← Impact with Eddie Wilson
Impact with Eddie Wilson
35 - Your Success Is a Cage | The 3 Freedoms That Set Entrepreneurs Free
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Welcome to the Impact Podcast. I'm Eddie Wilson, here to help you visualize what others cannot see, create opportunities where others have failed, and push you to build empires where once there was empty space. Let's embark on this journey together and make a difference in this world. What if everything you built to create freedom is now the thing that owns you? Today on the podcast, I'm super excited to talk to you about my three freedoms formula, which I'm going to help you through. And you're going to have to listen fast because we're going to go quick today. This is going to be a shorter episode as I'm going to jump right to the points that I want you to hear. And I want to make this one super quick, super easy, but super powerful in your life. All right, so let's jump in. You're a business owner, you're a solopreneur. You're somebody who has a lot of employees. Or maybe you're somebody who's sitting at home right now trying to make it happen all by yourself. But the fact of the matter is, is what you set out to build as an entrepreneur oftentimes enslaves you. The hustle culture sold you enslavement dressed up like success. Entrepreneurs pride themselves on being busy instead of being free. Let's talk about what freedom means in your life. Why did you start this thing? Why did you step out? Why did you leave that W2 job? Why did you leave that corporate environment? It's because you wanted freedom. You wanted freedom. So for you, you worked to escape the 9 to 5. And then what happened? Well, now you find yourself 8, 9, 10 o' clock at night, still fretting about clients that are underser business that's undone. And now instead of going from a 9 to 5, you got a 24, 7. And you're finding not necessarily success and purpose. You're finding shackles, you're finding slavery. And so I want to just kind of walk you through some concepts that I use in my life to really help me get to a place where I detach from what I'm doing to myself by creating those chains of control. Marcus Aurelius said, you have to have power over your mind, not outside events. And that's where this all starts. It's power over the mind. The problem is, is that we first have to identify the problem. And the problem is, is that right now, the framework that you've created for your life, for your business is that more clients equal more responsibility. A bigger team actually creates more stress. You think well, more clients brings success. It actually brings more responsibility. You think a bigger team is going to get you to a place where you work less, but it brings you more stress. You think that more revenue is going to be the answer to all of your needs, but it brings more overhead. You think that the, the accolades of being someone with success are going to drive you, but you realize your ego creates this addiction to being needed. Your ego creates an addiction to being needed. These are the things that we have to get straight in the mind. Because it's not more clients, it's not a bigger team, it's not more revenue, and it's not about building a name for yourself that's going to get you freedom. All of those things are traps. All of those things are things that will enslave us. If you can't sell it, step away from it. Or, you've heard me say this in recent podcasts, take 30 days off. Your success is a cage. It's not a crown. It's a cage, not a crown. When I think about building empires, we oftentimes think about ourselves as kind of the central figure. We think of ourselves as the emperor, the king, the person who's sitting there controlling all things. But the thing is, is the experience that we gain can either be a cage or a crown. And so for us, it's so important that it has to start in the mind. It has to start with how we think. So let's step into what I call the three Freedoms. The Three Freedoms, this is a framework that I built. Um, you'll actually find it in my next book that I have coming out is this concept of there are three freedoms that we have to have in our life. That, that, that creates purpose and creates fulfillment. Okay, so the first freedom we have to have is the freedom from our role. The freedom from our role. We have to detect detach identity from function. We have to detach identity from function. Oftentimes what we do is whatever we are associated with in role or title becomes our identity. And so what we want to do is we want to detach that. We want to say, okay, my, my, who Eddie Wilson is, isn't the CEO of Collective Influence. Eddie Wilson isn't the founder of or co founder of the Aspire Tour. Eddie Wilson is the functions of my job. And so if I break down the functions of my job, I'm a leader. I'm somebody who's mentoring younger staff members. I'm overseeing finance and governance. I'm building the big relationships with our clients. Right? Like, so I'm doing the role of a CEO, but I need to get rid of the title of the CEO. Oftentimes the title is what enslaves us because it gets us in this place where like, we are the king, we are the person that's the central figure. And you're not, you are the person who's doing the function of the job or the role. Because once you start to step into the function versus the role or title, you'll start to find peace, happiness and fulfillment in the job you do, not the title you wear or what's on your business card. So that's the first freedom we need is the freedom from our role. The second thing we need is the freedom from our perspective. Our perspective. We have to begin, and you've heard me say this so much, we have to begin to remove ego. We have to remove ego. How do I do this in practical sense? I have to look at my function, my business, as an investor, not an operator. Think about this. If you were to actually take the business and what you're in today, and I know it's tough to do this, but disassociate with the actual business itself and say, what is, what would I expect from this business if I was an investor, not an operator, right now you're the operator. You're in the middle of the business. You're, you're fighting the fires, you're seeing the issues. But if you stepped away and you said, what would I do if I was just an investor, what would I expect? What changes would I expect to be made? What, what people would I expect to be moved or changed around? And if you think about your business from the perspective of an investor, right now you're looking at it within the right framework. As an operator, we get lost in the minutia and the day to day and the concerns and the fires and the issues. But the problem is, is that as an owner of your business, you have to look at it and as an investor. So you need freedom from your role, you need freedom from your perspective. The way that you do that is you have to remove ego. Because oftentimes ego is preventing us from both role and perspective. And then lastly, the third freedom is we need freedom of our time. This is the one I struggle with. And what you'll find is that you will struggle with at least one of these categories. It'll be so difficult. So like, you may not struggle with a title or the freedom from a role, you