Now everything that is or can be communicated digitally is free.
This tells you what you have to do to make money from your digitally-conveyed thing, whether it’s music or writing, art or creation of any kind: sell things that are peripheral to your digital efforts, your analog soul, not because your art is less important but because digital is free, and because the market needs a way to affirm that it wants you to continue.
You, and your analog efforts, are still scarce. And you may be paid without being acquired.
Great things rarely happen without verbalizing intentions, but it’s easy to allow the act of planning to replace the planned act. Planning invites laziness and fear. Trust yourself to make the right move. “The objective is to fix mistakes of ambition and not make mistakes of sloth.”
The best thing you can hope for is to run out of time going down the right road. Talk and plans have all the substance of packing your bags.
“Poor people will do almost anything to avoid problems. They see a challenge and they run…the secret to success, my friends, is not to try to avoid or get rid of or shrink from your problems; the secret is to grow yourself so that you are bigger than your problems.” ~ T. Harv Eker
Whether you have already used your skills in web development (or any of a thousand flavors of technical expertise) to break out of wage slavery, or you are on the brink of doing so, let me suggest visiting DigitalMediaMinute.com.
‘Wow, a place in Bali. It must be nice.’ Yes, ‘it’ is nice-for me it makes sense in the context of my life. This post isn’t about moving to Bali…
I’m thinking of small comments that set a tone and a direction and a mindset for your future. Do yourself and your capacity for personal freedom a favor, and beware the act of verbalizing the immediate distance between yourself and some wonderful future or direction that you might want to explore.
It might be a subtle, subversive attempt to absolve yourself from even making an effort to change your life… We are taught by lazy, timid people that its perfectly ok to do this.
But maybe its not ok, for you…. You did say that ‘it’ must be nice. Why set the possibility of an improvement at arm’s length? Verbalizing a barrier can be the moment when ‘difficult’ becomes ‘impossible’, when an innocuous comment becomes epic failure.
The wage freedom word for the day is ‘Atrophy’. It’s what happens to a capacity or a muscle through an extended period of disuse. It’s also what you risk when you get serious about simplifying your life for all the right reasons. Malnutrition is a similar risk you run.
Atrophy and malnutrition are sad stories if you value health, although risking them in the name of something you hold as desirable at least makes them interesting. Not interesting enough to embrace, though. You’ll fend them off as long as your effort to simplify doesn’t create imbalance.
There’s no reason why taking less has to imply not getting enough, assuming you are lucky enough for it all to be subject to your choice. Maybe you need to dabble in atrophy to determine what you need. As lacking in moderation as my culture is generally, it can’t be a surprise that I’d overshoot in simplifying my life, when I became able to choose how I wage freedom.
The difference between doing nothing and being able to work very hard at something you enjoy, is all the difference in the world. It’s the difference between landing and flying.
For me, waging freedom was always going to be about the latter.
photo credit: Andrew Stawarz
