There is a point when technology stops being a solution, and instead, becomes a question. Namely, how do you want to live? The tools of the 21st century may afford us the luxury of working anywhere, but how much of our work lives are deliberate decisions as opposed to accumulated accidents? If you started with a clean sheet of paper, how would you design your day? It’s harder than it sounds, and I also quickly learned that there were three things that stood in my way. I ended up calling them the three rules of freedom.
And here they are...
1. Fire Your Boss
Years ago, fresh out of law school - I almost took a job at a high profile management consultancy. The firm only hired five graduates a year, the interview process was a gruelling ten rounds of arcane analytical exercises and psychological probes, and finally getting the offer letter was like winning a video game. But to my family’s dismay, I ended up returning the sign-on bonus, trashing the letter and never taking the job.
What forced my hand was a conversation with another consultant. He was in his early thirties and married to another professional. They were smart, neurotic, and miserable. Always on assignment, they never saw each other, held huge amounts of mortgage debt, and having become addicted to five star life, were terrified daily of losing their jobs and lifestyle in their highly political work environments.
High income attached to high contingency is the opposite of freedom. That’s how I learned my first rule of freedom - find a way to make money without relying on someone else. Having a job is like having one client who can leave at any time. So I fired my boss on my 30th birthday. On that morning I quit my job, spent three months writing my first book in a cafe, and then spent three more utterly terrifying years learning to survive without the safety net of a pay check. Believe me, six years on, achieving that has been far more rewarding than any end of year bonus or executive corner office.
So does mean you should go and quit your big company job tomorrow? Of course not. But it does mean, that when you evaluate your position you should ask yourself how contingent is your personal satisfaction on the whims of someone above you. Is your contribution valued and recognised throughout your firm, or is everything you do filtered through one person who has become the gatekeeper to your progress?
2. Fire Your Staff
I talk to a lot of managers, and believe me - most of the time their biggest source of stress is not their work, but their staff. As Sartre put it, hell is other people. I have hired a lot of smart people in my time, much smarter than me. I know that for a fact, because almost all of them have since gone on to become multi millionaires and industry pioneers in their own right. I always prided myself on hiring people that didn’t need a job, but about the time they learned Rule #1 for themselves, I also learned Rule #2. When you spend all your time managing people, you don’t get to spend that time doing what you actually enjoy.
Sure - unless you write songs for a living or trade futures contracts alone in your home - it’s pretty hard to make money without other people. These days, I still work with a lot of people much smarter than me - but they don’t actually work for me. I’m not their boss. They are my agents, my contractors, my partners or collaborators. I don’t have to plan their careers, just make sure that I’m delivering on my side of the bargain.
Shifting your mindset about working with people is a valuable lesson even if you have people working for you. The next generation have a different sense of the possibilities of life and world than we did. You may see them as your staff, but they will increasingly see themselves as freelancers.
3. Fire Your Clients
I know what you are thinking. How can you run a business, especially your own business, without clients? And true enough, Rule #3 is the one rule I’m yet to personally achieve. But hear me out. Clients are an anathema to freedom.
Clients provide you with the funds you need to survive, but in doing so, they occupy both your time and can easily re-direct your purpose. Many small advisory businesses are destroyed by their one big client. They end up allocating their entire resources to that one account, who can either walk away leaving them hanging, or worse, buy them, and turn their business into a job.
So if you fire you clients, how do you make money? There is a big difference between clients and customers. Clients tell you want they want you to do, but customers buy what you are selling. Clients hire you to help them achieve their dreams, but if you instead focus on your own dreams - your customers will find you. It is that distinction that makes websites like Kickstarter so important. Many of the people that use it to raise money to fund their projects, might have otherwise been simply been designing products for other people. But with the opportunity to find customers to back them, they get to see their ideas come to life.
And what is that, if not the best way to live?
