266: Are You High Net Freedom?

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host, host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello beloved Pivoters. I have one more crossover episode for you for now from the Free Time podcast. If you want to make sure that you get all future free time episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Look for free Time with Jenny Blake wherever you subscribe to this show and then you'll get both sets of episodes moving forward. Before we dive into this episode, I want to say thank you to the two most recent reviewers of the Pivot podcast. Delia said, love Jenny's motto. Thanks for creating such an awesome and informative show. You are so welcome. Thank you for leaving this feedback back in June. I hope you're still here listening. This is how slow I've been this year and this summer with just keeping up with things, but I'm so grateful for you and for you to take the time to leave a review. And Milena, Milena, who's been an insider for so long and just really one of the OG community members, Milena called Pivot a breath of fresh air in business podcasts and I just appreciate you so much. Milena. I don't know if I've thanked you publicly on the show or not, so I wanted to be sure to leave you a message here. Thank you for listening. That goes to all of you who are here right now. I always appreciate your reviews and feedback and requests for what you would love to see here. And without further ado, let's get into the show.

Today. The reason I'm doing another crossover is that this is a section from my upcoming book, Free Time, Lose the Busy Work, Love youe business that launches March 22, 2022, and it builds the bridge between Pivot toward free time. It talks about Pivoters being high net growth and then free timers being high net freedom. I hope you enjoy this excerpt and if you are someone who is building a business or even a side hustle and the Free Time podcast is relevant for you again. I encourage you to subscribe so that you don't miss any future episodes by searching for free time with Jenny Blake. Wherever you're listening to this podcast, I'm inspired to share this after just coming off of recording the audiobook. I hope you enjoy this sneak peek and if you want to join us in the Freetime Book Launch team and get insider access and behind the book calls and community leading up to the launch. I'm just starting to form it now. I would love to have you join us. Make sure you're subscribed to the newsletter@itsfreetime.com join. I'll throw that in the show notes as well so that you are the first to know when I launch the launch team. Without further ado, here is the section on High Net Freedom Consider a hypothetical Assuming you're already earning enough to live on, would you accept $1 million if it meant working 70 to 80 hours per week doing work you didn't enjoy for one year? No cancellation allowed with a demanding and bureaucratic client?

I encourage you to pose this million dollar bureaucratic client question to others. The answers might surprise you. As one person pointed out, it's a PG rated version of the 1993 movie Indecent Proposal starring Demi Moore. Or for a twist, consider the premise of the History Channel's reality TV series alone. Would you attempt to survive 100 days in the Arctic alone for a chance to win a million dollars? I don't know if I could do it. As a small business owner, you are in a privileged position if you know that you could earn this much through your own efforts. Or or you're someone for whom no exchange of money is worth trading time doing work that you hate. In truth, to work at all is a privilege to breathe, to live, to have clean drinking water, to get a full night's sleep, to move comfortably in one's body. I wrote Pivot for a group I consider high net growth. Those who are asking not just what am I earning in any job or income stream, but what am I learning? How am I growing? When those needs are being met, often in parallel, they aim for also making a broader positive impact. So if you're listening to this in your free time, you are definitely high net growth. You're likely high net impact, and it wouldn't hurt to be high net worth inside and out, of course.

But there is another core value that will supersede all of high net freedom. High net freedom means you most likely don't want to become an operator of a huge business with investors or shareholders to answer to managing an org chart five layers deep. You want to be free to move, to do your best work and to really enjoy your life and be present when you're not working on your time off. Side note, if anything, I didn't emphasize that in this book Enough, which is that. And even on this podcast I often talk about free time to do your best work. But there's also free time purely for the sake of it, without having to earn it, without having to fill it. Just free time where your mind is clear and you are free to do whatever you choose. Ultimately, it's that optionality that defines free time. All that said, sometimes emergencies happen, force majeure occurs, and you need to make sacrifices to survive. The million dollar bureaucratic client question sparked a fascinating discussion among my friends, family and private podcast community. Shout out to the BFF crew because I loved this conversation and if you want to join us I would love to have you go to itsfreetime.com BFF because these are some of my favorite people in the world and we had such a fruitful conversation around all of this. Some of them said they would take the job if they knew it was funding their bigger creative dreams. Others remarked that they had already worked this way earlier in their career for far lesser pay. At least this way they were ostensibly being recognized for their efforts. And then others said that if they knew their existing skills would never yield this much, an assignment like this could be game changing. For others, no amount of money was worth sacrificing their health and relationships. One person, citing the high opportunity costs of time away from his creative projects, said no way. I would rather make 30 grand with plenty of time to build my own million dollar assets.

