Pondering on “Financial Freedom”

Hi Medium fam,

I’m pondering on the concept of financial freedom recently and this post is the “findings” of my thoughts —

Share with me your thought — DM IG @simplifiedbusinesscoach or email SimplifiedBusinessCoach@gmail.com

The amount of money that we make, or how fast how slow would we make the money? Depends on efficiency.

More accurately. System efficiency. System efficiency means our working system or our operating system.

And more accurately depends on our quality of thinking.

That’s why i’ve been Learning and reading a lot of books on brain operation on neuroscience because our thoughts always Guide our actions.

Do you believe that our brains can be upgraded? Or do you believe that you set for life?

The moment that you believe your brain, your operating system can be upgraded with the right Information and the right practice is the moment that your life is changed.

One of the operating systems about money is saving. How much money do you save every week or every month? If you’re too focused on saving the small pennies that you are spending a lot of time, a lot of attention on saving that penny, you could be distracting yourself from focusing on making more money. And subconsciously you may be focusing too much on saving a penny because you don’t believe yourself can make the big money.

That has been my operating system for years. And of course, that makes sense for me to successfully save some pennies and dollars, but fail to really quantum leap money making as I wanted to.

Fortunately, we can change our operating system. And I’m going to tell you how.

One of the methods, a low cost very affordable one, is to read 10 books on neuroscience.

Not the ten books are going to help you change your operating system completely. But the attitude and effort in lifetime learning.

Lifetime learning is the only way to create compound effect. And compound effect is the only way we can get over the struggle of “I know! I know i’ve learned, i’ve heard about it. I know it, but I can’t do it”.

We live in an Information of full age. There is no reason why anyone wouldn’t live well today, given the Information that we have given the transparency of knowledge resources we have access to. But the fact is more people are getting stress , Depressed, having issues mentally, or simply not feeling happy.

What happened and why the explosion of Information and resources or everywhere couldn’t contribute to we live in a better life?

Because of Information overflow. Yes, you heard it right. It Is both a blessing and a curse.

Because of Information overflow, we have access to more knowledge than ever, but also because we have so much Information and knowledge, we get distracted. So much so that we feel like we know something. We’ve learned something. But in fact, we can practice it.

Practice is the only way to upgrade your operating system. If you read 10 books and without any practice without putting them into application, those ten books would not help you to upgrade your operating system. And without upgrading our operating system, we cannot upgrade our life.

If I have to boil all my sharing here into one sentence, it would be : practice, and application is the only way to upgrade our operating system, our brain.

But before we rush to apply in practice, first of all, there is a question.

What do we want?

A lot of people have been talking about “I want to get rich” “financial freedom. I want to have a better lifestyle.

But when we ask yourself, what exactly do you want? How rich do you want to be? The answers the same very vague and general :”as much money as a can make” or some random figure.

Neuro scientists and languages professionals told us that when our brains only have a vague concept about one thing, then it has the tendency to not think about that.

But life continues right?

And when we only have a vague idea of what we want, we don’t have a clear definition. We don’t have a clear concept. When life continues, the wrong action happens. The wrong direction happens. And we make poor choices and decisions. Because the direction is not clear.

Think about if you only have a unclear, blurred map that you can’t see clearly what you where you going. Of course, you’re going to make a wrong turn and feel very anxious, uncertain, insecured and stressed.

When we talk about what we want, a lot of people would say financial freedom has been a hot trend in the world for years. But do you really understand what financial freedom means? Do you really know what exactly it is that you want?

Some people would give me a logical explanation in terms of personal financing. That financial freedom is when your income — passive income, is sufficient to cover your expenses. So that you don’t need to actively work for your living. And when you enter that financial status that can be called early retirement or FIRE as well.

Nice try. Sounds very logical and makes sense right?

I used to buy in that definition as well.

But I was until I ask myself, what happens next? I can do whatever I like.

Yes, everybody says that.

But why can’t I do what I like now? Why I have to wait till I achieved certain financial status to do that?

Well, because we need to work actively?

What about before and after work? Are we going to work all our waking hours? Probably not.

On average, our productive hours are just two to four hours per day. For the other “working hours” we simply distracting ourselves with miscellaneous messages, rumors. Reading news updates about famous people, scroll social media, watch youtube, Netflix, play games etc.

We simply have too much time that we have to “kill time” with social media and other distractions . We are spending on average two to six hours on social media platforms per day.

If I use those hours doing whatever I love (Which could be scrolling social media if that’s what I love. But I doubt that I feel productive or feel happy or feel meaningful after doing that) , technically I am financially Free?

Or to be more accurate for each day. There are hours when we are not financially Free (when we have to do something that we don’t love, And there are those hours when we can decide or have more conscious choice of what we do with that time that we can dispose of to do what we love — that is the financially Free hours and time.

So in fact, each day we live both the financial not Free hours and also the financially Free hours, even before we have the financial resources passively supporting our expenses.

In essence, financial freedom is actually more about — time control, than how much money we passively make and spend.

When we have complete control of our time, we enjoy the status of “financially free”.

Once we are clear about this, financial freedom, in fact, means that one do not need to sell or trade time for money.

Now with this clear definition, we can have better action and decisions , including: how can we sell our time multiple times so that we’re not trading time for money? Or how can we set up systems or products or creations that can make money on our behalf without us having to trade time for money, for example, investment.

You see, with a new clear definition and clarification of concept, we shift from asking ourselves, “how can I make more money, or how can I save more money?” These types of general common questions, to, more accurately effectively and directly “How can we set up something that can gradually reduce and eventually stop trading time for money?”

That is an upgrade of our operating system.

One more concept clarification : financial freedom isn’t the destination, its just the beginning. Thereafter we need to think about financial management, financial preservation, financial inheritance. It’s a long path ahead.

What’s your thoughts on financial freedom?

Share with me — DM IG @simplifiedbusinesscoach or email SimplifiedBusinessCoach@gmail.com

With love,

Connie