Tag: personal freedom

Removing your desire

I just love this quote from Epictetus as it highlights the fact that all those cravings you seek to fulfill only detract from your freedom, in fact, they begin to enslave you. The examples are endless, but let’s take a look at a few:

  • I make a modest income, but I want a $60,000 sports car, the dollar figure doesn’t really matter and is somewhat relative. I go to the bank and now have a car loan for $1.200 a month for 5 years. I think I look cool driving around town, but instead of investing that money, which might ultimately provide some actual freedom, I am a slave to my car loan.
  • I decide I need to make more money, so I work harder and get promoted, but now instead of working 40 hours a week, I am working 60 hours a week. The hobbies I once had have been shelved and I hardly see my family anymore, but I make another $20,000 a year. I find that the additional money doesn’t do much for me, as I really don’t have time to spend it. My health and relationships are suffering and instead of freedom I just imprisoned myself with an occasional furlough called a vacation.
  • I decide now that I am a wealthy man that I need to upgrade my spouse by marrying a much younger woman or maybe having an affair. I end up sneaking around and find a younger woman and start a relationship (affair). My wife finds out, kicks my sorry ass out of the house, and calls an attorney. Six months later my estate is cut in half and I now live in a small apartment. Oh, and by the way, the younger woman walked out some time ago, when she realized I am really not that wealthy. Of course, my children think I am an asshole and I no longer have my wonderful wife to grow old with and who has been taking care of things for me as she did in the past.
  • I decided that to help me forget all the stupid decisions I made based on my desires; I would drown myself in alcohol on the weekends. Instead of helping me forget about my bad decisions, or God forbid doing something about them, I am now an addict. I did not free my mind and instead enslaved my body to what has become a serious addiction.

You might think these are silly examples of cravings that enslaved a person, but I have seen all of these as pretty common human behavior. Check yourself and determine if the things you desire are healthy and enhance your freedom or if they are imprisoning you. For most of us the more we desire, the less freedom we experience. The freest among us often have the least in material possessions and want but little. In fact, these desires that you might even consider to be fairly positive such as exercise or even enhancing your knowledge come with a price and can become an addiction.

If you want freedom desire less, appreciate what you have, and stop craving for things you don’t have.

Namaste

 

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Personal freedom – from want to a plan

goal_setting

In my last post I defined what personal freedom is to me and how it is sought after by many of us, but how can it be realized? Certainly the path may be different for each of us as we have different skills, desires, and risk appetites. The one thing we can all benefit from is having some kind of goals that we can achieve which will lead us down the path towards personal freedom and financial independence.

I’ve always been a big fan of setting goals, and I have lots of experience doing it, which has led to continued growth both personally and professionally. I also realize there are limitations to goal setting and if not accompanied by action they are not very useful. So you must first decide that if I set a goal, than I intend to follow-up and do something about it. You will also need to think about your goals very carefully to ensure you have the right goals, because pursuing the wrong ones is a waste of time and precious effort. If personal freedom is one of your goals you will need to have smaller short-term goals that support it. One way to do this is to have goals that fit into at least two-time frames:

  • Less than 1 year
  • Greater than 1 year

In the past I had goals that were in three categories (< 1 year, 1 – 3 years, > 3 years), but it seemed that I was trying to plan out everything so far into the future that I really wasn’t sure what I really wanted and it did nothing but remove my focus on my short and mid term  goals. My advice is keep your goal setting in the 1 – 3 year range, anything beyond that is really speculating and doesn’t help you achieve results in the near term.

I would also recommend being specific on how you phrase your goals, and give them target dates so you have a set amount of time to achieve the goal. It is also important that you not have too many goals and goals that are due during the same time frame. While you want goals that motivate you, they must also be achievable, so be a little conservative at first when setting goals. An example of this would be say that I’m making $100,000 a year and I want to make $150,000 in within a years time. Maybe it would be more realistic to set the goal as $125,000 and if you exceed it, then great, but even if you get a promotion or a new job and you do hit the target you did great and you won’t feel disappointed with that pretty awesome 25% increase in salary. Here are 10 tips for setting goals:

  1. Make them a stretch but achievable with effort.
  2. Be specific in the way they are worded, making sure they indicate an outcome.
  3. Categorize them into time frames of < 1 year and > 1 year.
  4. Shorter term goals may support longer term goals.
  5. Make sure you have a target date to achieve the goal.
  6. Be sure and include personal goals as well as professional goals.
  7. Use some kind of task management system to break a goal down into tasks. I use something called My Life Organizer (MLO).
  8. Don’t create too many goals. When you have other ideas for a goal put it in a parking lot and think about it before committing.
  9. Make sure the goals you create are visible, so that you are seeing them everyday.
  10. Realize that your goals will change, some will be removed, and replaced by other goals as you learn more and come to various conclusions regarding what you really want to achieve.

