It seems that most everybody theses days wants to become their own boss. We like to toss around words like ?freedom? and ?entrepreneur? but do we really have a good idea what they mean to us? We know what these words mean, but most people don’t understand what they would mean to them personally. We see so many people who call themselves entrepreneurs and claim to have the ?entrepreneurial spirit,? whatever that is, but are really just looking to make a quick buck. Nearly everyone’s biggest goal seems to be to achieve financial freedom and to become their own boss, or start their own company and there’s nothing wrong with wanting any of these things. What strikes me as odd is how some people set about acquiring them.
Rigid Control Does Not Equal Freedom
So many of these entrepreneurs out there just spend their time emulating other, more successful entrepreneurs, which works, but ultimately means a lot of work that they don’t enjoy doing. They try to fit themselves into a framework that they think successful entrepreneurs should follow. They have a strict diet, a strict schedule, they wake up at 5am, they force themselves to be ruthlessly productive. Sounds great on the surface except for the fact that their having no fun! They have trapped themselves within the rigid boundaries of a life that they think will help them achieve freedom . . . what the hell? Does that make sense to anybody? You’re caging yourself in to achieve freedom? What?!
When it comes to intention manifestation and the law of attraction, everyone out there tells you that you should ?act as if? what you want is already a reality. I don’t care how you feel about the law of attraction, this is damn good advice. In the Nature of Making Money I wrote about those people who claim that they will be happy once they are rich. This is a fallacy, that will never happen! If you’re unhappy now, you will be unhappy when you’re rich. Why, because a lack of money wasn’t what was making you unhappy to begin with. The same is true here. These entrepreneurs say to themselves that they will keep themselves under a rigid program until they become successful and then they will be able to kick back and write their own rules. Nope. Doesn’t work that way. If you aren’t relaxed and having fun now, do you really think there’s a chance that you will become so once you are successful and you have even more responsibilities and expectations to live up to? Yeah. Right.
If you don’t write you’re own rules now, how are you ever going to do it later?
Your Hard Work is Hardly Working
When I wake up every morning I sit in front of a blank piece of paper and write down my goals. I write out a sentence for each of my long term goals, just to keep them fresh in my mind, then I write out the goals I want to get done that day. I write out these daily goals in a way that will best fit them into my day. When I plan out big projects, I write out all of the small steps that will go into its completion in the order that will make me the happiest. I used to write down these goals and project plans in the order in which I felt they would be the most efficient. I wanted them completed in the quickest possible time. The only problem was that this generally put me in a position of procrastination because I didn’t feel like tackling a particularly unsavory item on the list.
Many of you reading this will say that my problem was a lack of self discipline, but I assure that that wasn’t it at all. My problem had nothing to do with forcing myself to complete my tasks, it had to do with the order in which I had made my list. I hadn’t made the order in a manner that took into account what I felt like doing at any given moment. My list was catered to efficiency, it wasn’t catered to me.
Isn’t this why we all want to be entrepreneurs? So we can get away from the jobs that put productivity and efficiency above employ enjoyment and happiness? How can we now tell ourselves that this kind of rigid control is going to give us the freedom that we’re looking for? If we’re not going to give ourselves that freedom, how can we expect the rest of the world to give it to us? I’m not saying that bringing success into your life isn’t going to require a certain amount of change on your part, but you have to know what changes are going to be beneficial and which ones are just wasting your energy and serving to fence you in further. Learn to change only what will make you happier and, more importantly, learn how to change it.
The Nature of Changing Your Life
It isn’t an incredible leap of faith to realize that your thoughts, actions and habits are the reason you have the life you have. That is to say, so far you’ve taken all of the steps necessary to get you to this point in your life. This also means that if you want to get somewhere else and change your current state, you’re going to have to change the steps you are taking; your thoughts, actions, and habits. We all seem to know this but what we don’t know is how to go about making these changes. We’re very literal and radical in our approach to change, we view this side of our lives as black and white. We say to ourselves, ?Either I am doing this habit, which is bad, or I’m doing this habit, which is good, and I see no third option.? So if, say for example, we wish to start waking up earlier we think that the answer is obviously to change our sleeping habits. We’ll go to bed earlier and therefore wake up earlier. This is a logical idea, which is bound to fail miserably because it doesn’t take into account all of the factors that go into a good nights sleep.
What we don’t seem to understand is that our bodies and minds are not used to drastic change, in fact, they don’t like drastic changes at all. Most of the data out there says that it takes your body and mind around two weeks to become accustomed to a new habit if all things are equal, i.e. no chemical habits. What this means is that our bodies have a period during which they must adjust to what is happening to them and this is an understandably fragile period. It is because of this adjustment period that the sleep example above will fail. Once your body and your mind get used to doing things a certain way, at a certain time, breaking them of that habit will only ever happen gradually.
