A recent thought I stumbled upon: the key to freedom is self-awareness of where you’ve made yourself a slave.
This is a bit off the beaten path for me, but it’s aimed at my business owner friends (and anyone else) who feel stuck in operator mode 24/7.
All of us are possessed by certain needs and wants. The needs may be true necessities, or they may be our exaggerated versions of what is truly needed to live our lives.
But if we focus on the wants, the desires, the lifestyles, and even the control which we, at all costs, must exert over our businesses, we find insight into the places where we’ve allowed ourselves (perhaps even made ourselves?) to become slaves.
Every time we commit resources to some new desire or want, whether once or in recurring fashion, we give away a little of our freedom. Since our freedom, or the resources that allow it, is limited, the more we “give away”, the less we have.
These can be the subscriptions you choose, the car brand you drive, the balance sheet items you acquire for your business, the tasks you choose not to teach and empower others to do in your company, and so many other personal and professional things.
The less we want, the less we have to trade some of our freedom to get it. But to want less, we first have to take an inventory of where we’ve already given up our freedoms. True self-awareness is the key to successfully freeing ourselves.
A great question to ask is “What game am I playing that I never consciously chose to enter?”
Give that a try, take a self-aware inventory of where you’ve enslaved yourself, and see what you can offload to get some of your freedom back.
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