Wealth Health & Freedom

Wealth

Aggressive saving, investing, and simple living is how I plan on retiring young. I thought I was good with money. I never carried debt, paid all my bills on time, and I understood compound interest. So what was my problem? I allowed my money to be lazy. I wasn’t dominating every cent of my financial life. Perspective is everything when it comes to will power. I will do my best to articulate the practices that help me the most in this area of my life.

Health

The definition of health is broad and measuring it is difficult. In my own life, I am finding different levels of health. While in my 20’s my measurement of health revolved around my physical abilities. I was solely focused on how well I could perform. Exercise and achieving goals feels great but heading into my late 20’s I began to notice the people around me had an extra level of freedom. Though I wasn’t required to work as much as them due to my simple lifestyle and low amount of responsibilities, they seem to be able to move through life in a way that I could not. They seemed to be able to maximize their time. I remember well when I asked one of the people about how I could reach the same level of freedom, but it was framed more like, “What can I do for work I, am looking for a job?” His answer was simple, referring to himself and the rest of the group he said, “We all put in the work and worked hard to get here, so we can play hard.” While I felt welcome in the company I was with, I could clearly see in them how far I was from where I wanted to be.

Freedom

The freedom of my early 20’s had turned into stagnation and stagnation in life is like a prison. Another large part of health is relations with others. I consider every interaction with a person a relationship. We just define the boundaries for each one. The society we live in provides a large number of those boundaries out of the box. Look at boundaries as the expectations we have for the way others will interact with us verbally and physically. While I don’t think being in an intimate relationship is necessary for good health, I knew I wanted to have a family someday. It wasn’t difficult to find partners, but the type of freedom of my early 20’s that I so fiercely processed evidently became the bottleneck on all of my intimate relationships. Now in my early 30’s with two kids I get the how unattractive it is to see someone misappropriating their time. I now see how every second counts. Invest an hour today toward bettering your future and it can turn into days of freedom later in life.

Placing constraints on your freedom is discipline and so goes the saying, “through discipline comes freedom.”