Episode 26: The Freedoms You Enjoy as a Freelancing Parent
Freelancing is a chance for you to get your freedom back
Employee’s individual rights and freedoms are being choked more than ever before. Our goal is to help you regain your freedom.
We’re going to discuss what those freedoms are and how to protect them, especially as a freelancing parent.
“I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.”
- Thomas Jefferson.
Obviously, it’s important to reject any forms of violence when it comes to having freedom but Thomas makes a good point.
The risks associated with freedom are lower than the risks associated with slavery.
We really can’t be happy if we are not free:
free to choose a career of our choice
free to earn income however we want
free to work at home
free to choose what we do with our own bodies
free to educate our children
There are many freedoms that are important to my wife and I that I can only guarantee by working at home as a freelancer.
For example, as we’ve been dealing with a crippling pandemic, public health has become the latest doorway to new forms of oppression in the corporate world.
However, I’m not here to talk about politics today, but instead, about principles.
You might think some of what I mention today is political because the world has made way too many things political. But my views are not representative of a political party, and I am not defending a political party.
I don’t even support the political party system. It prevents people from coming together and simply focusing on the problems because they get so caught up in the labels of their political party.
I focus on principles and natural, universal law, to back up what I’m saying.
Let’s get into it. We’re going to start with some of the more obvious freedoms, and then move into the deeper freedoms that tend to spark more debate.
Freedom #1: Location independence
When you are self-employed, you get to work at home, or wherever else you want. You can go visit family in another state and keep working. You can move or stay put.
The freedom to take your work with you provides a lot of opportunities for you and your family.
It also allows you to spend more time with your family because you’re not commuting to an office. You get to spend breakfast, lunch and dinner with them.
And if you’re like me, and have figured out how to work 25 hours per week, you’re spending even more time with them.
That leads me to the next freedom:
Freedom #2: Income potential is 100% in your hands
You don’t have to wait around for your employer to give you a 3% raise. You can give yourself a 10% raise every month as long as you’re increasing your skills and offerings to justify the raise.
You have the freedom to decide what you want to earn and then develop the skills you need to be able to earn that amount.
I was able to increase my income by 500% in a year because of freelancing.
It’s not like it was easy, I had to work at developing skills quickly. But it is possible when you’re freelancing. This higher income will obviously provide even more freedoms for your family as you become increasingly self-reliant.
You’ll have the resources to free yourself from a financial system that is very unreliable. You will also be able to have new experiences, travel, purchase homes, and enjoy other comforts because of your financial situation.
Freedom #3: Flexible work schedule
You have the freedom to work WHENever you want. You decide what work schedule works best for your family and it can change week to week.
A consistent schedule is probably better for you and your family, but you can easily adjust your schedule without getting approval from your boss because you are the boss.
Obviously, you still have to make sure that you’re staying on top of client projects and committing to meetings, and you can’t just take a week off abruptly without it having negative consequences, but, your schedule is in your control.
That’s a big deal when raising a family and having to meet the needs of your spouse and kids, needs that are unpredictable and fluctuate.
Now let’s shift into the deeper stuff.
Freedom #4: Health freedom.
There’s two kinds of health freedom I want to talk about here:
It’s much easier to be healthy when you work at home.
You’re not tempted by the free chips and processed food at the office. You don’t have to eat out every day for lunch. You can take the time to cook nutritious meals and a healthier body also means a healthier mind which will increase your ability to grow your business faster.
You get to choose what happens to your body medically.
The other side of this coin is based on basic human ethics, and can be summed up in two words: Medical Freedom.
This means you get to choose what happens to your body medically. You get to choose which medical treatments and medicines to take without any coercion from governments or companies. It’s your body and your choice.
All medicine comes with benefits and risks. There are chemical substances in medicines that can harm your body and thus it must be your choice to take a medicine or not.
The medical industry has benefited a lot of people. There is a time and place for medical intervention but there is also a time and place for other means of helping your body - things like eating nutritious foods and exercising.
