I am willing to pay the price of being free.
One of my fundamental values is freedom. In all of its forms. I want to feel free, I like feeling free, and I am willing to pay the price of being free.
At fourteen or fifteen I decided to get my ear pierced so I could wear an earring. Around the same time I started growing my hair long and, for both reasons, I had running battles with the head teachers at my high school. I wore my hair long for many years. Because I liked it but, looking back, also because it was a form of rebellion.
Then, at seventeen or eighteen, I started thinking seriously about the fact that I too would gradually have to start earning a living.
I remember one of my first interviews in complete detail. It was an IT company in Bucharest, I went for a junior marketing job and I had the interview directly with the company’s manager. After ten minutes of questions he said:
“You know what? We have another open position, in sales. Would that interest you?”
Honestly, any position he had would have interested me. After he explained what it involved we got to the salary, which had a fixed part and a commission part. He had a whiteboard next to him, on which he wrote out a formula for calculating the commission, so I could get an idea of roughly how much I would take home per month depending on the results I produced. A complicated formula, with a lot of brackets.
I listened carefully and then asked him:
“I would like us to also work out the maximum I could earn in a month, is that possible? Say I hit the maximum target, how much would I take home at the end of the month?”
He smiled, probably reading the question as confidence in my own ability. It was not confidence. I simply wanted to see whether it was worth it. Or I wanted to convince myself that it was not worth it. Or something.
He did the calculation and it came to 1,000 euros. He pointed out that the target was not at all easy to hit, particularly at the beginning. And particularly, I would add, because I knew nothing about anything, this being my first job.
I politely asked him to let me give my answer the next morning, but I knew from that second, 100%, that my answer would be “no, thank you”.
Do not misunderstand me. A thousand euros was an enormous amount twenty-odd years ago. I had never seen even 300 euros in one place and I would most likely have settled for that 300 for a long time.
What stopped me was that I simply could not accept the idea of a cap on what I could achieve. The idea that someone else had, through a system, set a ceiling on what I could get, and that what I could do had a limit regardless of how much I wanted to work or push harder, demotivated me enormously.
And the fact that in exchange for this money I would have to give a fixed nine hours every day, for the rest of my life, frightened me.
Obviously, with the adult mind I have now, it is easy to imagine promotions, other positions, other jobs taken after the first few years, even negotiating days off in the week. But I am not judging the decisions of an eighteen year old here. I am only trying to describe the internal mechanism that came from how I saw the world, even back then.
I did not take the money, which I needed, because I did not want to accept what I perceived as a limitation on my freedom to be whatever I want to be, to own my time and my calendar, and to get as much as I would prove capable of getting.
And I never took a job
After the first two interviews I went home and told my mother: I do not want to be employed, I am never going to work for someone else. She backed the decision, although I do not know what she felt in those moments.
I built my own business, first trying to do things alone, then hiring others, so that by around twenty there were already several people receiving money from me every month, collaborators, then employees.
At that age, already living alone, trying to do a degree in parallel, with no developed skill of any kind, because I had never worked anywhere, with no understanding of the business world at all and no money to compensate for that post-adolescent naivety, it was not just hard. It was brutal.
But it felt like freedom. And not for one second have I regretted anything. In fact regret is a word that gives me trouble even today. Honestly, I do not really understand it.
Every time I have tried to find things I could say I regret, I have found nothing. I find whole lists of difficult periods, I find many, many things I tried to do and did not manage, and there are plenty of situations I would have liked to handle a little differently. But I do not feel regret. I would not change a single thing.
And I think a large part of that comes from understanding this equation of life early:
If you take responsibility for your own decisions, and if you are willing to look the truth in the face, you can have complete freedom.
But what does complete freedom mean?
For me, today, freedom means having the resources to be the owner of my own life. Not to feel captive for a single second. It means time, mental quiet and money. In that order.
In the 7,000+ hours worked in change strategy sessions, hearing the intimate realities of so many people’s lives, I have met a great many people who earn a lot of money and feel captive in their own lives. They have recognition and social status, they have money, but they do not have time to ask themselves how they are feeling. Or, worse, they have got used to running so they do not have to ask.
They are involved in large scale projects, but they do not have the physical time or the mental time to connect with their partner or their own children. They postpone life, because “it is a busier period”. All the time. Or they are, as Alex Pattakos put it, prisoners of their own thoughts and emotions.
Their income grows, and their spending grows proportionally. However many zeros they add to their monthly income, the money set aside is zero, the feeling of safety does not exist. The money only accelerates their life. They burn faster, and that is all. Many of them are technically their own boss. Freelancers perhaps, entrepreneurs perhaps. But that does not mean they own their life.
Many people have fantasies about going independent so they can control their schedule. Then they get there and realise that instead of one boss telling them what to do they have three clients who have become their bosses and who set the rhythm of their life. And if they do not have three bosses, they have three major fears dictating it instead.
It is very complicated to genuinely feel free. Much harder than getting to “success” or making money.
I said this to a friend, slightly irritated by a conversation we had:
“People with money, cars or houses do not impress me at all. I can appreciate the effort and I know they most likely worked hard for it. But I think anyone can end up making money if that is the only thing they care about. It does not impress me in the slightest. Show me one who made money and is still free. Who has time, has mental space for the people and the things they like, and then, yes, also has money to live the life they want to live. In that order. That would be remarkable.”
Solutions
Writing these lines, I feel the need to close the article with a potential solution. As if it were that simple.
“Two pieces of advice that will transform your life.” “The routine that will give you the freedom you know you are looking for.” “The Roșca method and how it will revolutionise your life.”
That is what you are looking for, right? Well. I do not have it.
But here is what I can give you. I can tell you one concrete thing, not just a philosophical one, that I do in order to defend and cultivate this freedom. And it is something you could try too, to see how well it fits you: be less tolerant of the things that take your freedom away.
For me, two consecutive days in which I did not feel in control of my own time is the maximum I tolerate. One day can happen, because I am not perfect, sometimes I take on more projects than I should, or my organisation creaks a bit, and I find myself with a day that is very different from how I would have wanted it to be.
I find myself a prisoner of my own promises, which I no longer feel like keeping. But I keep them, because I want to go on seeing myself as a responsible person.
But when I have two consecutive days that are not how I want them to be, I KNOW I need to change something fundamental. That my life needs a revolution, otherwise there is a risk I start settling into the role of a victim.
So I cancel everything I had in the calendar for tomorrow, I take a day or two of “holiday”, and all I do is look for the courageous decision with the best chance of making my future different.
What can I change in my life, starting tomorrow, so I feel less captive, so I feel freer than I felt today? It can be a small decision, but usually it is a big one.
I move from one possibility to another, I run scenarios in my mind, I evaluate ideas for change until I reach one that (1) looks like it would give me more freedom and (2) frightens me a little, or more than a little. And then I know I have found it. That is the decision I need to take.
All that is left is to put it into practice. Which is not always easy, but it is not impossible either. When I feel the need, I ask for help.
PS: I have met employed people who were freer than the most “successful” entrepreneurs. This article is not necessarily about going independent, even if in places it may read that way. You need to see what could work for you. Freedom is subjective, and everyone has their own definition of it.
About the author
Andrei Roșca is a change strategist working one to one with founders, C level executives and senior managers who perform well on the outside while carrying a constant internal load. The work is nervous system regulation under real pressure, not motivation and not mindset. 13+ years of practice, 510+ clients, 8120+ individual sessions, through Whisper, Center for Strategic Change. Sessions are online, in English or in Romanian.
If this described your situation, start here: Coaching for overthinking executives. Or read more about my background and method.