The Smart Investor And Smart Work

People often find working as second nature. After all, through history we know that we need to work to feed ourselves. More importantly, working hard has been the central motto of people looking to find success. As they say working hard is what your worth is all about.

But is that still true today? People can understand why hard work is needed at a time where people have to hunt animals and gather fruits. During those times, you cannot come back home without food. In the 21st Century, most people still think that way. But from the philosophy of a smart worker, “hard work pays off… but it doesn’t pay enough.”

Jamie McIntyre drives this point in his book “What I Didn’t Learn in School but Wish I Had”. He argues that the trends today do not call for hard workers. Instead, we need people who think. While millionaires do not undervalue hard work, they certainly do not find hard work as the beacon of success. Instead, working smart is just as important, if not more important, than working hard.

Then what is smart work? Smart work is thinking work. Today, people get caught up with different pressures in life that they feel they need to be in tip-top shape to handle every pressure that comes at them. However, a myopic understanding of hard work will result to making things harder instead of succeeding. In the end, a sense of constant struggle will befall the hard worker who does not find ways out of his predicament or are unaware of his current situation.

Today the world is built on finding easier ways at arriving at things. In finding financial freedom, there is always an easier way. Finding the easy way out is the initial step to smart work. As we find the path to making things more efficient and effective for ourselves, we free up time to become more productive and useful to other people. Thus, smart work becomes one of the primary tools for achieving financial freedom in this age.

A Smart Approach

Developing a millionaire’s mindset involves a lot of discernment, decision making, and critical judgment. In short, being a millionaire requires a lot of thinking. Being your own CEO by improving your time management skills, efficiency, and productivity is a thinking process. Being higher up the financial pyramid requires being smarter than the next person. There is always a bigger chance for you to outsmart the next person than outwork them.

Achieving Financial Freedom the Smart Way

Jamie McIntyre explains that hard work can be detrimental and is not the key to wealth creation and financial freedom. Definitely, it is as not as valuable as working smart. There are different examples including Jamie’s life that can testify that smart work pays off a lot more than hard work. By developing his mindset, he changed his fortune from a young man with too much debt to a better man with financial freedom. The changing mindset allows people to set successful financial strategies and act instinctively with the vision to create wealth.

Being Above the System

Smart work involves questioning your way out of a system created by the people who control the resources. Breaking into the group of the haves involves rising above the world system that most people fall under. Daring to be different in a responsible and positive way is a never-ending thinking process to get ahead of the pack.

Smart work is the true pursuit to happiness. Meanwhile, myopic hard work is admission of defeat. This distinction is more obvious in the 21st century than ever before. It is our choice where we want to end up.

Achieving Financial Freedom

Definition of Financial Freedom

Financial freedom is a word that has taken primacy in the 21st century. It is a term that describes a lifestyle that is organically planned where no one is required to work for income to cover their expenses. Financial freedom perpetuates that one can be free of the responsibilities of money as long as he has set a life defining plan to handle his finances.

Financial freedom does not mean that one is free of debt. However, it contends that debt can be defined as an expense. While debt is a constant financial consideration, a person who has acquired financial freedom is allowed to mark debt as a part of his expenses rather than a weight to his financial goals.

Financial freedom is a misconception for being rich. While we know that rich people have a number of million dollars in account, their overhead long run costs could mean that they are not as financially independent as they seem. Therefore financial freedom is a concept attuned to your lifestyle and the amount of money you have to cover it. In this perspective, financial freedom is not as hard to achieve as first imagined.

Financial Freedom is Time Freedom

For other people, financial freedom is equivalent to having an expanded leisure time. The concept of time is money comes into play. In reality, a financially independent person will see that money is time. Once you are able to develop a sense of time freedom, then that means you are in a positive direction to acquire financial freedom

Financial freedom makes ones finances less of a concern. Defined differently, financial freedom allows someone to take time on activities without trading your free time for income. Financial freedom hinges on tradable assets that compound over time to cover for regular expenses. Thus, wealth is created which generates more time and money. It allows people to cut their working hours with no loss of income because of money making activities.
Achieving Financial Freedom

Achieving financial freedom requires a different mindset. In our classic college education, we are taught to work for money. Therefore, we put in time to work and then we get our wage. This is the famous time for money swap. However, financial freedom removes the concept of time-and-money-swap and allows an individual to make money work for them.

Achieving financial freedom involves a different shift in lifestyle and overall mindset. While it is easy to think about having more time to invest and create a business, most office workers still find that whatever amount of time that they have should be placed in a routine. A critical step in achieving financial freedom is realising that there are ways to make better use of ones time.

To achieve financial freedom, fundamental attitudes about the concept of money need to be changed. Realizing that money is only a mean to achieve an end is one thing. Knowing that no one should be judged depending on the amount of money they own is another. Judging financial freedom as the amount of money held defeats the purpose because in the end, you will not have financial freedom if you are not satisfied with the money that you have. Remember that financial freedom is also a personal perception. This perception is highly related to the level of satisfaction that money brings.

On another side of the coin, we should also remove the negative perception of money. While the saying that “money is the root of all evil” seems relevant, thinking that this is always the case will provide a repellent view about creating wealth. Always put into heart that financial freedom is a healthy endeavour as long as one feels it is ethically sound to make money. In the end, having the right attitude about money will go a long way in dealing with different perceptions of financial freedom. Financial freedom is ultimately a state of mind.