For example, I believe that modern medicine isn’t able to do a great job at helping chronic illness.
Modern medicine:
Treats symptoms
Is really great at putting your body back together and treating wounds
Can provide certain medicines that can be life saving for acute illness
But for chronic illness, your best bet is:
Good food
Enough sleep
Exercise
Mental wellness.
With that said, medical choices are an extremely personal and private decision and should never be seen as something that has no risk. As we’re seeing in the aftershock of the pandemic, employers are taking it into their hands to force employees to get vaccines among other things.
That has been unheard of outside hospitals until this point.
I’m not for or against vaccines, I think it’s perfectly fine for them to be created and available. What I can say is that I believe very strongly that every person has the right to choose whether or not to inject themselves with a substance.
Any type of medical treatment is always an individual’s choice because all medicine comes with risks and benefits.
Each person must weigh that for themselves.
We each have individual bodies with individual weaknesses and must be allowed to make medical choices about what we think is best for us. We cannot be treated as if we all have the same body because we don’t. We have to follow our own conscience.
Vaccines are not exempt from this. It is a medical treatment. They have risks but can also have benefits. So if someone doesn’t feel right about doing something, because maybe their body will not react well to the medicine, or maybe they will be the unlucky one that has a severe side effect, then they have a right to choose that and to follow their own instincts on that.
Unfortunately many companies and governments have forgotten their ethics a bit when it comes to people’s medical freedom and think that they can tell their employees what to do with their bodies to keep their job.
A public health crisis should never be allowed to give any government or company the power to take away your medical freedom.
It might just cause a brand new public crisis where nobody is listening to their own bodies on what’s going to keep them healthy and everyone is being put in the same bucket - which simply doesn’t work.
As a freelancer, you have total freedom about what goes into your body. You decide what medical treatments to subject yourself to or not. You have medical freedom. It’s the same medical freedom guaranteed for your kids when you homeschool, which brings me to the next one:
Freedom #5: Education freedom, especially regarding your children’s education.
This can also include you having a greater ability to keep educating yourself because you have extra time and your continued education is in your own hands. As a freelancer, you don’t have employers putting you through courses and dictating what you learn and how.
When it comes to parenting, as a freelancer, it’s much easier to homeschool your kids and take their education into your own hands.
If you’re like me, then you don't have high trust for the public school system. They aren’t teaching kids to enjoy learning, they are teaching them to hate learning and make them eager for summer break. They test these kids to the point of exhaustion and require insane amounts of homework. They don’t focus enough on subjects that actually matter in life. These kids spend 6-7 hours per day and hardly learn anything that sets them up for success in life.
Of course they are teaching English and Math and some relevant subjects. They are doing some good. I’m not saying it’s a total waste - but there is so much fluff.
I was extremely unprepared for real life after college and I was in public school in the 90’s and early 2000’s. It’s become 10 times worse since then.
All that education, all that time and I didn’t even know how to budget my expenses, or how to actually live as an adult.
We didn’t get taught life skills such as:
How money works
Basic economics to help me live successfully as an adult
Verbal communication skills
Sales skills
Emotional management
Mindset training
All those soft skills that are key to being successful.
I had to learn all of that in my 20’s in order to find success in my career and success with my life. I had a bachelor’s degree but no relevant knowledge.
You’re not taught entrepreneurship and business in public school either and whether you are going after employee jobs or freelancing you need to understand how business works.
The highest paid employees are in those positions because they know how to grow businesses, not just show up and do a job.
In my 20’s I learned more watching YouTube videos then I did in 4 years of college education and tens of thousands in debt.
You have to vet your sources and know how to cross-reference information to get the best value out of it, but I can tell you the sources you’re getting in college aren’t very reliable either.
Information changes so fast, by the time a text book gets printed on digital marketing for example, it’s already outdated. Many professors re-teach what they learned decades ago. Some see themselves as students continually learning - those are the good ones. But they’re not all that way.
