Why I wanna be financially independent?
We’ll be talking about how we SHOULD change the way we think about money and why you SHOULD learn about this and actually plan something!
If you list my previous articles, you’ll be like ‘what the heck!?’ cause yeah, I usually write about programming related stuff, but here I go with the first article sharing my thoughts about financial independence. If you can relate, that’s great! If you don’t, please take the time to write a comment and tell me why I am wrong.
The thing is, I don’t wanna pass the rest of my life programming. It’s true that I like it, but even now, while I’m 22 years old, I get annoyed to keep working almost everyday for a long time, If you’re a programmer, you can understand what I am saying: sitting in front of your PC for more than 10 hours a day, back pain, eyes hurt, drinking too much coffee, sucky social life maybe…
Some people say “If you like what you do, you’d do it always even if you do it for free”’. I used to agree with that until no more and I realized deep down that’s not true, because when you do what you like, you do it whenever you like. When you don’t feel like it, you just don’t do it. If you love playing video games for instance, for sure sometimes you got to a point when you’re like “argh, enough of it for now.” But If you gonna rely on video games to live (to earn money), you can’t just stop, you have to do it.
It’s is so traumatizing to think I need to work until I’m like 65 years old, by then I won’t have the perfect health to use the money the way I always wanted, like traveling and many other things. Actually I may die before I get there or maybe I won’t have extra money, maybe I won’t even have the mindset of enjoying stuff. I go back with my thoughts to the past to see how much I gave and to the future to see how much I still should give in order to have a ‘good’ job (job security). But is it worth it? Years and years of studying things I am not actually interested in, all I worry about is to get good enough grades to pass, not actually how to use that in my life. The school system made me feel so many times that I’m just a robot: study the lesson → pass the exam → forget the lesson. I HATE to feel like that.
So during those really bad feelings and thoughts, I kept asking, what’s the solution then? What can I do so I don’t live like that? And of course I kept thinking of the rich people, how did they make that money? How is that possible? Till now, you can see how many questions I had and how lost I was. And yeah, most of those people don’t have a college degree or studied at the best universities, but still they are the bosses of people who did. This reminds me of what Elon Musk once said:
“Don’t confuse education with schooling, I didn’t go to Harvard, but people who work for me did”
So, will I pass 20 years studying to work 30 years for someone who probably doesn’t even have a degree? No, I won’t(hopefully) and obviously school doesn’t make you financially smarter, which is actually the goal.
Then I started to search about this, watch those rich people do Ted talks, take courses and all that kind of stuff until I understood most of the ways they did it (without details for now obviously). First book I read about this subject was the famous ‘Rich dad, Poor dad’ by Robert Kiyosaki and of course I loved the book and recommend you read it if you haven’t yet.
After a long period of searching, I got to understand the key phrase “Don’t work for money, make it work for you”. The idea is to find a way which allows you to earn money even while you’re asleep in your bed, because if you don’t, you’ll pass your life chasing money. But of course that’s not easy to do, that’s why we’re not all rich. Some people wanted it and got it, some people didn’t, because those who did it worked on a plan and actually invested their time and money trying stuff while the others were only dreaming. So you gotta move, you gotta take actions!
Being rich is a mindset, I learned that there are common thoughts and rules rich people follow, things like you shouldn’t be afraid to fail and that’s actually the best way to learn, that you shouldn’t give up, that you shouldn’t worry about what people think about you and so on… You need to liberate yourself from the idea of job security and just find your way to rise. Don’t limit your dreams, dream big even if you think it’s insane to reach that.
The phase after that is choosing the way that suits me, I finally decided to learn investing in stocks and maintain working on dev for now, because I need to make money to invest of course and because I can fail doing that so I have a plan B (still a bad one for now). Will I succeed? I don’t know. What if it doesn’t work? I’ll try another way. As Jeff Bezos said:
“I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.”
For now, that’s all. I need to go study and make my dream come true. But I promise, I’ll keep you updated and I’ll share what I learn with you in some of the next articles. Peace ✌️!
