pivots that you can make in the day-to-day that make your life more meaningful and give you more happiness and make you less stressed? And a lot of people, like I said, are just very close to a life that they love.

They're so constricted that they lose perspective. So for me, it's fun to be able to go in and say, hey, let's talk about your life. Wow. You love your friends. You love your family. You love the city that you live in. You love your softball team. You love your parents.

You know, you have great hobbies but, you know, your job is really, really stressing you out. But all you've really talked about is your job. Let's look at, you know, the other 85% of the things that you have in your life you really love. It's just this one thing that's dominating so much of your thinking and maybe you already have so much of what you seek.

And so that's really what I try to do in my work is just help share a language that people can use and reflect on to get a little bit more perspective on these ideas of money, time, and freedom and then, you know, move closer to a life that really, really fulfills them.

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I've got three follow-ups. So first, one of the places I've enjoyed finding that space personally is in a sauna. And there's plenty of health benefits to that. We're not even going to mention that. The one really great benefit is that it is so hot that you don't want to bring your phone in.

You know, like it's dark. Sometimes I bring in a pencil and a piece of paper, but I have this place to go where I can't do a lot but think and be with myself or my wife will join and we can talk, but we're not distracted. We're not looking at phones.

We're not listening to music. There's no TV on. And so that's one space I've really enjoyed that, you know, I'm not going to go to the sauna for two days for a personal retreat, but to get half an hour, 20 minutes, a few times a week is great. So that was one thought.

The second one is when you said 85%, it really struck me and you were talking about, you know, 85% of your life might be the life you love and the work part of it might not be something you love. I wish I could remember which episode, I'll try to put in the show notes if I can find it, where I was talking with someone and they pointed out like people don't have to love their job.

Like this idea of pursue your passion and your work has to define you and be the thing you love. I think there are a lot of people that I've met in my career that I know in my family and extended family that they might not love their job but they've recognized that their job enables them to have a life they love and I think one of the really important things that they've managed to separate and where I want to spend a little bit of time talking is that they haven't made it their mission to level up their career and have more money and more, you know, responsibility and more title because they've recognized they love their job and you've said, you know, people don't really feel free until they know what enough is and so I think the people I know that have managed to find a lot of peace and happiness in a job they don't necessarily love have recognized that that job is already putting them on the path to have enough and that allows them to be happy so I'm curious how you think about enough and defining it because one of the lines you said in the book is if you don't take time to figure out what you really need chasing more money is an aimless pursuit and so how do you think about that question because I know it's a hard one.

you mentioned an important word here peace and I think everyone wants to feel more peace in their life and we often don't think about what peace is we think about peace as having no stress but what it really means is that you have an elevated perspective on your life and you're able to very clearly look at the things coming into your life and the things going on in your life and not judge them and so this is very important.

