Three Sticks — Personal Development for Christians

What is freedom? I define freedom as the opportunity to spend your life doing what is important to you. For some that may mean spending time with their family, for others that may mean working to change the world for me it means improving my little corner of the world helping people and building deeper and richer relationships with those around me especially my friends and family.

I have spent a great deal of time thinking about freedom over the last 3 weeks. Three weeks ago I took a new job.  This job ended a 6 month period of dedicated self-discovery and soul searching. I wrote much of what I’ve learned about myself My Ministry series. Unfortunately I spent the first few months of my self-discovery period attempting to launch the SafetyNet Wireless Firewall, the first product of Miles Ahead LLC, the company my brother and I started. I violated the BE-DO-HAVE rule and tried to reinvent myself as entrepreneur by focusing on the outcome (a successful company) rather than the requirements to be a successful entrepreneur (entrepreneur’s mindset). However I am extremely fortunate that in the latter half of my self-discovery period I spent my time learning about myself and what is truly important to me. This resulted in me finding the path that I believe God wants me to walk in life.

About mid-February I realized that I faced an income shortfall. I needed to create a new revenue stream to address my basic living expenses. Although my mindset approximated that of an entrepreneur I chose instead to take a job. I prayed for it. I asked God to help me find a job and as I asked so he delivered. In a 3 day period I found a six figure consulting assignment with BearingPoint. The law of attraction at work.

This proved a couple of things to me. First, that as long as I believe I can achieve whatever I want assuming that what I want falls within the boundaries of God’s will. Second, that I still behave as though I believe myself to be an employee rather than an entrepreneur.

Here’s a quick review of the difference between an employee and an entrepreneur. This summary of the differences between employees and entrepreneurs is found in Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad Cashflow Quadrant. According to Kiyosaki, employees choose security over freedom. They believe that a “steady” paycheck will provide them with financial security which inevitably leads to emotional and other forms of security. Entrepreneurs instead choose to preserve their freedom and create business systems that address their financial needs. In addition, entrepreneurs do not link their emotional well being to their current financial status. As you can see based on these definitions, I reacted to a cashflow crunch by getting another job as someone with an employee mindset would respond, when I could have responded like an entrepreneur and create a new business system to address my cashflow crunch. Ironically, the employee mindset is the most dangerous because most employees have a single income stream the infamous “steady” paycheck and it only takes one person, usually their boss to close off that income stream.

I voluntarily gave up my freedom. I have attempted to accept it as just a short-term solution, but the reality is that it is easy to lose yourself in a new job attempting to fit in and be part of the “team.” This especially true of someone in a service industry like management and technology consulting. I am determined to not allow this to happen, but when you put on the face of an employee and act like and employee you will eventually begin to think like an employee.

There are a number of downsides in taking a job. For example, this post is my first significant post in March despite March almost being over and many of the activities I had planned to address in March have not yet been started. It’s simply very difficult to find the time to do other activities when you work 8-10 hours everyday with a 2 hour commute. One of the most important downsides I’ve found in giving up my freedom is that my daily worship time has been significantly compressed leaving me feeling that my connection to God is somewhat diminished from the earlier high I had experienced. For more reasons to avoid getting a job read Steve Pavlina’s 10 Reasons You Should Never Get A Job.

As you can see by the previous paragraph, I am fortunate in that I am having an incredibly tough time accepting my loss of freedom. I have realized that I need to reclaim the identity I found earlier this year. I realize that for me freedom is more important than anything else except my relationship with God. History, movies and legends all extol the great efforts that ordinary people will undertake to restore their freedom so shall I take those steps to restore my own.

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