Starting a business is the most accessible way to financial freedom.
However it is way difficult to start a business in say, real estate or investment. The capital to start is huge.
I don’t deny that real estate is a decent option for people who have money, but for beginners who are still trapped in their parents’ ideology of investing every last penny while being forced to stay at a boring job to fund their delusional chances of getting rich… it is not going to happen. At least not on any meaningful timescale where you still have a life to live.
The way that we live and work continue to change. Human Civilization influence what society determine as valuable which affects the chain of value exchange – business.
The earliest civilization were hunter gatherers. About about 1.8 million years ago humanity's vocation wad focused on survival activities.
In early Agrarian societies, we invented tools to make food gathering easier and had abundant food in store. Individuals had the free time to invent mathematics and writing other field of study.
As societies continued to progress, we invented heavy machinery and built industries for industrial mining, car manufacturing, transportation. This was in the Industrial Age.
Before the Industrial Revolution, most education was local, religious, or apprenticeship-based.
With factories emerging in the late 1700s–1800s, factory owners needed disciplined, punctual and obedient workers.
Schools began to take on the role of producing "obedient" workers who could follow instructions, work long hours, and fit into the new system of mass production.
Features like age-based grades, standardized testing, and a focus on obedience and routine were adopted widely.
Work shifted from pursuing your interests and solving the problems life presented you to completing tasks assigned to you by your employer. Doing something you hate just for survival sake.
While many still endure grueling and meaningless work, we have sports, film, content creation and deep experience as "work."
The thing is, we’re not in the Industrial Age anymore, we’re in the Information Age.
Getting a job and investing your savings isn’t the only option.
People are losing trust in the conventional path's promises to secure their future. It's one of the worst options because your time, energy, and and emotional well-being are at the control of a boss.
The creator economy.
The idea space.
A place where people aren’t limited by their connections or physical location because they can reach anyone with an internet connection.
And if you have the right skills – writing, marketing, and building – all you have to do is get what you build in front of a micro-fraction of people that perceive what you built as valuable.
A quick insight on breaking free:
Entrepreneurship is the natural step after self-improvement. You acquire a skillset and mindset so valuable to your life that you can’t help but share it with others. You solve your own problems, sell the solution that changed your life, and improve humanity as a result.
I see employment as a stepping stone.
Jobs are useful for skill acquisition, status, and opportunity.
But getting stuck in one is dangerous for your psyche which is wired to hunt. You become a monkey in a cubicle. It is against your nature.
Entrepreneurship is modern survival.
- Set a goal.
- Find a problem.
- Learn how to solve it.
- Document how you solved it.
- Distill into a replicable process.
- Give it to others that want to be helped.
Do it offline and it's called growth. Do it online and it's called business.
If you can write, speak, market, and sell you no longer have to worry about the outcome of your life. All you must do is use those skills to create your path.
The easiest way to build an independent income source is to solve a problem in your life, document the solution, and use your personal brand to market it. Writing helps you achieve that.
When you stop hiding what you have to offer and put yourself on the market, only then does your luck increase beyond 0%.
Why Most People Fear Starting A Business
Going against what everyone is telling you to pursue your interests is a huge risk.
It requires personal responsibility, personal accountability and self education.
If you want to do what you enjoy for a living, you're living in the right period.
The internet has decentralized wealth creation to individuals who value self-education, personal responsibility, and amounting to something in your life by doing good work.
Most people have no shred of personal responsibility left. Most people stopped learning after graduation.
“The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner.”— Naval Ravikant
Personal responsibility determines the outcome of your life in a decentralized economy.
You won't get average results with average goals. You will get rare results with rare goals. Curiosity, reality exploration, and eventual obsession with a craft is your key to greatness.
You have to realize what you don’t want to figure out what you want – even if it is destructive – to realize what you don’t want. Preventing yourself from making mistakes is the stupidest mistake of all. Learning that does not lead to action is useless.
It is impossible to know with absolute certainty what is going to happen in the future.
This is why the masses flock to “secure” jobs and belief systems.
It’s an illusion of certainty to avoid struggle. You can’t skip making mistakes. Mistakes are your light in the dark.
Self-education is a cornerstone habit that you must do every single day, no matter the topic of study.
Humans are meant to expand, transcend, and create. Constant self-improvement and evolution is not optional. If you as an individual get stuck, so will your endeavors.
There is a way to build whatever life you want with technology and the internet. If there isn't a way, create it.
The Greatest Killer Of Any Entrepreneur's Dreams
In the previous letter I briefly went over the first lever you need to make an independent income - a product. If you learn how to monetize your skills and build an audience you are set for life.
Most people don't know how to create wealth right now.
