I can’t think of a time when I’ve taken stock of my life, decided I wanted to expand some area of my personal freedom, and all I had to do was wait for this new dimension of freedom to be unlocked. Inevitably, there has always been some blend of action and time separating me from the status quo and the new level of freedom I hope to achieve. So, even though I think of freedom in many contexts as a state of being, acquiring more of it is often preceded by a fair amount of doing.
In my own journey, and as I’ve witnessed in the journeys of others, the desire for new or expanded levels of freedom is often motivated by the desire to move through life differently. This may mean having the freedom to do something or the freedom to not do something. This may mean having the freedom to be something or the freedom to not be something. Maybe it’s having the freedom to go somewhere, which means having the freedom to no longer have to go or be somewhere else. However, whether it’s freedom that enables something new or freedom that relieves the burden of something old, the freedom to is often dependent on first achieving the freedom from. Put generically:
My freedom to <insert verb> is dependent upon my freedom from <insert noun>.
None of this is particularly complicated, but I’ll share an example from my life to illustrate how I’ve navigated these dynamics in the past.
After around seven years of owning and operating restaurants, I started to feel an imbalance between the amount I was learning and the amount I was working. Up until that point, I accepted the workload because I was learning so much about starting, growing, expanding, and operating my businesses, not to mention how much I was learning about myself. But around that seven year mark, the learning curve started to flatten out and the long hours and never-ending stress no longer felt worth it. It was then that I knew it was time to begin my transition out.
Knowing you need to make a change is the first step, and I think many people stall out at this stage when they realize what will be required of them to actually make the change. In my case, because restaurants are not easy assets to get into or out of, I knew I had my work cut out for me if I wanted to exit. As difficult as that was to accept, it afforded me the time to take inventory of my experiences as a restauranteur and envision what I wanted to carry forward into the next stage of my life and what I wanted to leave behind. Both sides of the ledger were well-populated, but below are three qualities that really defined how I wanted my life to feel post-restaurants.
I wanted to be able to work from anywhere, i.e. I wanted freedom from the constraints of a physical location.
I wanted my next business to be less labor-intensive, i.e. I wanted freedom from employees.1
I wanted the ability to more easily unwind myself from my next venture, i.e. I wanted freedom from owning illiquid businesses.
Going back to the generic “equation” from earlier, my freedom to <insert all of the above> was dependent upon achieving freedom from the restaurants. In this case, because the restaurants dominated my life, freedom from that one variable could unlock the potential to pursue all of the other freedoms. It took me three years to finalize the sale of both restaurants, and I was still tied to the lease of one restaurant for four years after I sold it, but once I was free from, I’d earned my freedom to.
When thinking about the areas of your life in which you would like new or expanded freedom, I think it’s a good early step to identify what it is that you may first need freedom from. Sometimes, like in my case above, it couldn’t have been more obvious. Other times, it isn’t so clear. When you find yourself in the latter scenario, struggling to identify what it is you first need freedom from, there’s a good chance you need to turn your gaze inward. More on that in a later installment…
As always, thank you for reading The Free Dominion. If there are any topics related to freedom that interest you, please let me know. I really would love for this to become a conversation.
For the record, I worked alongside many incredible people during the restaurant years and am forever grateful for what I learned from them.
"an imbalance between the amount I was learning and the amount I was working"