Dan Sullivan breaks down what entrepreneurs actually want: freedom from constraints versus freedom to build something. The four concrete freedoms are money, time, relationships you choose, and purpose. "Freedom to" takes more courage because it requires a vision, not just escape.
Chapters
There's two big categories, and one's called freedom from, and the other one is called freedom to. So most people, when you're an entrepreneur, your main motivators is freedom from, freedom from. And that's what prompts people to become an entrepreneur in the first place. They want to be free from something. And for some people, it consumes their entire life. Their whole life is always about freedom from. And the second one is freedom to. Freedom to actually takes enormous amount more courage than freedom from because freedom from somebody else is creating the stimulus. You know, it's unpleasant, you don't like it, it's oppressive. And everything else, well, they're actually creating the motivation by being unpleasant. Okay? But freedom too, you got to make it up in your brain and you got to commit yourself to a vision. So freedom from tends to be past based and freedom to tends to be totally future based. And you got to make it up. And then within the categories I always bring it down to, first one is freedom of money. You have to have freedom of money. There's no upper limit on it. There's no external limit on the amount of money you can make. And the first thing that people buy with money is time. So it's freedom of time. I mean, there's a neat trick that they do to human beings. The system. You know, the system, you know, you're born and you're given all this delicious freedom and then at six, they take it all away from you. Six years old, they take it off. And then they train you how you're going to spend the rest of of your life buying all your freedom back. And that's what we call the economy. And that's all the economy really is. People spending their whole life buying back all the freedom they lost when they were six years old because they stick you in a desk and then you know your life is controlled by bills and you do it. So freedom of money, freedom of time. And then the next one, which is really crucial is freedom of relationship. You don't have to deal with, with anyone you don't like, either inside your company or outside your company. And if you have those three freedoms, then it's possible to have the fourth freedom, which is freedom of purpose. In other words, your life is entirely according to your own purpose.
