Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.
One of the most common emails I get is from people who have difficult decisions to make.
“I want to live the minimalist freedom lifestyle, but I can’t decide if I want to keep my house and my car.â€
This message is for all of those people out there who have a hard decision to make.
If you’ve already made hard decisions, congratulations! Now go enjoy the remaining summer days in the park.
The difficulty of hard decisions.
Whether it’s leaving your wife, destroying your car, burning the bridges at your high paying job you hate, or running away from your childhood home. It’s all the same, and it’s all hard.
The truth is that you deserve to be happy, and something is in the way.
For years you couldn’t figure out what the problem was, instead you had this raw aching feeling that something/somewhere was terribly wrong.
Somewhere along the way you figured out that society as we know it was broken. It actually died a long time ago. In the wreckage of suburbia, the desolate sprawl of decay and discontent, you found the answer.
Everything they told you about the life you were supposed to lead was wrong.
- Building walls doesn’t bring safety.
- Buying a car doesn’t get you chicks.
- Watching TV news actually makes you paranoid.
- Having a good job at a desk didn’t make you happy.
- Eating chicken nuggets didn’t stop you from starving.
So you kept searching, and now you’re here.
The future of our society is now.
Our society is being reborn, but in order to follow the path we have to make tough choices. There will have to be yes or no answers. You can’t keep it all and have freedom too.
Sooner or later the moment will come when you can’t hide from the things we’ve done anymore.
…and you’ll have to make a choice, which I really believe is between life and death.
Look around you. Can you tell the difference between those who are the walking dead and the ones who are actually alive? I can, and the living surround me. Every day another one of you wakes up and realizes the journey to the future is this way.
The difference between that life and the life you want to lead is a choice. You either choose to live, or you choose the opposite.
I chose life. That’s why you’re reading this blog.
You might have choose already, and that’s amazing. You might not realize that there is a choice, someday you will.
If you’re at the crossroads, you have a decision to make. Freedom or prison? A slow death at the hands of the crumbling remnants of corporate America or building your own path to freedom.
You can’t have it both ways, I’m sorry. It just doesn’t work that way, there is no middle way.
The time to decide to choose life is now.
Here’s a quick guide to making hard decisions, I hope it will help you make yours.
1. Don’t ask everybody if it’s okay.
The sad reality is that most of the people you surround yourself are the walking dead. They’ve given up and don’t understand why you want a better life for yourself. If you ask all of your friends who are stuck in the perpetual cycle of consumerism, you’ll get a standard antiquated response. They can’t understand what you’re going through, because they don’t know. Surround yourself by successful people to become successful.
2. Instead ask people who’ve done it.
I’ve met a lot of successful people over the last year, and every single one of them would encourage you to dream big. Why? Because they’ve done it. So, here’s what I want you to do. Run your courageous dream by some enthusiastically successful people. You don’t have to look far to find them — and I’d encourage you not to restrict yourself to uber-successful unreachable individuals. Just find someone who’s making over $100,000 doing what they love and ask them how they got that place. Chances are it was because they dared to dream big and embrace a new reality.
3. Kill your babies.
You’re going to have to make some sacrifices, this much is inevitable. Nothing comes without a trade. You can’t have it all and have minimalist freedom success too. Sell your house, donate your car, restrict yourself to less than 100 things, break up with your loser of a boyfriend, say mom I’m never coming home again. The answer is that every action you take has infinite actions that you will never explore. Your actions will be more successful if you kill as many alternate actions as possible and focus on the important.
4. Focus on your priorities.
What do you actually want to achieve? Focus on that. You need to dedicate at least 80% of your time to achieving that goal. That means you’ll probably need to kill some other paths of action. You can’t maintain your big house and still travel the world, it just doesn’t work that way. Everything must maintain balance, and it’s easier to balance yourself if you only do a few things.
5. Jump.
At some point you need to burn your bridges. I know your uncle told you never to burn your bridges, but that’s false. In order to take one path you must burn all of the others. Take a leap into the lake and see if you sink or swim. You’re sinking all already, you have to give up all of your junk in order to fly. The only way you’ll learn is to jump. Jumping is scary, and yes, you might fail.
But ultimately success doesn’t come without 10,000 failures.
If you aren’t willing to fail at things, you won’t succeed at anything.
Meditation in action.
Take a moment and meditate on this for 15 minutes. Turn off your computer, sit in silence and think about everything in your life that you wish wasn’t a part of your life. These are the hard decisions you have to make. Live with the consequences of your actions, or be free of everything that haunts you.
Your current situation, your past, your anger and your jealousy. It’s all useless.
What matters is now, and the decisions you make to free yourself.
Yes, this is hard, but ultimately it’s harder living with all that you can’t leave behind.
