Getting Paid More, But Feel Like You Have Less Freedom? – Insights Into Freedom Series, Part 9

Inside this video, I want to continue with the insights that I’ve learned during my work days in pursuing what I call the Professional Model of Freedom.

As you’ll see, it’s actually flawed. You can get some measure of freedom, but it’s not that great.

Let’s just go through the steps here…

When you start getting a job. Say you’ve got the qualification; you’ve got the job, this can be any job for that matter. You start getting money, which is great… At the beginning, you spend all of it on things that you couldn’t buy when you didn’t have any money. And it’s quite liberating in a way.

So you start getting income and it slowly grows and grows. There’s probably going to be some sort of a threshold that you can reach as a professional because essentially, you’re charging out your time if you’re getting paid by the hour.

You only have a limited number of hours within a week. So even if you’re really a big hotshot CEO, or whatever, your income is still going to be quite limited. It might have an increased curve, but then there’s going to be some sort of a threshold that it’s going to reach.

Some people’s thresholds will be higher than others, but there will still be a threshold.

Now, let’s look at the freedom curve… As you start earning more money, you start getting more freedom because you can do more things. However, you’re still stuck in a place where you have to turn up everyday. So your freedom is a little bit limited. Even though you’re getting more freedom, it is limited.

The next thing that happens is, once again, not intuitively obvious. Your freedom starts decreasing. This is the weird thing that you don’t expect when you’re starting out in your career.

The harder you work at your career, the more experienced you become and the more able you become, the more you get advanced into higher levels of your career.

Perhaps, you start off as an apprentice or as a beginner. You progress into a more advanced type of person, maybe you get advanced into management and maybe into other managerial roles. Perhaps into project management; and maybe build it up even to CEO level.

What happens is that you start working longer hours because you start getting paid more, so you feel you’ve got to work more.

What happens then?… If you start working longer hours and you are getting paid more, essentially your freedom decreases. That’s not good.

I worked for five years. When I was working, the more I progressed in my career, I thought, “Great, I’m getting paid more.” But I felt that my freedom was getting less and less.

I think I quited at just the right time. Because my freedom was just dropping and dropping, even though my income was increasing. I was becoming more and more unhappy.

I think that’s something to keep in mind. It’s fine having that as a business or freedom model. But you’ve got to realize that your freedom is going to be limited. The more advanced and the better you become at your job, the chance of your freedom becoming less increases as well.

Basically, your freedom reduces as you become more advanced in your business levels and as you grow in the management levels of your business.

That’s it for my working life, the three insights that I had and the freedom model that goes along with it. That’s the third freedom model that I pursued that didn’t quite suit what I wanted to do.

Perhaps you could look at this now and learn from my experience and see for yourself whether that is a freedom model that you want to pursue. Or if you’re looking for something better.

And inside the next videos, I’m going to share with you how I started my own business, the early days of the business and some of the key insights I’ve learned there, and the different freedom models that I pursued as I was starting my business.

I’m very excited to share that with you because they’ve been very valuable in my life and business career. I know that they’re going to be worthwhile for you as well.

Thank you so much for watching once again. I’ll see you inside the next video!