photo by new wave rh

I should start out by telling you that . . .

I’m Trying to Practice My Ranting Skillz

I suck at ranting. I enjoy reading rants, but I’ve never been very good at writing them. But apparently the rant genre is a sub-genre of the blog genre, and I need to master this shit if I ever want to displace Dooce on technorati.

Cool… I’ll Start With My Rant Right Now

Almost any resource can be a currency governed by economic forces—and the laws of supply and demand. (I probably read that in a fancy book somewhere. Please punch me in the face if I ever write another high falutin’ sentence like that again).

Anyway, money is a currency or whatever. Yeah, we know that.

But so is ego: it is traded, bartered for, bought, sold, etc. I see people participating in the ego economy all the time: new business owners waste thousands of dollars on putting big pictures of themselves on billboards. Social media people and others in the web 2.0 space sacrifice entire days of vacation and family time so they can be mini-internet famous for 1,000 people and make an extra $100/month. And people get into debt buying shit they don’t need trying to impress others or get laid.

So before the internet, money was (often) the primary means by which people participated in the ego economy; the money economy fed into the ego economy. Maybe it’s still this way.

But social media, the internet, and web 2.0 have given people a whole new venue for being vain and wasting their resources in exchange for ego gratification. Now you can broadcast a vlog to 500 people, become a power user on StumbleUpon, or Reddit, or Digg, and start a blog and try to get 1000s of subscribers. You can start and lead your own forum or newsgroup. You can be the leader of your own fiefdom of 400.

I’m Not Saying that All Bloggers are Ego Obsessed or Wasting time. Far from it.

Just hear me out.

I’ve seen a lot of people start blogging because they ultimately want to use blogging income to liberate themselves from their day jobs. That’s cool.

The problem is that – 1 year after starting their blogs – far too many of these people are still spending countless hours on their blogs even though they’re consistently losing money, freedom, and space time for months and months and months. They’ve become addicted to being in the spotlight.  It’s sad.   And many of those people are further away from liberation and more desperate than they were when they started.

The problem is that, although they originally started trying to liberate themselves from their day jobs, they can’t let go of being mini-internet famous.

They are trading ego for freedom.

Here’s the Tragedy

So the tragedy is that so many people who’ve come to the internet and this web 2.0 space to liberate themselves from shitty jobs end up not liberating themselves at all.

Instead, they end up self-medicating the shitty feeling they have at work with the ego-attention they get through their social media positions, subscriber bases, their statuses as influencers, or whatever, and as a result they end up sacrificing true liberation.

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photo by Laura Jeanne
I received an email yesterday from someone who told me that, with Finance Your Freedom, I had somehow decided that “money is the most important thing in life.” The email author stated that my view now seems to be that “we can’t live without money, so why not make as much as possible?”

So I Want to Set the Record Straight on Two Points

• First Point: I have nothing against anyone who makes tons of money. If you’re filthy rich and you’ve done it ethically, then good for you. I also have nothing against you if you’re dirt poor, or middle class, or anything in between. Money is a non-issue to me because it’s not a currency that I care about.

Which brings me to my second point . . .

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I’ve been working my ass off getting Finance Your Freedom ready, and it launches in 22 days.

But before FYF launches, I want to give you a flavor of what’s to come.  So tonight I’m not-so-subtly “leaking” (ha!) part one of a series of “Interviews With Work from Home & Lifestyle Design Renegades.” Go check it out here.

A little about Chris . . .

• It takes Chris between 1/2 hour and 2 hours each day to run his immensely successful Orange County personal training company.
• Chris is a married father of two girls, an Orange County personal trainer, and a fitness marketing blogger.
• In a past life, Chris was a marijuana trafficker and has (at various times) been both homeless & incarcerated.
• Chris is an amazing person and one of the best lifestyle designers I know.

In the interview we talk about…

• How Chris turned an 70+ hour work week into a 7-hour work week;
• How Chris went from making NOTHING as a personal trainer, to making more than 99% of personal trainers; 
• The most important first step towards leaving your day job;
• How Chris liberated himself from a traditional work environment and created the life of his dreams;
• Renegade time management; and
• Internet marketing and empowerment.

But enough talking already. . .

Just go here and listen to Chris droppin’ knowledge.

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