It’s projected that many universities will fail and have to close in the next 10 years. It’s not a sustainable form of education.
When you have generation Z seeing how many income opportunities there are in the freelancing world, they’re like, “why would I go spend a bunch of money in college when I can start earning $50/hour now as an 18 year old designing websites.”
There are so many millennials with degrees struggling to find success in their career, and they aren’t passing on a ton of confidence to their children or to Gen Z, when it comes to going to college and entering the workforce.
We get rammed with such excessive information on things that won’t be relevant to us. Let alone the politics that have pushed its way into public school. We won’t get into that, but just like the corporate world, public school has also become a platform for certain political agendas. You want completely out of that? You have to homeschool and freelance.
Public school prepares your kid for one type of job: a low-paying office job in the corporate world where you become a cog in the system.
I know this sounds dramatic and I am generalizing. There are still many skilled employees in higher paying jobs and freelancing isn’t for everyone. I think it’s perfectly fine for people to pursue traditional employment. However, that is a much more difficult route if you want to live like my wife and I are able to live. If you have certain beliefs about freedom and family, you’re going to struggle more if you aren’t freelancing.
To my point though: why do you think so many millennials are drawing in student loan debt, unable to pay it down? Because they are shuffling around with their backpack full of degrees and all that education did nothing to help them in the real world. They go to job interview to job interview, bouncing around unfulfilled and frustrated that they can’t get ahead. Why won’t this piece of paper that says masters degree on it get me a decent job!
It is primarily the parent’s responsibility to educate their children. Public school should only be an option for those that aren’t able to educate their children but it’s become the default.
Homeschooling was always seen as for the weird people but it has exploded in the last couple years because of how bad public school is getting.
Homeschooling does come with great responsibility - but also great benefits.
If the parents don’t know enough about a certain subject then they must outsource that. Luckily there are many wonderful programs and curriculums these days from experts on different subjects that help parents to homeschool their children so they don’t have to be experts on the subjects themselves, they just facilitate their child going through these programs. You can even go at the child’s pace and teach to their unique learning style.
Our 5 year old is already very advanced with his ability to read letters and numbers. We integrate learning into real life so he sees the relevance of what he’s learning and enjoys it. He reads letters on store signs and learns how water works when he’s playing in a pool. He’s always asking questions about how things work. He learns how the world works through his daily education and only a small portion of that is book work.
Freelancing makes it so much easier to homeschool because both parents can be at home to help with that.
My wife takes on more of the homeschooling than me because I’m the only one that works, but I still basically only work part-time so I can help and be a part of it. Freelancing opens up the options of not having to send your kids to public school for those that don’t want to.
I’ll be bringing some expert homeschooling parents onto the blog and also our podcast, so stay tuned for much more on this.
That brings us to our next freedom:
Freedom #6: Greater ability to practice your religious, philosophical and political beliefs.
The corporate world is starting to become too political. A company will take a political stance and then ram that ideology throughout the company to all the employees and force them to attend trainings and adopt ideologies they may not believe in in order to keep their job.
What happened to diversity? Allowing people of all backgrounds and beliefs to come together to operate a business?
It used to not matter what your political beliefs were. Now there are employers that fire people because of their political affiliations or squeeze them out through social rejection amongst colleagues. It’s becoming so toxic to work in these corporate environments.
Again, I’m saying every company is like this but it is trending and gaining momentum. Companies are now feeling like they have to get involved in political issues in order to stay popular. It will be to their demise in the end. While they get distracted becoming activists, their sales will start to struggle.
We won’t dive into specifics here because each company is different but if you’re an employee that feels uncomfortable at work with recent changes then you know what I’m talking about.
At home, you get to believe what you want to believe and live those beliefs fully. Without feeling like you have to go against those beliefs to keep a job.
You can be honest with yourself.
That’s all for today! Hopefully this was helpful. Would love for you to comment and continue the discussion on the issues you may be facing in your job and how freelancing can secure the freedoms and rights that you value. I’ll see in our next conversation!
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