There are some people that are more naturally wired for peace and you're talking about some of them and I have a friend like this he works for the EPA has a great job lives in Seattle Washington spends time hiking in the mountains camping with his son and he's got this job that he has to go to and it doesn't light him up he doesn't love it it doesn't fulfill him but it's secure when he's there he's there and when he's not he doesn't have to think about it and it allows him to build an incredibly peaceful life and like you mentioned he's just at peace that this job is a means to an end it gives him the money to do the things that he wants to do and do them with frequency goes to Hawaii multiple times a year and this is important because he's able to do this because he knows what he loves he's been honest with himself I like hiking I like golfing I like grilling in my backyard I like playing basketball with my son he's listed out those things that he loves and having his job gives him the time to do that and then he's not stressed he's not kept up and so cultivating peace in your life is really about being in alignment with what you love and you can do this as an entrepreneur you can do this as a full-time employee and the more alignment that you have in your life the greater peace that you're naturally going to feel you don't find peace peace arises in your life it's a byproduct of moving towards the things that you enjoy and that you love but the thing is it's often so easy in life just to chase more money it's just what so many people do it's just okay I'm going to make more money I'm going to go after this thing even when you reach financial independence I'm going to work to get this raise and all of a sudden you look back 20 years from now on your life and you're like wait how did I spend my time or you know someone near you gets sick or you get sick and you're forced to kind of take a hard look in the mirror and be like wow is this really how I want to be living my life and I think a lot of people out there think they know what they love but they haven't really thought about it deeply and they haven't thought about how they really want to spend their time and the role that money ultimately plays in it it's about carving out maybe a couple of hours a week to think through what is my relationship with money did how I spend this money make me happy do I want to keep spending my money this way am I making enough money to live the life that I want to live and will I be able to do that with some level of certainty for a long period of time and this is that balance right between saving and spending where you want to figure out okay is it worth spending today to do the things that I love or worth saving this money and compounding the amount of freedom and opportunity that this money has over the long term and then the other piece is that for me specifically my definition of enough continues to change as new things happen in my life when I reached financial independence you know I thought that I could live on you know 50 or 60 thousand dollars I have a child kids are expensive I want her to have the best life possible so my definition of enough has to change and in fact more of my definition is about her and about my family than about myself because between me and my wife I'm one out of three in the equation and so my definition of enough has actually extended beyond myself to be more about my family so there's things that my wife and daughter naturally would want to spend money on that I wouldn't but you know we spend that money because you know I know it makes them happy and so this is something that you never truly figure out but it's something that gets easier over time when you're intentional about it and you take the time to just to think through these things and that's really what I want my books to be about it's an opportunity of reflection where you can look back and say huh maybe I have been spending too much time chasing money and maybe I should be spending my time you know doing something else or maybe I don't need as much money as I think I'll need right now because so much of the news out there the financial advice it's just negative it forces you to feel like you're never going to have enough in order to sell you a financial product and so that people get in that natural mindset I'm not going to have enough for retirement I'm not going to be able to live on my money forever I need to to hoard it I need to make all these massive sacrifices and so yeah my definition of enough is certainly in flux but I feel very comfortable because I've taken the time to think through this in my own life and then that gives me the ability just to live my life instead of always wondering gosh should I work harder should I grow my company bigger should I find another income stream should I do something different I know there's a period of your life where you weren't thinking this way and you were grinding really hard 100% man and that enabled you to reach financial independence and now have this kind of elevated perspective totally man but do you think you could have done it with this perspective from the start or do you think there is a season of life where what you need to do or what you might want to do or how you might want to use your time is to go and make more money and grind and hustle and spend all the time and energy so that your future life which now you have a family and kid is easier dude I write these books for my younger self I wish that I could tell my 27 year old self just to chill out enjoy the journey you're still going to get there it might take you twice the amount of time the things that I said no to in my life I'm not going to say I have regrets but you know I wish I would have gone to the music festivals with my friends I wish I would have gone out to drinks with them instead of just building my businesses and websites you know in my room you know on my own I wish I would have spent more time nurturing some friendships and relationships that I lost I think you're right that there's times to grind and times to rest naturally if you're younger you have more time you have more energy right now I can't do nearly as much at the age of 40 that I could at 25 you know when I was invincible and so I feel grateful that I was able between 25 and 30 to make all this money and save and really really hustle I did make some sacrifices that I wish I didn't make but yeah I used my young energy and now having a kid being my age I'm like I can't imagine just starting now to save it'll certainly be more challenging you know and more difficult so yes I think you should do this when you're younger and have more energy and have more time and have fewer responsibilities because there's just less constricting your life you know when you're younger and you have a lot less to lose and so I think you're right right about that but I wish I would have had more balance that's just not how I'm wired I grew up in a home where money was always tight money was always stressful money was just everything that my parents talked about and so for me it was like once you know I got out into the world it was just it had so much anxiety and stress for me I meet people in their 20s now and some of them are just so relaxed and it's so easy for them to you know follow their passions and do the things they love and I'm a little jealous of that we're all wired a little bit differently and we also change faster than we recognize that we're changing I think a lot of us fight change in our life and we don't like to reflect on hey maybe I don't love the things that I used to love and so it's just recognizing that it's fine to sprint and fine to rest but having a little bit of perspective on you know why you're pursuing this journey ideally having some level of a definite goal so for me to try to save a million dollars as quickly as possible and then once I got there I was just able to stop and reevaluate it was like okay I don't really have to think about money as much where am I going next and so you know there's levels to this right and this is one of the things where there's kind of these ladders that you climb up in your life and then you get a little more perspective and you're like whoa do I want to take this other ladder and you know even now man I meet so many successful entrepreneurs you know in New York who have way more money than me or far more successful and some of them are happy and some of them aren't and people are wired very differently often the people who are happiest are doing things that they really love and they're challenged and they're growing and they're very outgoing but I love meeting someone who's you know more financially successful than me and being able to be like whoa I feel very happy with where I'm at because I can't imagine living their life.

