How to Achieve (Real) Financial Freedom
By: Tim Denning
Tags: Skills, Entrepreneurship, Productivity, Work, Money

Financial freedom isn’t living on a yacht with a laptop.

Financial freedom is accidentally romanticized. Financial freedom is having the time to work on whatever you want, instead of working solely to pay off debt. Many people are guilted into thinking financial freedom is a reality they will never reach. “The economy is screwed. There’s no hope for you.”

What if there was another way to buy back your time? There is.

The Power of Focusing All of Your Time on One Thing

Author Derek Sivers says, “You get wealthy by learning valuable skills.”

So learning a skill is the key to financial freedom. There’s way more to it. Many of us learn skills yet it gets us nowhere. Why?

Focus amplifies results.

You might be learning a new skill that can get you to financial freedom, but if you spread your attention across too many skills then you’re unlikely to ever get there. I used to do this as a musician. I learned drums, sound engineering, DJing, and piano all at the same time.

I had mediocre skills in each area, although zero mastery. Eventually, I burned out from mental illness and a lack of results. Had I have gone all-in on DJing, who knows what might have happened.

The power isn’t in a range of skills. The power is focusing on a single skill.

Many of us have done that too. What’s missed is you need to focus your attention on a single skill for a consecutive number of years. The value of a skill takes time to unlock because you have to transcend the basics that are commoditized and easily learned by your competition.

Once you transcend the basics of a skill, you’re on a path that can create financial freedom.

The Enjoyment X Factor

Out of piano, DJing and drums, I liked DJing the most. DJing gave me enjoyment because it allowed me to tinker with software and replace my lack of musicianship with electronic instruments. The piano put a frown on my face because reading notes on a page from hundreds of years ago feels like a slow death in the Amazon jungle.

The skill worth investing in is the one you enjoy.

Enjoyment is an X factor. It helps you learn faster. It gives you a benefit other than money, titles, or accolades to motivate you to keep going in the early days when you have no idea what you’re doing.

Stay away from clickbait news

Clickbait news beats the financial freedom out of you.

It tells you society is screwed and you can never have financial freedom. If you consume enough of this content you start to believe the lie. The truth is this content is designed to earn its creators likes that lead to money.

Telling you that you can’t have financial freedom is a new business model called demotivation. Logic sells this dream. Because reaching financial freedom is obviously a lot of work, so telling you it’s never going to happen is a logical reason to give up or never get started.

Being told you’re stupid every day and should sit on the couch and rant on Twitter isn’t helpful to achieving any version of financial freedom. Human existence is hard enough without clickbait demotivation that burns you out.

Your content inputs determine your financial outputs.

Invest time and money differently

Financial freedom is built on skills. The challenge is skills take time and money to build. You have to be prepared to invest.

Last week, for example, I invested a bunch of money in a number of courses that taught me how to use Twitter differently. It turns out retweets don’t work that well. It turns out me stupidly publishing blog post links on Twitter gets me ignored by a wider audience. It turns out you have to tell people clearly what topics you want to be known for.

I believed my approach to Twitter was genius. That’s based on my ego. I had to invest time and money to learn to think differently. Our biases shape our experience. Investing time and money helps you get out of your own head and learn new approaches to things you think you’ve already mastered but probably haven’t.

Investing in your skills is better than any financial asset. Skills provide the income that enables you to buy real financial assets later on, like stocks, real estate, gold, and bitcoin/ethereum.

Go beyond your place of residence

I was a bubble boy. I stayed in my bedroom bubble and didn’t venture outside. The skill I learned is to have conversations with new people online and hear about their journeys. As I did, I was able to take snippets of other creators’ journeys and paste them into my own.

It’s exhausting trying to figure out everything on your own. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of people all trying to learn the same skill and reach their version of financial freedom.

Start conversations to escape the loneliness of acting on your creativity.

Finish the message with “I completely understand if you’re too busy to reply and don’t feel any responsibility to.” That one sentence triples your response rate because it shows empathy.

Financial freedom is built on what you do regularly

When you reveal your daily schedule it shows your financial future. Financial freedom isn’t an accident. It’s built on top of skills that become daily habits. Habits that lead to money are best scheduled in a calendar so there is no debate about what has to be done.

Since quitting my job I have a pretty full calendar. The difference with my old dinosaur corporate job is the majority of the appointments are with myself. I don’t want to be trading time for money for the rest of my life. I’d like to have a life, raise a family, spend time with my elderly parents, etc.

Goals are fluffy and nice.

A schedule that leads to financial freedom is undeniable.