What is freedom to you?
To me, freedom is doing what you want to do, when you want to do it, with whom you want to do it. That’s freedom.
Now, that doesn't mean you have to stop doing work or service or owning a business. It just means you have a choice in how and when you do it.
You're not forced to do things on a time frame or agenda that doesn’t fit with your life.
Now for most people, they go through their entire life living on other people's agendas. Other people, businesses, and corporations control what they do.
That’s not a good way to live.
Our nature is to have limiting beliefs. We've been told we have to live a life by putting in time for dollars, slaving for wages that may or may not let us retire some day.
I think that's just baloney. I don’t think you should have to wait forever.
14 years ago my daughter Jenna was very, very sick, and she was undergoing a life-saving liver transplant which had a lot of complications.
I came to a point where I said, “I've got to change my life.”
“If I don't do it now there may not be another opportunity for me to spend time with Jenna.”
I was still working in my practice, doing what I thought I was supposed to do.
I didn’t feel good about it though, because it was a stretch for me to get away from the practice to spend time with her.
But I'm her dad. I needed to be there.
So how do you change that paradigm when your job is to provide financial security for your family, but you also want to be there for them?
How do you deal with that dichotomy?
I made a decision. I looked really hard at my financials and came up with what I call “My number.”
What number did I need to have in terms of passive cash flow: income that did not require me to go to work at an office every day?
I got very granular about it and threw away all the things that I thought needed to be there to provide a wonderful lifestyle for my family.
I came down to simply, “How can I create a lifestyle where we're together, without all the stuff?”
When I got down to that, it wasn't so much. And fortunately, I had built up a decent portfolio in real estate by that time.
When I looked at the numbers, I had enough to accommodate that particular level of lifestyle – which most importantly, let me spend my time with my family and not be strapped to the practice.
Now here's the key point. You think, “Well gee David, I understand why you did what you did, but I couldn't do that.
I couldn't ask my family to move to a different house or not to have the nice cars or furniture or vacations.”
You know what? You don't have to stay there.
Make that number as small as you can, get your family on board, and then get free.
Maybe you can't get completely out of your job or practice, but get to some level of freedom.
The more free time you have, the more time you have to work on leveraging those investments, the capital you've already built.
Whatever my number was 13, 14 years ago, the actual revenue since then has increased and magnified many, many times.
And the beauty is, it happened with a lot less work because I didn’t have to trade time for dollars.
I can actually work on leveraging the investments, my network or my relationships, which all magnify the result. And I can do that on a few hours a week.
I do what I get to do today because I love what I do. I can spend time with my family, travel, or whatever it is I want to do because I had that epiphany.
Had Jenna not undergone what she went through, I wouldn't have come to that conclusion. I would still be in my practice like many of you are.
I'm telling you: This works, and I watch other doctors do it in Freedom Founders.
You can do this yourself, but I recommend you form an association with other people who have already done it, or are on the same path.
That's the way to make it happen, give you the confidence, and get you past those sticking points that hold everybody back. We all have sticking points.
But I pushed through hard because I had a real reason why – it was about my daughter.
I didn’t let anything stop me.
What's stopping you? That's my question. What is stopping you?
If you reach some level of freedom now, everything will expand much, much faster than trying to do it when you're 65 or 70 years old – and by then, it may be too late.
Don't let anything stop you. Determine your number and get free.
