Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash
We have gone through the things in your life, stopping you from changing. We then understood that real change needs peace. Now, we are at peace, we are ready to exercise our god given right. Freedom.
For me, the word Freedom conjures up the image of hippies wearing flowery clothes with wide inebriated smiles on their faces. That is, unfortunately, not freedom. Its inebriation.
Freedom is not Free
The freedom you enjoy today, feels like free because someone else has paid for it. Through payments of blood sweat and tears over many generations, you now have the freedom to order Swiggy because you didn’t feel like cooking.
This is not a Sunday lecture to make you feel guilty, although donations to be paid should be sent to my google pay account. This is the truth. You eat because someone has stocked your bank with credit. Credit that took generations to generate.
Freedom is value times time
By providing value consistently over time, you earn credit. Some activities make more credit than others over unit time. Unfortunately higher credit activities usually take for ever to master. You may have heard of the 10000 hour rule. Well that’s what it takes to be super highly paid. Also, this 10000 hours needs to be focused on honing your skill not business as usual activities.
You know what really sucks, sometimes, to learn, you need to pay in credit as well! College is not free, School is not free, Nothing is free.
You can’t do 10000 hours in just ANYTHING
You are pre-disposed towards certain types of activities. This is the stuff you would pay to do. You discover this by working at whatever credit generating activity comes your way. By working and delivering what is your best at whatever you are asked to do you will find something that doesn’t suck every single day. It may suck on some days, but others leave you accomplished and satisfied.
Then you push yourself, day-in, day-out to get better at that. Constantly ask yourself,
How can I do better?
You can’t ONLY do that for 10000 hours
Life is not meant to be only about creating value. Also, as human beings you have needs. If those needs are not met, Maslow will take you back to focusing on them. These are eating, sleeping and the rest of the hygiene activities. So, while doing your 10000 hours, you need to put in the time to make sure the rest of your life works. This has to be done pretty well to keep you motivated enough to ask the question “How can I do better?”.
Even in your area of expertise, there will be stuff you loathe to do. TPS reports, performance appraisal, yep, all the drudgery, repeatedly over years. You need to do those as well if you want to continue to generate value and hence credit.
But
Unfortunately, that’s not enough either. You may do your 10000 hours to become the best at something but that something must generate value that others are willing to pay for to fill your coffers with credit. So, you need to look around at other folks who do what you do and find out how to get people to pay for the value you generate. This is so hard!
Thanks to big corporations, that part of the problem is out of your hands. Its their burden to sell what you do for profit. Unfortunately, the incentives will push you to do work that is not in your area of liking or the company may fold. As you have no skills in generating value in any other way, you are stuck or screwed as the case maybe. Burn out, frustration, bankruptcy and other health issues result.
Then shit happens..
Just when you have something that works for you and generates the necessary credit, tsunami happens or you get fired or the pandemic rears its ugly head. You will survive this if you have saved some credit somewhere for future use. Savings. The “S” word.
So Freedom is…
A. The discipline to go to work every day and asking yourself “How can I do better?” and come up with creative solutions and execute them.
B. The discipline to take care of everything else (food, clothing, savings, relationships, your happiness etc) that keeps you motivated to do (A)
This should give you enough credit to do whatever you want. Enjoy!
Discipline is Freedom