“Can you teach courage?”
“No. You can’t teach it. You can only show people how good it feels to be free.”
Natan Sharansky
Freedom is not the easiest concept to grasp. From the very important things in life, it’s the most invisible one.
This is why if your life is static and driven by inertia, your drive for freedom suffers. You are not reminded that you have near infinite different paths of future choices. And some lead to freedom you can only dream about. Because when inertia and sheep mode prevail, you forget how to dream.
We can define Freedom in the simplest possible terms: How many meaningfully different paths can I take?
Many different paths = High freedom
Few different paths = Low freedom
The constraints on freedom are two kinds:
- Game of Self limitations (our own abilities, fears and barriers)
- Game of Life limitations (our health, family and relationships, moral responsibilities to others and financial freedom)
A central concept of I Grow Younger is to use freedom as the metric for success in self improvement.
Freedom is measurable
It’s simply the amount of different things you can do. While it may be difficult to count all our choices, we want to feel growth which means just comparing the freedom of me now to the freedom I had as past me and the potential freedom of future me.
Only people with a certain level of freedom can participate in making the world better at scale – the more people with the higher freedom, the better. The rest are just fighting for their own survival in The Game of Self and Game of Life and their impact for society will be limited to non-scalable contributions – like being kind and keeping a good connection with reality.
Freedom is everywhere which makes it all-important
The invisibility of freedom can make it sound less important than say love or happiness. But this is an illusion, they are all on the same level of importance in the structure of life.
This is how we define self growth – Improving Long Term Freedom
Why Long Term?
There are different types of freedom in life but over time they influence each other directly and indirectly so much that in the end you just have your Total Freedom – the number of all the different long term paths you can embark on.
Some people feel that pure freedom only exists in the abstract and can only be lost in real life, leading to an endless struggle against the constraints to keep at least some freedom. But this is not true as life also creates freedom for you – by inventing and discovering new stuff and even more so at a high level, we can increase our Long Term Freedom for us and others.
Freedom does not mean a lack of commitment to the rich, beautiful things in life. Not at all! Starting a family and having kids may seem like a huge limitation on freedom and in reality it is. But life with kids gives you freedom too, because you can experience a new universe of emotions that people without kids will probably never be able to. You lose a lot and gain a lot.
Increasing your long term freedom means more chances to find self-love and unconditional love. More experience to build wisdom upon. More self-knowledge about what brings you happiness. More given to your loved ones and humanity in general. Your potential is and will always be limitless. But the journey of fulfilling more of it sooner goes via increasing your Long Term Freedom at every possible step.
And I have no better example of this then my favorite (high freedom) laws of Peter Diamandis:
- When given a choice, Take Both! (my personal fav!)
- Multiple projects lead to multiple successes.
- Start at the top and work your way up.
- When forced to compromise, ask for more.
- If you can’t beat them, join them–then beat them!
- If it’s worth doing it’s got to be done right now!
- If you can’t win, change the rules.
- If you can’t change the rules, then ignore them.
- When faced without a challenge, make one.
- ‘No’ simply means begin again at one higher level.
- Don’t walk when you can run.
- The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live.
+ more
(By Peter H. Diamandis M.D. http://www.diamandis.com/peters-laws/)
Our identity and Game of Self in the context of Long Term Freedom
The legendary Seth Godin summarized most of human existence in 7 words:
People like us do things like this
Remember most things can be done in thousands, even millions of ways. If you limit yourself to what your broad group usually does, you will not end up in special places, have interesting ideas or earn more money. You’ll be about average for your group. Which is not bad but can be better. Why not strive for more and make your life journey more interesting and fulfilling?l
Having a changing identity or even none is not a bug of our system. It’s a feature.
Living with no big ass identity, no defining life story, is a serious psychological challenge. But one worth living because you will inevitably write down your own. And the story of writing down your life story will become your life story. You are not missing out!
The danger of identities, stories and boxes is that it’s not so easy to leave them behind. They limit our long term freedom much more than we realize.
We don’t generally get to create our new identity until later in life. We are born with our race, gender, looks, sexual orientation, location and class set mostly in stone for the first 20 years. Some are unchangeable, some you can fight to improve. But try not to view them as an inseparable part of your story if you seek long term freedom. When you fight for your long term freedom, being a victim-as-part-of-a-group is no longer an option, When you fight for the long term freedom of others, you’re a hero by definition.
Your professional life is a competition for resources. You need money, trust, attention, knowledge etc. In this competition everyone is in the same game. You’re responsible for your own future. The world is changing fast and you need speed and adaptability, not a supporting structure that might be gone next year. So whether you like it or not, even if you’re working a day job, you’re in the same game as entrepreneurs. So you will eventually have the same challenges as an entrepreneur. The quicker you stop running away from them, the better. The best is just to admit you’re an entrepreneur already.
Our life choices in the context of Long Term Freedom
For a start in our heads our choices are 2 types:
- Choosing what direction to follow: (Let’s call those horizontal choices)
- Choosing how much you follow it, how deep you dive in (Let’s call those vertical choices)
How people imagine those two work: We make a big horizontal choice (eg. study law) and then it’s a multi-year grind on the vertical one until we graduate or quit in tears.
However if you value your long-term freedom you should really prioritize horizontal choices. Consider more options more often. This is what freedom actually is – options.
Because in reality all choices are horizontal. The more freedom you want… the more choices you want. And they are horizontal.
So if we want the highest long term freedom possible, we just need two things:
- Making more horizontal choices
- Maximizing the long term freedom (for ourselves and/or others) on each horizontal choice.
But making more horizontal choices is just the multiplied result of two different things:
- More options each time. All horizontal choices are binary – do I do X? So more options = more choices
- Having such choices more often (living at a faster pace and larger scale).
So in result we have the ultimate algorithm for long term freedom:
- Living at a faster pace so you develop deeper intuition about choices and options
- Considering every option possible (you will filter intuitively so you consciously compare only the best)
- Maximizing the long term freedom (for ourselves and/or others) on each horizontal choice.
Living at a faster pace without losing it is a skill much more forgotten than impossible. It’s definitely one anyone can master. Entrepreneurs do not suffer from mental health problems because of speed. Speed is what is holding them together when everything else is uncertain. And for the proponents of a “slow”, mindful life – this is not a recipe for success or happiness for most people long term. It can be your therapy period after you had too much in your life but it doesn’t mean too much is always bad – you probably just had too much of the wrong things.
Considering every option possible requires extensive and practical Game of Life knowledge. It mostly comes from experience and the resulting intuition (but don’t ignore good education and mentors either). So from living at a faster pace and having more diverse experiences. Long term freedom is proportional to speed squared.
