I view economic freedom as the ability to control your own work life on a daily basis. To choose where you want to work and what you want to do. To choose if you want to work full time, or if you’d rather live simpler and work less hours.

You can get rich if you learn to leverage the skills of others, but you can take ownership of your future if you can figure out how to become self-reliant.

“In this way you must understand how laughable it is to say, ‘Tell me what to do!’ What advice could I possibly give? No, a far better request is, ‘Train my mind to adapt to any circumstance.’…In this way, if circumstances take you off script…you won’t be desperate for a new prompting.”

Epictetus

Not all careers are compatible with that type of flexibility, but many are, and many more could be.

Unrelated ferrets“Euteleostomi (bony vertebrates)” is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Services like Uber and Doordash allow people with cars to make their own hours doing deliveries. Market forces will shape demand curves, but there is no boss to drive your decision making.

Unfortunately those companies and many like them view People as an expense to be squeezed out of their businesses.

Other services like Shopify make it easier for individuals to start their own businesses with global reach. These types of services give people Freedom.

With effort, you can achieve a balance between your expenses and your income, if you are able to move somewhere with a lower cost of living.

With more time, you can focus on building yourself. You are capable of far more than you realize. With dedicated effort and perseverance you can build your skills and capabilities.

If you put the effort into learning to play music, you can become a musician.

If you put the effort into learning how to program, a whole world of opportunities open up.

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”  — Archimedes

If you had complete control over your life and how you spent your days, how would you use them?

For me, understanding that was the key to realizing what I was capable of.

For most of my life I doubted myself in ways that made it difficult for me to try to influence others. Instead, I focused on learning to solve problems myself, and I built a very successful career doing it.

Now that I have the opportunity to take a wider look around, enabled by taking a step away from the daily routine, I get just an inkling of how much broad knowledge I was missing.

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”  — Charles Dickens

So what should I do with this perspective? I can help others see what they don’t currently understand. I can help people understand that we do better as individuals when we work collaboratively to free each other than we do when we work to help others gain wealth and power.

I can show people how to help.

“Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.” -- Epictetus