This quote in Ryan Holliday’s excellent Daily Stoic book jumped out at me recently: “Addiction is the loss of the freedom to abstain.”
Freedom. I hear that word over, and over, and over, and over again from clients, prospective clients, business owners, business leaders, friends, and family. Everyone wants more freedom.
What this quote points out, though, is that so often we trade our freedom for our addictions. We taste a little success, and we want more. More customers, more money, to buy more stuff. We attend more networking and community events to build the customer funnel to support the rest. We get addicted to completing tasks on our to-do lists, making sure our calendars “look” full enough, and being present and available to everyone for everything.
Studying Stoic philosophy has taught me one very important thing: focus on what’s within your control. The number one thing in our control? The choices we make to respond to what happens in the world around us.
When we let the world and external events and people dictate what we do, what we should do, where we should be, what we should own, how we should look, we trade (for free, I might point out!) our freedom of choice. We give away our ownership of choosing. And when we give that away, we trade our freedom to abstain.
When people say they want freedom, they usually mean they want more free time. And if we zoom out further to the real core, they really want more time, period. There is an opportunity cost for every “yes” we give freely, most especially for every gift of our time.
When our addictions reach the point where we no longer have the power and freedom to abstain, the result is always the same: we begin trading our time, our most precious, valuable, and irreplaceable resource, to get more of our addiction. And then, we are no longer free. When we are no longer free, we no longer control our choices. And when we no longer control our choices, we’ve given up the only thing within our control.
So, if you want more freedom, or more free time, or just more time, the first place to look is not your calendar. It’s not your task list. And, no, it’s not your spouse and kids!
The first place to look is deep inside at your own addictions. When you start letting those go, you regain your freedom of choice, your freedom to abstain, and the freedom you truly seek.
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