An Unconventional Life

I have been trying to put words around what I want from the next chapter of my life.

Earlier today, I was talking my mom about it, and she reflected back to me what she heard me say.

She said,

“What I hear is freedom.”

Yes.

Freedom.

I don’t want another life built around a calendar full of obligations.

I don’t want to wake up every morning already belonging to someone else.

I don’t want back-to-back meetings, employees waiting for answers, clients needing access to me, or a business that stops producing the minute I stop working.

I don’t want to have to be “on” to make money.

I don’t want to trade my time for money anymore.

And I don’t want to spend the next twenty years building another impressive cage.

I want my money to work for me.

I want to build things that can make money without requiring my constant presence. Assets, investments, products and ideas that can grow beyond the hours I personally put into them.

I still want ambition.

I want to make a lot of money.

I want to challenge myself intellectually. Learn difficult things. Build things. Experiment. Take risks. Get completely obsessed with something simply because I want to know whether I can master it.

And I still want to matter.

I want to contribute. I want to lift people up. I want to create things that make people’s lives better and help them believe something bigger might be possible for them too.

I want to change the world for the better.

And—

I want impact without surrendering ownership of my life to achieve it.

I want to wake up on a Wednesday and decide what Wednesday is for.

Maybe I work all day because I am consumed by an idea.

Maybe I get on an airplane.

Maybe I hike a mountain.

Maybe I spend the afternoon with someone I love.

Maybe I do absolutely nothing useful.

And maybe I spend an unreasonable amount of time deciding whether I want to buy an exotic Hermès Kelly Pochette because, remarkably, it is a choice I can responsibly and seriously consider.

I want generosity and beautiful things.

Purpose and pleasure.

Ambition and spaciousness.

Impact and autonomy.

I don’t want to retire from life.

Quite the opposite.

I want to be wildly engaged with it.

I just want to decide what gets my time, my energy, my attention and my money.

For most of my adult life, necessity made a lot of those decisions for me.

Now I get to make them.

And it is nice to want.

To want more freedom. More money. More impact. More adventure. More beauty. More life.

And here's the coolest thing:

I know myself.

I am not built to sit around hoping the life I want finds me.

I am built to make things happen.

So that is what I am doing.