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Again that's chrishutchins.com slash viore to discover the versatility of Viore clothing. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions and find the link in the description. Yeah when we talk about enough I think for me to go back I said I would come back and talk about limits.

One of the things that really helped me and I think it was Rachel Cruz was said was you know budgets actually very freeing because when you define how much you can spend to be within your means you can you can spend it. You know when you don't know how much you have to spend then it feels like everything could be stressful.

But for us I think we kind of line item went through the categories of spending and we compared you know with some basic you know 4% rule or 3% rule whatever you want to use math to figure out how we were trending and how much we're making and we kind of got to this point where we said do we want to spend more money or do we want to spend more time to create more money because if we spend more money now like we have to replace it or we're not going to save enough for for the future.

So that really made it easy to say well we don't need a bigger this or we don't need more elaborate vacations or we can get more creative about you know how to use the the points of the mile so we don't have to pay more for those vacations. But that was really helpful for us because we see people all around us spending more money on certain things that we're spending money on.

and it can make you feel insecure but I actually feel really secure because we could go spend that money. We just know that the trade off of what will happen if we spend that money is actually is not worth it because we thought about that impact. And so to your point thinking about you know where you are what you need might take some you know basic retirement calculations you could go use a tool to run through that.

I'm actually I think I'm working on an episode of all the different kind of financial planning tools that you can use on your own to project your net worth and all that kind of stuff but because we've done that work it feels really easy to say no to spending more money because we know we don't want to spend it that way.

When it comes to a lot of people's advice on financial independence I think that it often comes to save save save cut your expenses limit what you have so that you can save as much as possible. how do you think about that trade-off on your path to financial independence of trying to save more versus trying to earn more?