Be right back just after this.

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Uzma was faced with this exact type of decision in the early aughts when she was graduating medical school to become an oncologist. She had two job offers, one for $120,000 starting salary and the other for $500,000. The former would offer intangible rewards beyond financial gain, while she knew that the latter would box her in. Uzma took the lower paying gig. As Uzma said to us on that community call, boy was I right. I never made much money in that first job, but I learned the skills to launch my own practice, perhaps now even making up for some of that money lost. Uzma asks herself a version of this question every day. Reflecting on what her number would be, she said, $1 million is an attractive number, but it's not the one I would give up what I am doing now for or how I am working. She's content with how she's running her medical practice with the flexibility to toggle her hours up or down and even take certain days off every week, which might not be possible in other situations. Short of the hypothetical million dollar client, the challenge for many business owners is ignoring the siren song of money for money's sake, despite survival fears for yourself, your family and the business. Foregoing money as the main driver requires trust because it's countercultural to imagine freeing up time and energy first so that you can attract new and better opportunities next. After all, most business advice centers upon cash flow for a reason. Without it, your business won't survive. I challenge you to equally prioritize ease and joy on your path to profit. Not ease in the sense of laziness, though many successful entrepreneurs are known to tout strategic laziness as the secret to their success, but the ease of working in harmony with your strengths and your team. The intersection of revenue, ease and joy is where you will find free time within your business. Plot your current and potential revenue streams across these areas, looking for sweet spots that are abundant in all three, and you can take a piece of paper, draw a Venn diagram, put these in the circles revenue, ease and joy and actually map your projects and see which ones are in that sweet spot that overlap with all three. I also this is a side note from the book itself. I love asking the question how can I optimize for revenue, ease and joy? So rather than assuming that it's not possible, or rather than assuming I need to sacrifice ease or joy in order to increase my revenue, I'm always asking this question creatively and expansively as an inquiry what's possible? And I just I let it. I live with it. I live with this question.

I say and do this aiming for the intersection of revenue, ease and joy. As the breadwinner for my family, my business is our main source of income. So the principles that I'm sharing with you here in this podcast and in the book support our household. My business is not a part time supplement that requires a second full time earner in order to be realized. As a primary earner, it would be tempting to take on the pressure of working around the clock. But I refuse to work this way, having hit burnout too many times before and even as I sit here recording this being just on the other side of a gnarly ear infection with total unending pain for five days, as I shared in the previous solo episode. So I know that my body, I call it this is aside from the book now. But my body has me on a short leash that when I start working in a way that does not honor these principles of revenue, ease and joy, I am immediately snapped back to attention by my body. And that might be me being more sensitive. Who knows, Maybe it's aging, just can't work with that same adrenaline and hustle that I did in my early twenties and even prior. But one way or another I must honor these principles. Otherwise I pay for it physically. And a lot of us are that way. It's very interesting to look at how many of us are managing psychosomatic impact of the last year and a half of the stressors of life, of family, of business. All of it. It's a lot to handle. So what I'm trying to do here on this podcast with the book is help us design a new way forward that honors our body, that honors our mind, that honors our presence and our joy in the process of running an abundant business. That concludes this mini first look at the FreeTime book. And remember, I would love to have you join us as part of the launch team or in our private BFF community. You can learn more about both@itsfreetime.com I hope this provokes some interesting food for thought today and I encourage you go ask that million dollar bureaucratic client question to a few friends. I thought that everyone's answers would be the same one way or another. An obvious yes or an obvious no. They were all over the board and it just sparked such fascinating conversation. So have fun with that and I look forward to hearing what comes up and what your take is. Don't forget you can always submit updates when I ask these questions. They don't have to just be rhetorical. You can actually answer if you to air it live on the podcast by going to itsfreetime.com ask. Thank you so much for being here listening everybody. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for PivotList, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.

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