🤔 What Is Financial Freedom?

2/5 exams down, just 3 more to go.

I haven’t been able to work on a lot of ideas recently due to the commitments of my course but sat down to 1.5x through this Ali Abdaal video.

And to be honest, I found it to be one of Ali’s better videos in recent times. I suspect this was because a) I resonated with the topic discussed - financial freedom and also because he was extremely authentic and genuine in the way he spoke about how one can go about approaching this. Just to share how I view financial freedom… it’s a sum of money that would allow an individual to be able to go part-time or quit their day job and pursue activities and hobbies that they enjoy without feeling the financial pressures of life as they have supplemented it with another form of passive (or similar) income.

When I started my journey ~14 months ago, I set myself a goal of making £1000 recurring revenue every month and I crossed it around 6-8 months ago. Since then, I have been working to grow that (I haven’t really decided to what number but I guess the most logical is £5k MRR?) and I have been having similar issues to ‘John’ in the video - a knowledge issue. Ali is definitely right about wanting to play the game at a harder level once you hit a milestone…

I have developed a tendency to have bias towards action as I am always keen to take opportunities but I can’t take action if I don’t know what to do. That said the video was helpful in highlighting in some resources that I haven’t visited yet and have added to my reading / listening list to catch up on to help explore further how I can scale up sustainably in a fun way.

I think for anyone else on this newsletter who is walking the solopreneur path or something similar, I would genuinely give it a watch as I think it helps you set your priorities straight and points you in the right direction. And I agree with Ali in the sense that:

‘You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.’

I then supplemented the video above with this one from Ali (part of the same playlist). Watching this made me realise that I am somewhere between ladder 2 and ladder 3 i.e. making the transition from a service-based agency to productised services which are set and much easily scaleable and have less associated headaches. If anyone on the list has advice / tips on how to go about this would super appreciate it!

P.S. he also mentions how building / growing an audience makes life easy at every single stage i.e. another major reason to get back to being active and posting on LinkedIn asap.

Finally, is there value in having multiple businesses that are revenue generating? I have done some reading on this and there are benefits and negatives of multiple income streams but I haven’t really been able to make an informed decision. If anyone can shed some light that would be great. I supposed at my age, and for other budding solopreneurs we have the beauty of time on our hands and also are fortunately less at risk of ‘catastrophes’. I appreciate that individuals circumstances of course differ and not everyone has the same luxury. But as medical students we are often groomed to be risk-averse and stick to the book and that almost ‘stifles’ entrepreneurial spirit. So from that point of view, it makes sense to try and do as much as you can at the start (what is manageable and means you are still working efficiently) because it’s better to not have all of your eggs in one basket.

Keen to hear your thoughts - these are just some of many that I have been mulling over in my break time from revision as I craft my next steps going into the summer.

Also need to get on that YouTube grind finally…