might not struggle with the freedom from perspective, but you might struggle like me, which is Freedom from time. Which time is one of those things that I hyper, hyper focus on. But the reality of it is, is that we. Our time. Let's say our calendar is a scoreboard of design. It's a scoreboard of design, meaning that when we look at what we do on a weekly basis, we can really determine how much freedom we have based on the control we have over that calendar. Does the calendar have control over you or do you have control over the calendar instead of looking at your. And again, you know, one of the core teachings that I adhere to is that time is our most valuable asset. You'll agree with me there. However, our daily activity does not prove that. If time is your most valuable asset, then we should be. We should be spending more time managing our time than managing our money. We believe that money is our most valuable asset. So you spend more time managing your money, thinking about your money, thinking about how far the dollars will go. Well, what if you spent the same amount of time or put the same emphasis on your time? Here's where I'll give you a test to determine if you do or not. You say time's your most valuable asset, but let me see, let me ask you this. If time is your most valuable asset, then you wouldn't measure the success of your business by its revenue. But by the time that you control, it wouldn't be how much profit is in a bank account. It would be how many days could you take off? How many days did you take off? How much time did you separate for yourself? And so if you say, well, you know, but I look at my, my bank account, my profit, and that's how I gauge the success of my business, not the time that it creates for me or the days off that I could take. Then you have this entire thing out of perspective. The three freedoms you need are role, perspective and time. If I looked at your scoreboard, the. The calendar of your life, that's your scoreboard, your personal scoreboard. It's not the scorecard or the stoplight report I'm talking about with your business and KPIs. But if I looked at the scorecard of your life, the scoreboard of your life, it would be your time. It would be your calendar. How much time do you have over it? How much time do you spend doing the things that matter to you most? How much time do you spend in this place of fulfillment? This is the true key to determine if you're actually free or not. Did you build yourself a trap? Did you build yourself a cage? Or did you Build yourself a platform for success. Detachment is actually power, and this is what I want to spend just the last few minutes on is detachment is actually power for you and your life. The more you can detach from your role, your perspective, from the time constraints in your life, then it will help you begin to make the right choices. You know, one thing I talk a lot about the Stoics, and I love the concept of who Marcus Aurelius was. But I think the thing that makes me most, let's say, admiring of who Marcus Aurelius was, was that he ruled in silence. You know, he ran his entire empire in silence, not in noise. It wasn't the frequency of how much he was talking. It wasn't the activity that was always buzzing around. It was oftentimes him sitting in deep thought, reflecting on the things that mattered, giving himself space so that when he acted, it was acting in truth and was acting in consciousness, not in his subconscious reality. Most of us, because we are tied by our subconscious to our role, to our perspective, to the time, or the traps that we set for ourselves, oftentimes we lack the clarity to make the right decision. When I think about stoic leadership, oftentimes you'll hear people talk about it as a leadership style of apathy or disassociating or not caring. And that couldn't be further from the truth. What it is, is it's a leadership style that acts in clarity, not apathy. Apathy would be, I don't care, I won't spend time on this. Clarity is as I'm going to get the time that's necessary to have the right thinking so that I can make the right choices. Carnegie built to exit, Rockefeller exited to impact. And I love that because as we begin to build our, our, our empire, as we begin to build what we're doing, we have to have the end in mind. We have to have what are we building for. And you'll never get to what you're building intentionally to, unless you control the process of building. You hear me talk a lot about the exit. You hear me talk about a lot about the end goal or the North Star, that future place. But today I want to call us back to, but what about now? What about this moment? What about you today as you sit here and you listen to this podcast, do you have control of your time? Are you tied to this perspective? Your ego is tied to this perspective that you're trying to generate or this perspective that you currently have? Are you tying it to the role? Some of you. This is a hard reality, a harsh reality, need to step down from the role that you possess on your business card because you're not good at it. You should put someone else in that role and you should qualify yourself based on the functions that you can do at the highest level. Instead of associating your role and associating the title, associating the ego to who you are. If you can flip that and begin to spend the time intentionally in the area that you operate at your highest and best service, you'll find fulfillment. And that's the craziest thing, is like we're taught from the moment that we get out of college that titles matter, that pay matters, that benefits matter. And can I tell you that title pay benefits are all the traps that put you into this place where you say, my fulfillment is going to come from my title. My fulfillment is going to come from the output, which is money. The fulfillment comes from all the accoutrements that essentially prop us up and make us feel better. That's not what happens. Our fulfillment comes from understanding who we are, where we're going, but controlling the process consciously along the way. Today, I want you to think about this. I want you to write things down. I want you to consciously be aware, I hope that one of those, those freedoms that you need to possess hit home and you'll take steps. What steps will you take today to make sure that you're ensuring the freedom along the pathway to get to the end result that you ultimately want? Hope that helps today. Super excited to help you and continue make sure that as you go down this path of this podcast with me, give me some feedback, let me know what you think, let me know if there's things that you want me to tackle, problems that you want me to help you solve, and topics that you want me to go on. For all of you that have not been a part of the Aspire Tour, that we have the nation's largest business tour, we'll be coming to a city near you very soon and if you use the code word impact, you use that, that word, then it'll give you a 50% off ticket to come be a part of the Aspire Tour and I'd love to see you there live. Thanks so much for being a part of the podcast and for listening today. Love to connect with you further and you can connect with me on social media. Wilson Official on any of the social media channels.