Financial Freedom - The Daily Gwei #341
Financial Freedom - The Daily Gwei #341
First you get the money, then you get the freedom.
Financial freedom - it’s what many people dream of achieving but unfortunately very few ever do. It also means different things to different people - some want to achieve it so they can “retire early”, some want to just have financial security for life, some want to use the money to help their family & friends and and some want to use their new-found freedom to change the world.
I think it’s safe to say that at this point the crypto ecosystem has given more people true financial freedom than anything else in history. There really is no other industry that I can think of where you can make such an insane return on investment in a short period of time. Of course, crypto investing isn’t necessarily easy and plenty of people blow themselves up before they ever make it to financial freedom, but on net more people “make it” in crypto than anywhere else. The best part of all of this is that the opportunities for obtaining financial freedom with crypto are still as abundant as ever - you just need to put in the time and effort to find and ride the right waves.
What one does with their financial freedom can vary greatly depending on the individual. I personally know many people who have simply “retired” from any formal work and just do whatever they want with their time now and while this is incredibly liberating, I think that after a while it also gets a bit boring. This is why some people decide to use their financial freedom as a form of “security” so that they can quit their day job and go start their own company, start a non-profit or pursue some other worthy venture. If something goes wrong with a particular venture and they have to close up shop, they can always fall back on their “financial freedom stack” - as long as they manage the money correctly.
On that note - unfortunately there are also a lot of people who taste financial freedom but then throw it all away shortly after. We see this frequently with lottery winners where they’ll win tens of millions of dollars overnight and then spend the next few years blowing it all away. I do often wonder what it would feel like to have a few years of financial freedom and then to end up broke and having to go back to a “normal” life - it can’t be easy but maybe it’s humbling. Though I think this just speaks to the fact that there are different ways to achieve financial freedom and depending on how you get there will probably end up dictating your chances of staying there.
In saying all of this, I think plenty of people can be perfectly happy without being financially free. If they genuinely enjoy the work that they do and don’t just feel like they’re wasting away at some dead-end job then financial freedom at that point probably wouldn’t increase their happiness by very much. Sure, it would maybe give them some more security and allow them to help out their friends and family, but maybe they don’t even want the hassle of all that money because as Biggie once said - “mo money mo problems”.
At the end of the day I think that money is really just a means to an end and I strongly believe that money does not buy happiness. Though what it does do is buy you more time to work on what makes you truly happy. For me, that’s providing free Ethereum education for everyone and working as hard as I can to bring Ethereum to the world. For others, that could be anything from spending all of their time with their family to opening a little coffee shop in a quiet neighborhood. Of course, there is no right or wrong way to spend your time, but spending it doing what you love is worth more than any material thing that money can buy you.
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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A great article
A great article