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Being happy has a lot to do with being free. But freedom cannot be given, it must be earned. It’s earned through achieving financial freedom. So, financial freedom is the foundation of your other freedoms. Being financially free will enable you to be time free and location free. But, our societal conditioning has erected barriers that prevent us from getting out of the slavery domain and into the freedom one. I identify two psychological barriers that are self-imposed and prevent us from achieving financial freedom.
The first barrier is our conditioned mindset. It’s a long history of conditioning that there isn’t enough to go around. The business landscape has a role in creating urgency and scarcity that enhances the scarcity mentality. Replace this with developing an abundance mentality. Delivering value to people is an abundant resource. Stop thinking of how to get money, but rather, how can you give value. At the end of the day money is a reward for the value rendered.
Related: Why Adding Value is Your Life’s Sole Mission
The second barrier is the belief that “money is the root of all evil”. Such saying was quoted from the Bible and lacks a close scrutiny. For Bible says that “Love of money is the root of all evil.” Money is a neutral tool that depends on how you use it. It’s like a knife, you can peel an orange and feed the poor or you can kill with it. It all depends on you.
Our today’s leader is someone who evolved from being a rapper to a wealthy businessman worth millions of dollars. Jay-Z is a lyrical genius and a favorite hip-hop music artist of all time. In some of his songs, he preached about the necessity of having financial freedom. For him, it’s no longer an option but rather a necessity.
Jay-Z’s courage is best illustrated in exposing his vulnerabilities to his audience. He recounts how he climbed over the fence that was created by society. The fence that was formed by the early conditioning of living paycheck to paycheck every month, to another space of abundance and financial freedom. That freedom cannot be attained without a proper financial literacy.
Related: How to Honor The Power of Commitment
Financial freedom is the basis upon which other freedoms are built. To attain this freedom, we need to remove our deeply-rooted beliefs that reside inside us all and replace them with viable and sustainable ones.
