Let’s be honest. When you have a lot of capital at your disposal, it is very unlikely that you will start a freeform business. You’d just start a traditional business in a first, second, or third sector possibly with a storefront and some employees.
(I used to call this concept a “creative online business” but I think freeform conveys the meaning a bit better)
Many people think of freeform businesses like “hustles” because it has the public image of someone trying to make some side cash out of something that’s less legitimate than a proper business. That’s why people often times equate it to a side hustle.
There are many implications of this perspective both externally and internally. Every time you want to proudly proclaim something about your business you will unconsciously shrink because you feel like people will consider it your cute little hobby. For this writing I’m not really interested in talking about that.
What’s the implication of YOU believing in this for your business?
This is a good time for you to read my previous writing on a similar topic:
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While there are numerous reasons for suffering not all of them impact us in the same way...
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The primary implication is that it will be very difficult for you to invest first in your business.
Consider the fable of the goose that lays golden eggs. You see the said goose in the market, and it’s being sold for $1M. Would you buy the goose?
What about if it’s for $100k? What about if it’s for $10k? What about $1k? There’s an amount of money that feels like it’s “reasonable” to you. And I’m not talking about YOU as a particular individual, this is just how we think about money in general.
That “reasonable” amount usually ends up being an amount you can spend and forget about. Why? Because if it’s anything beyond that amount, you’ll ruminate over the amount and obsess whether you’re getting your investment’s worth or not. This is what we talked about in the money objection writing above.
When you stay within the zone of financial safety you put a soft limit on how big your business can be. Your business can go through radical expansion, but it will only get those opportunities through external means like a technology previous impossible being accessible or finding a benefactor who radically supports your business.
But what’s the downside of going above the zone of financial safety? You’ll be taking risks. There will be a chance that you won’t get your money’s worth. There’s a chance you’ll need emergency funding but won’t have liquidity and you’ll have to eat into your savings. These are things that the modern individual wants to avoid at all costs.
So it’s ultimately about what we want to prioritize. And it’s so easy to forget this important fact: we can be fluid here. We don’t always have to be risktakers, we don’t always have to be comfortable. You can pick and choose periods of expansion and contractions. I just don’t want you to always default to a contracted state without even recognizing it.
Risks sound bad because it can eat into things we consider precious. This causes our loss aversion to kick in and it’s very difficult for your normal level of thoughts to win against the primal drive of loss aversion.
Which is why I want to propose this radical idea: what if risks are actually good?
The path to success is ridden with failures in a world where everything exists in a binary. Anything worth your time will have a sufficient level of difficulty, so the more valuable the success is the more likely you will fail your way through it.
In the eyes of the dharma it’s more nuanced than that. When you initially think of your desired results you don’t have any actions that educate you through the pathway through the results. So you take the actual steps, see that sometimes you get closer, sometimes you get further, and so on and so forth until you’re set on the right direction to arrive at your result.
It’s the binary vision that forces us to see things in a negative light. Whenever we’re not succeeding, we’re failing. In this viewpoint there is no “learning how to ride the bicycle”. There is either riding the bicycle or failing by falling. In this viewpoint there is no “practicing basketball”. There is either making the shot or failing the shot.
So we could simply employ a different perspective on success and failure. Then the million dollar question insists on itself: why don’t we do that then?
This is due to the subtle mechanism of the ego and its desire to be right. Dropping the desire to be right is one of our last battles before we reach unconditional happiness. Could you be happily wrong?
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It's easy to see that certain things are good or bad depending on perspective...
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When you cognitively set yourself on a path to success, regardless of how much you learn in the process your unconscious mind will still take it as being wrong.
Interestingly in the opposite case, when you pre-fear, pre-inhibit, and preclude your failure your unconscious mind gets validated with the outcome it predicted. It becomes the right one.
It is very likely that you are participating in this continuous cycle of needing self-validation of being right, and you’re doing it through failing. You self-prophesize your own failure and instead you get to feel omniscient and self-controlled.
This is a pattern that must constantly be surfaced up. In the spirit of the topic of this writing, surface it up by think about self-investment.
Let’s go back to the golden goose. Could you invest $1M in it in advance, even if you have to take out 10 mortgages? The answer doesn’t have to be yes. I just want you to look at the resistance you feel even when the prospect of returns is as obvious as a goose laying golden eggs.
(Chances are, you don’t think of your product and the value that you have as a goose that lays golden eggs. Let’s talk about that in another time)
This is the conversation I need to have with everyone interested in coaching with me. My life coaching is a $5k commitment. Will you invest that much into your life and make giant steps towards lasting happiness that can’t be quantified in dollars?
My business coaching is a $3.5k commitment. Will you invest $3.5k into yourself and build a business that makes $35k?
My technology services can build the product of your dreams for $1k. Will you invest $1k and make $2k out of the product?
I am not asking this so you will answer yes. I am asking because I want you to look at yourself navigate this question, because that’s ultimately what we are going to cultivate together in the end.
Billy Seol
July Life Coach
Invest in yourself at julylifecoach.com
