About financial independence and freedom

All the people dream about financial independency, but only a tiny part of the world's population achieved it. Interestingly enough, once achieved they almost never fall back to regular jobs but instead looking for new opportunities eventually starting new companies or investing previously earned money.

Image credit: © PsychoShadow - www.bigstockphoto.com

Don't sell your freedom for money

Every single person has her own understanding of freedom, one may feel free as long as she is not in a jail, another needs a decent passive income and yet another needs her personal jet to travel around freely. For me freedom is a total financial independence when nobody controls what I'm doing.

When I started my career I decided to work in hi-tech field. I was brand new to earning money, so I was excited to start as soon as possible. I became a technician. We were walking on the street, repairing old dusty Chinese routers and it seemed to be true freedom. I could cheat a bit and start working later if the workload allowed or swap working days with my colleges, we could meet up and resolve a few tickets together. We thought we are free, but wait a minute what kind of freedom it was? I had to carry a heavy backpack walking on the street even if a temperature was lower than -20 by Celsius, we had to walk if it was +35, if it was raining or icy, very often I got electric shock because of horrible installation standards and had to jump down from a metal lid placed on top of a wobbly chair. I had about $300 monthly and had to pay $200 of them for renting a small apartment. I knew I couldn't spend more than $3 per day buying simple food, I didn't even think about new clothes, cafes and cinema. Finally I met with my managers sitting in a cozy office and asked them kindly to increase my salary. The reaction was very negative, they started screaming about slow work so I have to find money to buy a car, buy a ladder, put lots of switches in a trunk and should do my work faster. I had been working for two years in this company, it was the end, I decided to quit as soon as possible and guess what, I never regret it. I've found a better job instantly, I became a software tester and got my own desk and a comfortable chair.

It was wonderful, at least at the beginning. Later on I noticed that I am doing the same monkey clicking and monkey typing over and over, so I decided to automate some tests and learnt basics of web automation. It was fun, but I still had a lot of manual testing. Fortunately, the company became bankrupt shortly and we were free to ask whatever we want, I asked to become a software developer and stared to practice developing some prototypes for free. As soon as the company touched the ground and started to grow again we got our salaries back and my chief started to give me testing tasks more and more. Finally I asked him to stop doing this, and after a short discussion he switched me back to programming tasks. In general we felt good working in software company, however very soon I realized that I couldn't select tasks, platforms, and programming languages I'd like to work with. Also my chief had a nasty habit of planning epic improvements for workers and holding on them forever. Eventually I decided to quit and guess what I never regret it.

Many people could give up and fall into depression, instead I took care of myself, bought nice food and increased sleeping hours. A few days later I decided to sign up for Elance and started freelancing full time. Very soon I've found a sold startup seeking to hire C sharp developers. I worked on a project solving a real world problem and was happy for a whole year. At the time I knew the project's code base very well and tasks became boring, I asked a CTO to increase my salary and he increased it by $2 per hour. So I gained a bit more, however it didn't give me peace of mind. I was looking to solve great challenges, so I had to leave, and I don't regret it at all. If you are tired to solve the same tasks over and over, just find another job or simply quit your job and take care of yourself like I did. If you have a family, quitting your job might be a tough way, your expenses most likely are very high, and you feel comfortable covering them with your wage so just take the first option please.

Do whatever you like to do

Now I spend a lot of time learning cutting edge technologies like blockchain and machine learning. I enjoy my freedom, but I don't earn money doing so. I'm watching some people writing blogs and making videos every day. It seems they live freely and don't need to obey anyone. I am asking myself is such a person living the life I want to live? Not quite sure, a small passive income could pay all my bills and could give me financial freedom at the moment.

I'm sure we shouldn't work just to earn more money, instead we should do whatever we like to do and money will come later. It may sound doubtful, but if you read great stories of success you can find lots of them about someone started something great just for fun, and it became something very useful and quite profitable. For example Linux kernel project was started by only one guy just to play with a new hardware set. He worked long hours without any payments and years later it was paid off. So you can do the same, spend some time every single day exploring new horizons, you can even do it all the time before you know exactly what kind of project or company you'd like to build, then make a plan and start working on it. If it fails you will get a useful experience, so whatever the odds you will be a winner.

Thanks for reading.