Financial Freedom Starts out Being Absolutely Brutal

Everything looks easy until you sit in a room for a day with a person who created something out of nothing and unlock their process.

Photo by One Zone Studio on Unsplash

When I used to hear about financial freedom it made me want to buy a pony.

Ponies equal the good life.

Get on a pony and ride your life away, they say. If I was filthy rich you’d find me in the backyard riding a pony, eating a vanilla ice cream.

The problem with financial freedom is it isn’t the fantasy glossy images on Instagram make it out to be. What nobody tells you about financial freedom is it’s absolutely brutal. A friend of mine has just quit their job. They want to be financially free, and already have two kids under six.

In-between babysitting and picking up toys, she’s creating a learning app. Her day is jam-packed. She has no idea if she is ever going to make money from her idea, especially in a deep recession.

Another friend set up a chain of restaurants. The first one was a hit. After about twenty restaurants he was exhausted. He tried to sell the whole franchise and got peanuts for it. Turns out it’s easy to copy a glorified sandwich without bread.

I became financially free too. But I did so mostly through the elimination of the unessential, as opposed to a smart idea. The amount of money I needed to become financially free was a number I was willing to compromise on. Why?

The feeling of financial freedom is far better than owning material stuff you don’t need.

It Starts out like a Nightmare

I started my path towards financial freedom with an extreme disease of the mind. The world looked dark. I didn’t trust anybody. It was exhausting just to live, let alone create anything.

The early days felt like a nightmare because I had the burden of mental illness combined with the painstaking effort required to get anything off the ground. I wanted to be a blogger, but finding the time to write when you hate yourself and can barely get out of bed is near-impossible.