Always more valuable to earn more money while you can because you just really don't know how long the opportunity that you have is going to last. We see this with all the layoffs of all the tech companies we see this with the algorithm changes and online businesses and Etsy seller restrictions and I mean there's just so many changes that are happening in our world that when you can make money and you have the opportunity to make money you should try to make as much as possible and then save as much of that as possible to give you more options you know in the future and so de-risking your life is just about investing in the you that you've yet to become so it's always going to be easier in life to have more money and more options than not and when you go back at a very basic level there's very very little in our life that we can actually control and I think that really scares people talk about that you know in the book you know how we're kind of stuck between this sort of like level you know of uncertainty and this level of control and the most important way to deal with this is to control the things that you can and then just forget about the rest and so when it comes to earning money try to earn as much as you can try to save as much as you can don't save to the point where you're unhappy I wouldn't say that I was unhappy when I was saving you know 82 percent of my income but I could have you know lived a little bit better and done a few more things but no opportunity lasts forever everything is changing and I think a lot of people underestimate the level of kind of risk and uncertainty in their life and they just think oh I'm gonna have this job forever oh I'm always gonna be able to save 20 percent of my income but we have no idea what the future holds and so it's really about managing your money in a way that helps you de-risk your life and controlling those variables you know while you can and I even think about this you know in my own life it can naturally be risky to be an entrepreneur I'm always thinking about okay what's the five-year plan for this business and this company and how can I get out within the next five years and so I try to build businesses to sell because I'm worried about really the economic risk of any sort of market opportunity or business and so important to save and earn money while you can because you don't know how long that's going to last and you don't want to get stuck in a place where you have to make really really drastic decisions in your life like needing to sell your house and so that goes back to this idea of the space of freedom money factors into that of course right what is your safety net what is your level of cash reserves how much you know of your investment portfolio is liquid versus locked up in something that if the real estate market crashes you know you couldn't sell I'm very much like you I've used the spreadsheets I've used the tools you know for years and I'm a very very numbers person but when that's all that I thought about I was so limited in my thinking and so all of this is really about adding a level of heart to the head thinking about how you feel before just looking at the spreadsheet or just looking at the numbers and I think if we do more of that it naturally helps us create more you know freedom and peace in our life because we've gone through the work very much like you have and I've talked with you and now for a number of years and know some of the decisions that you've made with your wife around your business and the choices and I think you naturally are doing this work and that's why you know you're happier for it I think I'm definitely happier for it but there's a bit of a contradiction and I'm not sure what someone listening might be able to do about it thinking of kind of the the common golden handcuffs situation you've got this great job you're getting paid the harder you work the more you get promoted the more you earn the more bonus and so on one hand I hear you saying like take advantage of that while you have it and then on the other hand I hear you saying well set up some limits and don't put it all into one place so that you can be happy how do you think people should process the fact that if they have a high-paying job and and it's not the life they live how long do you take advantage of that and when do you stop and start to make changes so that you can be happy I love that you brought this up because isn't this the paradox of life and I think that people were always stuck between this duality we're always stuck between these two choices should we work harder should we rest should we spend more money should we save more money and for everyone listening I don't know what your life looks like I don't know who you are what your dreams are what's important is to recognize that there's a balance between these two things and being honest with yourself and intentional is the only way to do this and create peace in your life there's no way that I can tell someone hey you're 25 you need to grind you need to bear it out for the next five years or hey you're grinding it out but you hate your job you need to quit this is a delicate balance here where you need to make the decisions for your own life I just think it's important to set up these questions because within these questions within this paradox is everything that it means to be alive we have to balance all of these forces and so the more intentional that we are the more time that we give to thinking about this naturally we learn to do what we know we should do and I think that's an important thing once again you can't always think yourself through these answers you have to trust your intuition you have to listen and pay attention to how things make you feel so let's say someone's golden handcuffs making five hundred thousand dollars a year spending all their money have nothing saved two kids private school feel like they have no choices no options in a vast majority of case you have options but those options are going to change your life in some way and I would argue that for someone like that they probably need a change because there's massive amounts of risk in their life in that scenario and they need to de-risk their life in some way and so that's doing an inventory of where you spend your money hey maybe we're not actually making enough money to send our kids to private school and the public schools where we live aren't that great so maybe we actually have to move and maybe we have to change houses and maybe we have to de-risk our life a little bit even though we're happy with everything that we're doing in our life we're on a fast collision path to having nothing in the future and we're just living on the edge and that's a tough conversation to have with someone it's a tough conversation to have with yourself and it's an important one to have because if you feel like you should be having that conversation with yourself then you really should and the longer that you put off anything the more difficult that that conversation then can become and so yes there are people in life who are in very difficult circumstances who are stuck and have very very few options single parents stable job two kids can't imagine you know doing any of the things that we're talking about here and that's where it's more difficult to create limits around your life and you have to work even harder to do it because there's just less time and space and flexibility built into your life but there's so many pivots that we can make from going back to school learning new skills trying to make money on the side to get some of that entrepreneurial empowerment and save a little bit of extra money the important thing is that you do what's within your capacity to build the life that you want to have and just move towards it no matter how small those steps are and i've had people reach out to me one woman was homeless she reached out to