Lawrence from Office Space’s guide to freedom

[Note: This post is by Johnny B. Truant. A good friend and one hell of a weird dude].

My dad (who isn’t the guy in the photo above; he comes later) has this really interesting way of combining the surreal with the profound.

I mean, he lives above a big Italian Market warehouse populated by a gun-toting right-wing conspiracy theorist who can’t bring himself to click open a ballpoint pen, a woman with one arm, and a bizarre multipurpose hourly worker who argues that he should be paid twice what the woman with one arm gets, given that he has two. Dad will cook chili in tanker-loads and then eat it all year, and then (almost literally) not eat for two months in the winter to save money and lose holiday weight.

But he’s also always been my advisor, my shrink, and my moutaintop guru who simply doesn’t live on a mountaintop.

He’s the one who taught me to have faith. He’s the one who gave me the idea to operate on an all-cash basis. And he’s the one who gave me a really obvious — yet really underrated and often-missed — definition of freedom.

He’d say, “You just need to make enough money to let you do what you want to do.”

So obviously, a lot of you reading this blog are either working on your own freedom businesses, or you’re thinking about getting in the next time Project Mojave opens and taking a crack at one. And maybe you’re running the numbers in your head, trying to figure out what dollar figure would replace your J-O-B income so that you could be free.

But now would be a really good time to stop and think about what you really want, because it may not be what you think it is… and it may not take the amount of money that you think it will. What is it that you really want to do with and in your life? Once you’re free, what do you want your life to be?

Yeah, you really should consider this.

My dad is an artist. And, I mean that in the purest sense of the word. I don’t mean he makes illustrations for an advertising agency’s campaigns, or paints houses, or creates sculpture schematics for city parks departments. I mean that he lives in a loft and every single day, sits in front of an easel with a brush and paints. He does nothing else for money. Either he sells paintings or he’s shit out of luck. And you know what? Sometimes, when this is the way you operate… well, sometimes you end up shit out of luck.

It wasn’t always like this. He used to work for a big ad agency. I don’t know how much money he made, but he drove a Corvette and lived in a really fancy-ass condo and had one of those American Express cards with no limit.

And he was constantly stressed out and angry, because all he wanted to do was to make enough money so that some day, he could quit the job he hated and just paint all day.

So right now, you should say, “Aaah, I get it.”

See, every once in a while, we catch ourselves going in circles. We’re doing X so that it’ll provide enough income so that we can quit X and do Y, but then it’ll dawn on you that if you’d just stop X, that Y actually doesn’t take much money at all. It’s X that takes the money.

I heard an anecdote on a CD seminar recently where some big business guy lived in the city and hated it… he hated the traffic, the congestion, the people, the noise, the commute, the pollution. He really wanted to live in the country, but the problem was that he could only work his current job if he lived in the city. And he had to have that job — had to! — because living in the city was really expensive. If he didn’t keep the job, he would no longer be able to afford to live in the place he had to live if he was to keep the job.

Or consider my new buddy Adam Baker of Man vs. Debt. Go read his “About” page. What did his family want? They wanted to travel, to see the world NOW instead of working and working for things that society told them they should want, and to go deeply into hock to get those things. So they sold everything they could. Became minimalists. And now all they do is travel.

Or… you’ve seen Office Space, right? Peter hates his job, so he’s dreaming, asking people what they’d do if they had a million dollars so that they didn’t have to work. (That’s when Lawrence says that the thing he’d do is two chicks at the same time.)

And then he asks Peter what he’d do if he had a million dollars, and Peter says he’d do nothing. He’d sleep in, lie around the house all day… and do nothing.

And Lawrence says, “Hell, you don’t need a million dollars to do nothin’, man. Look at my cousin. He’s broke; don’t do shit.”

This is really, really worth looking at right about now, as you look toward your own freedom, and the income you want your business to give you. Maybe you make $5k a month now, and live in an expensive house with two cars. Maybe you’ve told yourself that you’d make that income all your life so that you could retire and… move into a loft above the Italian Market (where you won’t need cars; there’s a subway) and paint all day.

Think about what you’re really gunning for in life, because it’s for damn sure not money. Nobody gives a shit about money. What we want is what we think money will mean, what it will give us. If what you really want is to go skydiving every day and to live in a mansion, then okay, you DO need a lot of money.

But a lot of us want to “do nothing.” Or paint. And that’s not expensive at all.

What do you want? It may be a hell of a lot cheaper than you think, and the number you have in your head about how much money you need to make might include a lot of infrastructure: I need THIS so that THIS can happen and I can funnel THIS into THIS so that I can stop doing THIS and eventually have THIS.

But maybe you can just have THIS now if you’ll let go of the rest.

Think about it. Freedom might actually be one hell of a lot closer than you think.