This is the mistake we so often make when it comes to making changes in our lives. We tell ourselves that we must change our thoughts, actions and habits, but we fail miserably every time we try until we finally throw up our hands in anguish and decide it just wasn’t meant to be. The reason we failed has nothing to do with whether or not we had enough self discipline or enough knowledge. The cause of our failure has to do with our desire for change and our ability to work with our natural tendencies.
False Idols
It’s true that one of the best ways to be successful is to find out how other people have become successful and do some variation of that. That’s not to say that this method is an easy way to success but it is certainly one of the best. The only problem is that we sometimes forget that we are different people. I am not Benjamin Franklin and therefore will not operate in the same ways that Franklin worked. This isn’t to say that I cannot achieve the same successes he enjoyed, but simply that I will reach the same ends in different ways. To often we read books wherein some millionaire tells us that if we want to be great we should wake up early in the morning to get started on our work. So what do we do? See the previous section.
When we find ourselves in these situations we think ?Excellent! I have to start waking up at the crack of dawn to get going on my goals!? The only problem is that, while waking up at the crack of dawn is a great idea at 5:00pm, it’s a suckie idea at 5:00am. Our 5am-self looks and the clock and can’t even remember what the hell a goal is, much less what ours are and why we should get going on them now. Screw that! Snooze Button!
The problem here is not that we aren’t disciplined enough to wake up early, it’s that we didn’t even take the time to stop and think about whether or not we wanted to get up early. We didn’t stop and ask ourselves whether or not we would even be productive at 5am. Sure, we’re up, we’re conscious, but is the work we’re doing really going to be worthy of us? Are we being productive with our extra time, or would we have been better off to sleep until 8 and do better work? If you’re one of those people who truly love waking up at 5am, great! More power to you. If, however, you are one of those who is trying to fool themselves into being productive that early, let it go. Be nicer to yourself, there’s no shame in not being someone else.
So many people, myself included, ran out to other self improvement blogs on the Internet and read about all the other authors who wake up at 5am, jump out of bed feeling great and go for a ten mile run before coming back home to make their millions and thought ?Gee, I just have to do what that guy does!? This is faulty thinking in a big way because I didn’t stop to think about the fact that I don’t enjoy waking up at 5am or that I’m barely coherent at that hour. Could I do it? Certainly. Did I need to, or want to? No even a little bit.
When I was 15, I wrote my first novel and no, it is not a novel you will ever read. Everyday over the summer of my freshman year of high school I wrote 2,000 words a day without fail. I never went to bed without 2,000 words saved safely on my computer. By the end of the summer I had a novel that was over 80,000 words long. Did my 15 year old self wake up every morning at 5am to get started on my writing? Oh, hell no. In fact I wouldn’t go to sleep until around 7 or 8 every morning. I did my writing after midnight when the rest of the house was in bed. I had tried doing my writing earlier in the day, but it just wouldn’t happen. I was at my best when everyone was asleep, the world was silent, dark and the heat of the day had dissipated. I had a cool breeze, late night radio, darkness and silence. The mood was perfectly conducive to work, even putting aside the fact that I was already naturally inclined to be a night-owl. My system worked so well with my natural tendencies that the next year I did it again, writing a second novel that surpassed the first in length and, incidentally, in quality.
Back then I did an impressive thing for my age, something that most adults don’t have the patience for now. Was I a particularly incredible kid? Well, I like to think so, but honestly, no I wasn’t. I was smarter than most, but overall I was about average. The key to my success was learning to work with my own natural desires and tendencies. I didn’t fight my natural urges to try to make myself work better. I figured out at what time of day and in what setting I did my best work and worked only in those times. Let’s face it, at the end of the day, the best you can do is only ever going to be the best you can do. Find when you’re work is at it’s best and stick to it. It didn’t matter to 15 year old Daniel that Stephen King liked to write in the morning, that didn’t concern me because I didn’t share that desire. I liked to write at night and that was all that mattered.
I said before that one of the best ways to be successful was to emulate what the successful people do. This is still true. You can use this method and become wildly successful, you just won’t be happy doing it. The idea that you can find the freedom in your life that you desire by placing constraints on yourself is laughable. Start taking steps now toward progressive freedom. Be happy now because there isn’t time to wait for the time to be right. Start working in a way that works for you and stop trying to be someone you’re not. Your success is going to come from you, not from the ?entrepreneur? you’re trying to be.
Stand up for your freedom! Take it back from yourself.