How does one take the necessary steps to free oneself from the daily 9-5 and pursue the lifestyle of freedom while still having the ability to earn enough to support oneself?

I have a ton of knowledge on fitness and nutrition and had practiced Chiropractic for many years prior to giving it up. I want to figure out a way to utilize my skills and share my knowledge with others in a manner that can support a minimalistic lifestyle.

-Larry

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Hey Larry-

Let’s start by rewording your question a little.

How does one make enough money to economically sustain one’s intended lifestyle without requiring a soul-crushing 9-to-5 job to make it work?

The answer to that question will be different for every single person who might ask it, since we all have different backgrounds, career-related and lifestyle-related experiences, skills, talents, personalties, networks and relationships; there’s no single answer.

One of the better ways I’ve found to assess what your specific, custom-tailored answer might be, though, is to figure out what you bring to the table in terms of capitalism-centric value-exchange.

Or said another way: what can you do that people will pay you to do?

Adding on that second part of the question though—the implication that this new path should alleviate the soul-crushing-ness of some types of 9-to-5, while also allowing you to earn suitable income to sustain your intended lifestyle—we might ask that same question, thusly:

What can you do that people will pay you in sufficient quantities to do, which you also enjoy—or at the very least don’t hate—doing?

Figure that out, and you’ll be in a far better position to know which direction you should be moving in, and which steps to take.

It’s a good idea to also take the time—and probably even before you answer the aforementioned question—to understand what “freedom” means to you, and why that specific definition is your definition.

For me, freedom is about being able to spend my time, energy, and resources on things I care about. I like to be able to read all day if I choose, or create projects that may or may not ever make me a cent. I like to be able to spend my time with the people I want to spend it with, and to visit and live in places that expose me to new ideas and perspectives. I feel the most fulfilled when I’m being challenged and tested and when I’m encouraged to become an increasingly better version of myself: better by my own standards, which include, among other things, becoming more knowledgable, capable, empathetic, self-aware, self-reliant, healthy, wise, and creative.

If you can assess your own desires to that (or greater) resolution, you’ll likely be able to home in on what this new life of yours will actually cost to sustain. And that’s valuable information, because that price tag will, in turn, determine how much and what kind of work you’ll need to be doing, and how much of your time it will take up.

In a lot of cases, we assume our costs of living will be the same, no matter what our ambitions. But if you can reorient your thinking and focus on the real purpose of that lifestyle choice, on the things you want to be doing and how you’ll be doing those things, there will almost certainly be opportunities to reduce your expenses, thereby reducing the amount of money you need to earn. This, in turn, opens up a larger number of options when it comes to how you economically sustain those lifestyle choices.

Understanding these fundamentals makes it more likely that you’ll be able to spend your time, your energy, and your resources appropriately, wasting as few of all of them on things that don’t actually matter to you as possible, and in turn, suffering from less waste and clutter in your internal and external behaviors.

Minimalism is about focusing on the important and shedding the unimportant, and we’re most capable of doing both when we know which is which.

We can then take that knowledge to build anything we want, from lifestyles that are custom-tailored to our individual specifications, to businesses with monetary models that allow us to fund those lifestyles without accidentally, as a byproduct, harming others or creating more of the things and behaviors we’d like to see less of in the world.

Keep these fundamentals in mind and the direction you’ll want to go, and which steps to take first, will tend to reveal themselves.