You deserve to be free in all ways, not just a few. To live the life you deserve, you must enjoy freedom in all its variations. Indeed, our physical freedom is our birthright. It is not something that should need to be earned, bought, or passed from generation to generation. It belongs to us from “Once upon a time” to “The End.” Physical freedom is important, but true freedom also means living a self-determined life, which is not easy. True freedom means creating, rather than accepting, the environment in which you live. It means refusing to stay in surroundings where you are not wanted, not loved, or not valued. It means having the ability to change your situation immediately, taking a principled stand when a principled stand is required. It means working on your own behalf for your own reasons. It means not accepting other people’s definition of how much of your time is their time and how much they will allow you to keep. You lose in that deal every time. It means being a Public Enemy when necessary, fighting the powers that be. It means not accepting anything human-made as a given. Free people know that anything human-made can be human-destroyed if necessary. True freedom is living life rather than just surviving it. Free people believe they can beat any odds, and then bet on themselves to do just that.
Those who are truly free will not accept “sometime” freedom, nor will they wait for “someday” freedom. In the same way that you would not accept the right to vote in only odd-numbered years, free men and women do not accept circumstances that work against them today in exchange for the promise of retribution at some later date. They know that those who would hold them captive today cannot be trusted to emancipate them tomorrow. Therefore, they support only those people and organizations that would have them do well at all times. Free people believe they deserve to do well, so they insist upon surrounding themselves with people who feel the same way. This is nonnegotiable. No bully is going to take their freedom like it was lunch money. They keep it on lockdown like Hannibal Lecter.
Further, those who are truly free believe that freedom delayed is freedom denied, and they’re not having it. They see too many of their peers busy dying one indignity at a time while waiting for their gold watches, so the free get busy living. Yet, too many of us spend our entire lives working for the weekend, working for vacations, working for retirement. We spend our entire lives trying to endure the bulk of our days as they want, so we can live some small portion of them as we want. People who are free in all ways believe it is their absolute right to determine their fate. They spend every day of their lives asserting that right. This is how free you need to be to be free. Yet, there is something inside too many of us that causes us to defer freedom or, worse still, to give it up altogether. Why? Freedom begins in your mind. You cannot be free if your mind is not. Are you free?
Brian McClellan is the cofounder and CEO of BAMSTRONG Presentations, a career consulting firm, and the author of The Real Bling: How to Get the Only Thing You Need. To learn more about Brian, please visit
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