One or more of your long-term goals will be related to obtaining personal freedom and it might be transitioning to being self-employed. Maybe personal freedom to you means being completely retired, but whatever it is you need to take some time to think about your goals. First determine what you really want and then work backwards to determine the goals that support your long term objectives. Here is an example of how this might look:

Short Term (less than 1 year)

Goal Target
Start playing guitar again 02/11/2017
Get a Brittany Spaniel dog 02/28/2017
Create Living Will and Trust 03/31/2017
Obtain XYZ certification 03/31/2017
Positive cash flow in my home based business 07/28/2017
Remodel Kitchen and replace flooring 09/31/2017

 

Long Term (greater than 1 year)

Goal Target
Start teaching project management online 03/31/2018
$3,000 income per month in my home based business 07/31/2018
Have 5,000 followers on my blogs 12/31/2018
Have 10,000 Twitter followers 12/31/2018
Have 10,000 YouTube followers 06/30/2019
Transition to self-employed 12/09/2019
Finish my first book 12/31/2020

Let’s say you wanted to manage your own business, do some writing, and teach project management in effect transitioning to being self-employed and having a lot more personal freedom than you currently have. Besides some of your personal goals you have some business oriented ones like having a positive cash flow in your home based business, increasing your social media presence on Twitter, YouTube, and your blog; all of these lead you to your ultimate goal of transitioning to self employment. This is merely an example, your own plan will be different and unique to your own situation and time-table.

You now have a starting point to begin taking action. You have considered what personal freedom means to you and have constructed a plan to get there, now you must start achieving your goals. Each goal will have potentially many tasks that go into achieving that goal, so your next step should be breaking down the goal into tasks and performing those tasks in a time frame that supports the target date for each goal.

I am personally committed to a business called MyDailyChoice that I will be working on to help me obtain personal freedom. Check it out if you have a few minutes.

In my next post we will go into more detail on goal setting and more importantly how to achieve them.

Personal freedom

FreedomQuote_Robert Frost.jpg

I have spent the past 35 years working in information technology after graduating from college. My career has been a good one, where I have had a number of different roles, which made it interesting for many years. Even though things have been good I would say that my interest level has steadily declined over the past 5 years, and I began searching for other ways to express myself. I found blogging and Twitter a couple of years ago and this has helped me find a way to express myself, but I was always looking for a way to increase what I am calling my personal freedom. If you are like me the thought of spending another 10 years in a cubicle has become totally unacceptable. Lately I feel like the plot just keeps playing itself out over and over, and it feels like no matter who I work for I am just reinventing the wheel over and over again.

Personal freedom as I define it, is about having a choice on how I spend my time on this earth. To have personal freedom means having more control over your destiny including how you spend your time, who you spend your time with, and overcoming the limits inherent in working for someone else. It may be that it took me longer to realize what I wanted because I was learning, making a great living, and getting enough fulfillment from what I did that I felt no great need to make a change, but that satisfaction has dissipated over the past few years . I’m sure the fact that I am getting a little older was also an influence, as I began to realize that time increases in value when it becomes more limited. I guess we all just reach a tipping point in our lives, when it is more difficult to stay the course than to choose a new one. If you feel like each day you go into work that it seems to be sucking the life out of you, and you count the hours and minutes until it is time to leave, and you are thouroughly uniterested in the endless corporate babble; then you are getting close to that magical momement where you are ready to make a change. I’m not advocating that you quit your job tomorrow, but if you feel like I do, you know that you need to make a plan to transition out of the drudgery that may be your existence and find some personal freedom.

In my next post, I would like to talk about some things that I have been doing, and how you can set some goals and take action to go from dreaming about personal freedom to actually realizing it.

Namaste