I would argue that you do know. You’re looking at it right now. But you still have the “consume and save” mindset that limits how you perceive the gold rush happening right in front of you.
Success comes down to 3 things:
- What you do
- How many people know what you do
- Making what you do valuable to those that know what you do
The greatest killer of any entrepreneur's dreams:
They launch the product they poured their time, energy, and heart into to face the one thing they feared all along…_Nobody cares about their product. _Nobody wants to buy the ONE thing that is responsible for letting them finally take control of their life. Even worse, some don't even make it that far.They have dreams of becoming an entrepreneur, but they do everything except for the one thing that will make them a success.
They write content.
They make videos.
They build a network.
They create a website.
They design a logo.
They send a few emails. But they're afraid… or they just don't realize… that in order to make money outside of a job (or second job called client work) they need an audience to sell a product to. It's not optional. That's the role the company you work for or your boss plays anyway. You are given a set amount of tasks for a set amount of income so your employer can deliver the product that their CUSTOMERS are paying for.
You Need Distribution Power
This is the second lever you need to build an independent income. I wrote about the first one in my previous letter. You can go and check it out.
You need distribution. Distribution=leverage. An audience=distribution.
Please hammer this into your head:
To think that working hard for 12 hours on a replaceable task, under a boss and not taking control of every single thing that would make you the boss and make you the money is kind of foolish and you are going to be trapped in that 2k to maybe 5k range for most of your life and you are not going to get out of that unless you choose to be an entrepreneur because that is the only way that you can tap into a broader sense of leverage.
Yes you can use leverage in your work to do better work but what about leverage in your life?
Entrepreneurship is the first step to unlocking that leverage.
At its heart, every successful business, every thriving career, and every dollar earned boils down to one thing: value creation. If you work a job, you're already doing this – you're providing value to your employer. The shift to independent wealth comes when you realize you can provide that value directly to others, on your own terms.
You need an audience.
"People do business with people."
Right now, it’s on social media.
Most people think of social media as a silly app on their phone, yet they spend the majority of their life on it.
You’ve still yet to make the connection that it is a massive part of the economy, business, learning, and life in general.
Our ancestors had small audiences for the role they played in their tribe.
As the world advanced through the printing press, radio, and television, how we acquired an audience for our work has drastically changed.
The point is this:
You need a group of people who know what you do and how it helps them. That’s what the business you work for does. That’s the only way to become the CEO of your life.
You don’t need to go knocking door to door. You don’t need to send thousands of cold emails. But you still need distribution for your work.
Right now, you can post your writing on an app like X, Facebook, have a larger account repost your work, and gain hundreds of followers in a day.
Most people think they can’t build an audience because they haven’t taken the time to learn the sovereign skills of writing and persuasion.
They don’t think they can:
- Write an impactful post by emulating what works (we all start as copy cats, how else do you learn?)
- Write a DM to a large account to offer a form of value (knowledge or money) to build rapport.
- Persuade them to exchange that value for something you want (a repost on social media).
- Or, write a thread about someone in hopes that they repost it because it adds to their social proof
- Get tens of thousands of people to see your post, many of them following you.
- Continue the process until you have an audience begging to pay you.
- Launch a product and attain your freedom.
As you practice skills, they decrease in the amount of time it takes to see results.
It will be difficult at first, as all things are, but your time invested will decrease to 1-2 hours a day of writing and self-promotion.
Your Action Plan For Independence
- Learn something: Acquire a new skill, deepen existing knowledge.
- Build something: Create a valuable product or service based on what you've learned.
- Share it: Connect with your audience and deliver your value.
If you're not where you want to be yet, there's likely one key differentiator: skill. The person who is where you want to be possesses the skills necessary to navigate those challenges. By intentionally acquiring the skills that empower you to tackle better mental, physical, and financial challenges, you fundamentally change who you are. And that change unlocks unparalleled opportunities.
Thanks to deep knowledge being accessible to those who want to find it on the internet, you can become top 10% in any skill with 6-12 months of focused effort.
I realized that the source of most people’s lack of fulfillment is that they’ve never learnt or built something that they chose to learn or build.
The inputs and outputs of one’s mind were enslaved since birth with the conventional life path. Learn this. Build that. To the point where people hate the only two things that will free them from that enslavement — learning and building.
If you invest the time it would take to get a degree in building an email list of 50,000 like-minded readers, that’s twice the capacity of what a professional football stadium can hold. Now, if you craft a persuasive message, write a few emails, and promote a product that you’ve created as a solution to your own problems, I would not be surprised if you made the average United States salary in a month, minimum.
If you don’t create a purpose, you'll be assigned one. If you don't create a career, you'll be assigned one.
Thanks for reading.
-Patrick