Wake Up Call: Money and Freedom Are Not Related
Ryan Daniel Moran (Capitalism.com video) argues entrepreneurs often confuse money with freedom and build businesses that become prisons rather than pathways to the life they wanted. He diagnoses why long to-do lists and constant "how-to" consumption stifle the creative passion that originally drove them, and leads listeners through an exercise (imagine everything is free) to identify the one or two activities and customers they truly want to serve. His core challenge: get quiet, stop adding misaligned tasks, and realign your business toward the work that fuels you so freedom and better results follow.
Chapters
I can tell you exactly why you're not making the kind of money that you want to make. I can tell you exactly why. You get to the end of every workday with this long to do list, and even if you cross most of them off, you feel like you didn't make any progress. And I can tell you exactly why, even sometimes after years of being an entrepreneur or wanting to be entrepreneur, you still feel behind and you still feel like you might even be worse off than when you started. I can tell you exactly why you've invested in things, built businesses, tried things, and you still haven't found that thing that you were looking for that inspired you to get into this game in the first place. And the counterintuitive thing is that the fix, the solution, the thing you need to change, the thing that finally gives you the juice, the life and fulfillment that you wanted, is so simple, it's so easily overlooked that no one ever talks about. In fact, they cover it up. They cover it up with more information, more consuming, more, more YouTube videos, more podcasts, more programs, more workshops, more conferences. They cover it up with more information and more how to. And it stifles the thing that would actually bring the impact, the change, the finances, the money, the freedom that you wanted when you started this thing in the first place. I know this because after working for 15 years with entrepreneurs, I can tell you that this is a theme among all of us. This is a common feeling that comes up from time to time. And for some of us, it dominates our lives. You see, most of us as entrepreneurs, we got into this game because we wanted freedom.
And. And most of us wanted freedom from something. We wanted freedom from working at a cubicle. We wanted freedom from.
Wasting our years away doing something that we found meaningless. But we forgot about the freedom to.
The freedom to pursue things that we desire, the freedom to be with the people that we love, the freedom to serve and impact the people that we are uniquely qualified to serve and to impact. It's one thing to be free from all the things that hold us back, but that's not what we desire. We want to be free from the things that stress us out. We want to be free from the things that keep us from doing what it is that we actually feel compelled to. But for so many of us, that muscle, or maybe that flame, that passion, that hunger that propels us to move to something, to create something, it's been tucked away sometimes for years. For some of us, for our entire lives, we have prioritized the to do list under the false assumption that once the to do list was clear, then we could do what it is that we wanted to do. I'm here to tell you that I can only speak from a personal experience, that when you prioritize the to do list and the things that you think will lead you to the freedom, you compromise the freedom, you cut it off at its source. Have you ever experienced one of these days where you were just on, you were just dialed in, you felt creative, you felt lit up, you felt ready to impact people, you felt excited about what you were doing. And yes, you were excited about the money and the results and all the things that were happening. But the best part was the actual doing of it. Have you ever experienced a day like that where you are floating through the day just on and lit up and it didn't matter what the results were because you were making the decisions about what happened from a place of creativity, of service, of ease, of joy. Have you ever had a day like that? For most of us, they're fleeting, they're a day, a year, three days a year. But when it happens, there's a sense of, ah, there I am. This is what I was here to do. This is what I was born for. This is why I got into this game. Can you imagine what your business would look like if you were switched on? You started business, you got into this game because you didn't just want the money. The money was a route.
To the freedom and the experience of life that you wanted. And as entrepreneurs forget, what got us here in the first place was the path. The freedom, the excitement, the life.
And so we've built this structure, we've built this container, we've built this prison that is our business that actually keeps us from the life that we wanted. Somewhere along the way, the thing that we expected our freedom business to be became our prison. Because instead of it setting you free to go create what you wanted to create, it has now just been a container to keep you working at the computer and working on long to do lists until the you that you thought would emerge is suffocated. You were made for something more than what you've built to this point. And the reason why you're not making the money that you want to make. The reason why you get to the end of your long to do list and you feel tired. The reason why you get to the end of the week and you say, what did I accomplish this week? Is because you've been built a business that is not a match to the experience of life that you wanted in the first place.
We as human beings are happiest when we're in service to other people. We're happiest when the things that are natural to us create value for someone else.
We're happiest when we feel like we're ourselves. And that's enough.
Not just enough, but great. I want to walk you through an exercise that will help you see how much attention is going to what you really want versus what you think is the right thing to do based on what other people have told you. I like to ask clients and customers to close their eyes and to imagine that they woke up into a world in which everything was free. Everything that you wanted to buy, everything that you wanted to do, everything that you wanted to accomplish was free. There was no result that you had to pursue because you could have the result. Now, you didn't have to work hard for the car because the car was free. You didn't have to work hard to get the big house one day because the house was free. You didn't need to have certain revenues in order to build the team that you want, because the team is free. If you woke up into a world in which everything was free, what in your business would you keep? What in your life would you add? What most people discover when they answer that question is that there's one or two things in their business that they would do more of, and everything else in the business is existed to make it possible for them to do that. One or two things. They discover that there's one person, one type of customer, one type of client that they love to serve. There's one activity that they love to do or would love to do more of, but it is drowned out by the need for revenue and profit in order to sustain that one activity. Now, revenue and profit are important. They're the lifeblood to business. But the point of the business is for you to be doing that thing that you want to do more than anything else in the world. Because when you do that thing, it's you. Because when you do that thing, it's natural value for other people, because it draws everything else in. Because when that one activity is on fire, all of the other customers and investors and influencers and attention and fun followers and likes and comments and partners all start to show up because that calls forth the same thing in them. When you are dialed into that zone, that feeling, that freedom for yourself, it calls it forth in all of your customers and employees and partners. And all of you are now on fire, leading toward the vision that you wanted in the first place. If you look at the most successful people in the world, the richest entrepreneurs, the ones that we all admire and look up to, none of them got to where they are because they followed some how to formula or step by step directions or even mapping out what somebody else did to be successful. And yet we spend so much time reverse engineering what they did to get there. But none of them did that. All of them were compelled by a vision that they had in their head and nothing stopped them from that vision. And it didn't matter what the results were. Can't you see when you look at the most successful people in the world that the way that they got to where they are was because they were so dialed into who they were and what they wanted to create in this world that everything else just showed up for them? And can't you see that that's possible for you? You've experienced it in glimpses. Haven't you felt that before? Haven't you felt that little voice, that flickering flame say, this is who I am and this is what I want. And then you stifle it in order to do what is practical to make your business survive. That is not freedom. Freedom is being tapped into that place and letting it guide your direction, letting it guide your decisions. Freedom is knowing that place and letting everything else show up to support that. This is my challenge to you. This can be the hardest challenge that you as an entrepreneur pursue.
I challenge you to get quiet.
I challenge you to add nothing to your to do list that is out of alignment with what you want to do and what you want to bring to this world. This is the part of the video where I usually do a call to action to subscribe or opt in or find or purchase something. But instead I just want to invite you to do an inventory of how you spent your day and your week. Ask the question, is this what I signed up for? Is this what I wanted? Because I promise you, if the answer is no.
A, there is a way out, but B, it means the world has more for you. You don't have to go create and do something that you don't want in order to get a result that you do want. You have to do what you want now to get the result that you want. This world is stacked to support creators who are dialed into their purpose and their mission. And if you don't know what that is, don't do anything. Let it line up, let it show itself. Because when you are lined up with what you want to create in this world. And you're an entrepreneur who wants to create purpose and profit. That's when you change the world. And as a side effect, it's when you get rich too.