me she said say i read an article on you on cnbc i was very inspired i read your book i started working at wendy's i started saving my money i signed up to work at a real real estate brokerage i ended up getting a brokerage license now i'm a realtor i just passed a hundred million dollars in sales and this is within a three-year period and this is like a really top you know performing realtor in the dallas fort worth area and so she's just made all these massive changes in her life just from being you know inspired by you know one story and that's a really extenuating example but it's important no matter what's going on in your life just to to ask yourself what does freedom mean to me how much is enough how can i create more peace in my life are there some changes that i can make with how i'm spending and making and saving money it can move me closer to a life that i love and then move towards that and then over time check in with yourself as you're living your life just to make sure you're moving closer rather than further away this episode is brought to you by fabric by gerber life if you have anyone relying on your income then you 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m-e-e-t fabric dot com slash all the hacks policies issued by western southern life assurance company not available in certain states prices subject to underwriting and health questions the latest book is inner entrepreneur and at first i thought oh this is a book all about starting companies and then i realized um maybe this is a book all about being in charge of your own life but that doesn't mean that entrepreneurship isn't a piece so i'm curious how you think of entrepreneurship as a source of income or a career path fits into the average person's world for happiness and a fulfilling life so we talked about how there's only so many things in your life that you can actually control and how you make money is one of those things and so entrepreneurship is really about making money on your own terms and figuring out ways to make money outside of your full-time job or in addition to your full-time job so you're not solely reliant on someone else's profit dreams and someone else's you know life plan because whenever you're working for someone else you're working for someone else and that's fine you can reach financial independence you know working a regular full-time job there are some incredible jobs out there but i think that everyone should test being an entrepreneur they should try it out they should see how it makes them feel they should think through it they should say hey is there a way that i can make a little additional money you know outside of my job is there a way i can move towards entrepreneurship it's at least worth thinking about and so the book is really about how to do that it's about how to think like an entrepreneur it's about how to test being an entrepreneur it's also for entrepreneurs who might feel a little stuck and not understand where this could go when i started you know businesses i had no idea how to build a company to sell no idea that i could sell a company had no idea what a holding company was no idea how to grow a company and so there's so much in the book that if you're curious about entrepreneurship if you're making a little money on the side even if you have a business and you're like where should i go with this i wanted to put everything that i think is important in building businesses into this one book even so people can read it and say hey gosh that sounds like so much work i don't want to do that but hopefully people read it and they're able to say hey i'm going to try this out and i've been doing some freelance consulting on the side now i understand why building a consulting business is probably a terrible business and here's how i can pivot and do something different instead or hey i've wanted to launch this product on amazon and i've seen all these things about how amazing it is what is it actually can you actually build a product on amazon today or how does you know digital marketing work or how do you build a brand or tell stories or create a content driven business like what are all these things and i feel like i'm a hundred years old and internet years chris you know it's like because i got my laptop my first laptop when i was seven and so it's like one of these things too for younger people or even people who are influencers it's like hey the opportunity that you have is changing so so rapidly so here's how you take advantage of it and here's what you should be thinking about and what you should be doing and all this other stuff just really doesn't matter as much i know you've talked a lot about ai there's just so much massive change going on in our world that really is empowering for entrepreneurs not that great for full-time employees who are you know easy easier to be replaced now as as we're starting to see but incredible for entrepreneurs because you used to need all these teams and all these tools and these expensive sas products and now you can use just a couple of tools and you know get massive amounts of scale and leverage so you can be a designer a coder a marketer a product manager all with a couple of you know inexpensive or free ai tools if you're willing to to put in the work so i really wish i was actually starting my entrepreneurial journey now there's just so much more available i know it's um um it's crazy we we wanted to set up a site for all the hacks members to be able to share their referral links so that you know anytime i'm talking about a product sometimes i have a referral link sometimes i don't and sometimes i have one and it caps out so i shared the us mobile launched this amazing new unlimited cell phone plan it's awesome and i put in my referral link but you can only refer like five people or something ten people yeah so it's like i need more people's links so i wanted to create a site where anyone in our membership could go in and like choose the kind of program and then share their link and it would create a url that would cycle between all the members links and i'm not even kidding in hours in a day less than a day i built an a full site that allowed people to go set this up i could see analytics i could create these rotating links i could put it with my custom domain i was using replit there's a lot of other tools it is wild what you can build now and i remember when i was working in venture capital people would email me back oh i have an app idea where do i find a developer and there was this window of everyone had ideas but no one knew how to execute on them well now is the time that you can go explore that so i think what entrepreneurship looked like 10 20 30 40 years ago felt a lot more like quit your job go figure it out maybe even raise some capital and now i want to encourage people to not think the way that it's always seemed because entrepreneurship could be spend a few hours building a thing and putting it out there i did an episode about buying and selling gold right entrepreneurship could be making runs to costco to buy and resell gold go back and listen to an episode i did with kai who runs this podcast called the daily churn and like he makes thousands of dollars a month finding deals and and profiting from them there are a lot of ways that you can do this entrepreneurial thing that aren't even companies and i think that's something that's really cool because as you said your job and your income is only as stable as as the company is that you work for and without getting into politics like there are people who thought government jobs were the most secure thing in the world that are learning right now that maybe they're not and so the push to find some way not necessarily to replace your entire career replace your job but to just start to test the waters and see how you can replace some income not even replace compliment some income but doing it