Formulate Freedom is an online education platform for up-and-coming entrepreneurs. The ideas, stories, and frameworks are based on my decade-long journey which continues today.
The majority of my success can be attributed to two main principles: Pursuing Your Passion and Applying Leverage. I'll break those down in my own terms below.
Pursuing Your Passion
You need to hack together a system where you can make a living doing what you love. I built a business around Freestyle Scooters because I love riding scooters, filming it, and sharing it on the internet. I opened a shop (now an online store) that sells scooters, and I created a brand that designs and manufactures scooters. Now, the media I make with my friends drives sales for my companies. To make money, I have to do the thing that I'd want to do even if I had all the money in the world and didn’t need to work.
Applying Leverage
You need to make money in a way that isn’t tied directly to your time. When I sell my products online, the process is automated; the website can handle an infinite number of customers from all over the world checking out at the same time. Once upon a time, I'd have been restricted to a physical store, between the hours of 9-5, in the small town of Brisbane, serving one single customer at a time.
There are pros and cons for both.
Con: Pursuing your passion has to be focused around something you love, so that it doesn’t feel like work. But if you fall out of love with that passion, you’ll no longer love the work.
Pro: Pursuing your passion provides enjoyment and fulfillment from day 1. Even if I pursued scootering for 5 years and never found a way to make a living from it, I'd have still been doing what I loved for the last 5 years, that's a win regardless.
Pro: When applying leverage you can choose something you don’t love because operating it won’t take too much of your time anyway. The person who makes millions renting portable toilets probably isn’t in it for the love of toilets. They’ve just found a way to apply leverage to a much-needed product.
Cons: If you attempt to apply leverage to a product you don’t love but fail to make a viable business, it could be seen as a waste of time. You spent your time on it, it didn’t work, and you weren’t doing what you love along the way. Bummer!
Either of these methods are worthwhile individually, but put together can create a level of freedom few can relate to.
Imagine the work tasks that you HAVE to do take up only hours of your week, like paying an invoice or shipping out orders.
And every other task is something you genuinely enjoy doing and has open-ended deadlines, like designing new products or filming videos.
Now imagine your income eclipses what you’ve ever made in traditional employment, by far.
This is my reality, and it isn’t the result of a happy accident.
From Alan Watts to Tim Ferris and Eckhart Tolle to Naval Ravikant, I’ve been absorbing and applying ideas, lessons, strategies, and frameworks over a decade-long journey of entrepreneurship born from a desire to make a living doing only what I love with almost no exceptions.
This is my attempt to put it into words, to condense a decade of learning into a shareable format for anyone who might find themselves on a similar path.
This is, in my experience, how to Formulate Freedom.
Want to learn a little more about me and why i feel qualified to speak on such topics? Checkout Finding Freedom where i break down my 10 year entrepreneurial journey into bite sized pieces.