while being fully aware of what you really care about and what you need so that you don't end up in a place where you're like oh now i have an extra twenty thousand dollars a year let's go buy this thing without first thinking gosh would i rather use that twenty thousand dollars a year to create a cushion so i can leave my job or to save for the future so that i can be more comfortable later but honestly sometimes the answer might be so i can spend more now my interview with bill perkins really changed a lot of things talking about die with zero and made me realize maybe i should be spending some of this extra money now instead of saving it for the future and so you just don't know that answer until you do the work and some of the work we talked about was on the inside figuring out what you care about who you want to be some of it is how much you have and how much you spend and how much you've saved but once you do it you can kind of realize that you're free to make decisions where money isn't the the only factor which which it so often is so i love this and i like that the message isn't quit your job and go be an entrepreneur and start a company but understand what you care about and see if entrepreneurship could be something that's interesting to you and it could be on the side it could be once a month there are a lot of different versions of it yeah i mean everyone's already an entrepreneur i mean you're advocating for your own life you're creating your own life and so it's really about just taking advantage of the opportunity the moment realizing where entrepreneurship can take you the trade-offs that you can make the limits that you can set so you can build a business or make money in a way that you want to that doesn't stress you out and you know create all these sort of limits in your life and so yeah it's we just live in a remarkable time if you want to make money and have more freedom and the tools available they're just changing so rapidly for all the doomsdaying out there man it's just such an incredible time to be alive and to be a creator and to be a builder and to be an entrepreneur it's never been easier in history to reach financial independence and reclaim your time and build a life you love rewind 50 years ago you know none of this would have been possible right it's like and you just look at how fast the world is changing and it's sort of just like pick the wave figure out what you want to do learn how to ride it pay attention be intentional you know open to you know yourself to the world and you know it's just an incredible time to to be alive man i think so many people just do the thing they've always been doing right and hacking your life is about questioning that right it's about saying huh i thought that freedom was this one thing but maybe it's something else or i thought that i really loved this job and making five hundred thousand dollars but you know i just had a kid and now i want to really spend more time with my daughter so i don't want to do this thing and so paying attention to that and then letting yourself change and moving towards that change and embracing that change instead of just sticking to how you've always been and continuing to do the thing that you've always done just because it's served you well up to this point it doesn't mean that that's how you should continue to live your life and you mentioned that you spent a lot of time you know on your own building that you say no to traveling to lots of events how important do you think community is during this whole journey community doesn't have to be big and i think we often think that community means having a lot of friends connecting with so many people community is about surrounding yourself with people you love who make you feel good who challenge you who you want to create with who you want to participate with most of my best friends are people that i build things with and that's how i like to spend my time with them whether it's building a company whether it's creating a band and so those are the people that i've built around my life there's just really amazing article in the atlantic this month from you know derek thompson i think it's called the anti-social century all about how everyone's so lonely and all these tiktok trends about people being excited when their friends cancel plans with them and you know so we naturally default to being alone in this world but i talk in the book about how collaboration is so much more powerful than competition and in fact i attribute most of my success online to reaching out to some of my competitors asking them questions and then just writing me back and inviting me to chat and me being able to learn from my competition and so my creator community you know a lot of them you know historically have been you know my competitors and so don't be afraid to reach out to people who are building the thing that you want to be building who are in careers similar to your careers and learn from them and then just be very intentional about who you spend your time with and this is important to spend your time with people who make you feel good who give you energy don't spend time with people who suck all your energy i know you're very very extroverted person i'm an introverted person so i naturally kind of hide behind my computer screen and myself but i'm working much harder to surround myself you know with people people that i love and um you know that i want to be with so community is is is is essential we're social beings we're pack animals you know as as humans we we need to be around other people to survive and to be happy right all that data shows that you live longer when you're surrounded by people that you love and so it's important that we find those people and that we build those those communities and those networks and you know next time you're sitting in a coffee shop you know take off your headphones and say hi to the person next to you or next time you're on the train say hello to the person next to you strike up a conversation because i think the value of sort of random encounters is underestimated and i think it's important for us to to get outside of our phones and to to look up and and talk to the people around us in fact you know in columbus ohio you know some of the best friends that i've made here are people that i've just you know literally one person i was standing in line at a record store and he and i have gone to you know three concerts together just because i was like hey dude what are you listening to and so um just open yourself to those encounters don't shut yourself off to the world awesome okay where where do you think we should send people who want to go deeper on all this if you want to learn more about this check out my new book inner entrepreneur a proven path to profit and peace where i go very deep on all these topics and then if you're interested in my journey to financial independence you can check out my book financial freedom a proven path to all the money you will ever need which is now available officially in 20 languages so all around the world and in any bookstore or on audio my books are my work and are my my gift to the world i don't create a whole lot of content otherwise and don't really participate much on social media just because that's a limit that i've set you know in my life and if you happen to be in columbus ohio check out my brick and mortar bookstore clintonville books where you'll find me most mornings if i'm not just meditating in my office or taking my daughter to school is i'm hanging out in my bookstore pricing rare books talking to customers and that's how i typically spend my days now i love it this has been great grant thank you so much for coming i really enjoyed it i really appreciate it man it's great to go deep with you on these topics and love everything that you're doing and i'm happy to to be a friend and be on this journey with you