Going All-in As A Free Agent

07/20/2022

What do you know and love?

How will people find you?

These are the beginning questions to answer as you create your life as a free agent, as an independent creator.

As I'm starting out as an independent creator, I prioritize self-knowledge and self-awareness as the key to my future success.

When I start making, I notice what comes easily to me. At the moment, what comes easy is writing. It is what I utilize to get my thoughts out me.

It comes from years of practice.

I'm cultivating this skill by aiming to write 1,000,000 words.

My goal is to understand what are the core pillars of what I know and love. The unedited self is honest and clear. We shouldn't ignore the parts of ourselves that come out when we are in flow.

With writing, these thoughts come easily bUlecause I don't have to think about the mechanics of typing or the nature of the words that flow from my fingertips.

With video, I struggle a bit more due to emotions around how I look, how I sound, and confidence around how I present myself to others.

I can see that my skills around video compared to writing are not as developed due to the lack of practice. This is a new area I'm tackling in my life because I know it has been something I have loved but don't know well technically. But it is a truth I tell people about all the time: that communicating through video is how you distribute ideas to billions of people.

The challenge and opportunity for me is to alchemize my emotions around video and develop my inner self-confidence so that I can share what I know and love to the people that need to hear it.

As I develop an audience and community around my core pillars through writing and video, I am also thinking about the types of products I can build as digital assets that bring in passive income.

These products can take many forms: online courses, ebooks, Gumroad digital products, subscriptions, affiliate links, platform ad revenue. Exploring other ways of patronage include: NFTs, brand sponsorships, Patreon, Substack. And active income streams could include: consulting, coaching, and taking on part-time work for services I offer.

The objective of creating all of these income streams is to live my ideal life, one that is not dependent on full-time employment - the pathless path.

Building relationships is another key to becoming a free agent.

In one of my favorite books, Accelerando, the main character is able to do anything and go anywhere and get whatever he wants because he is a source of ideas for groups, governments, and individuals. By providing so much value with his ideas, he doesn't need to think about asking for money, he can just ask for favors and exchange favors to get anything he needs. At the core of everything he does, he thinks about how he can help others.

The lesson that I learned from this book is that the future is going to get crazier, but human relationships and even human-machine (AI) relationships will still be important in our lives.

How do we help others?

It is a skill to help others. Which means there are ways of being that will improve our skill at helping others, as well as best practices. Being skillful at helping others will improve our own outcomes dramatically.

Even if we want to help, how we do it is important because "help" can turn into a burden.

One sub-skill is communication: the way we communicate is core to helping others.

Self-awareness, knowing our own limits, and then communicating our capabilities allows others to properly utilize our gifts. When we hit our limits, it's important for us to communicate to the people we are working with and either ask for help or pass off the responsibility to someone more suited for it. The quicker we get out of the way of preventing success, the more likely success happens.

If we can look for ways to pass important information to the right people in a smooth way, then organizations can move quicker and innovate faster.

Prioritizing agency, wellbeing, and freedom over being dependent on a central provider for your life.

This is one of the motivations for moving outside of the United States. It's much harder to break out of the collective cult of one employer. We're dependent on employers for our health care, retirement and perpetuation of other myths such as the 40 hour work week.

Living in Mexico City allows me to perceive a different way of living that wasn't possible in the continually increasing cost of living in US cities.

When we can choose to living in a place where we are thriving, why would we go back to the alternative?

I talk to friends that live in the USA and come visit Mexico City and I realize that I'm not missing out on much. The lack of communities, rising costs, and the growing sense of unease permeates American cities like New York City and San Francisco. There's a limit to how much people can take, and it feels like for many they are looking for alternatives.

Once I experienced Mexico City for a week, I was convinced that this was the place for me at this point in my life.

However, there is still internal programming that I'm learning about as I try to adopt a new lifestyle here.

As I pursue a creative career, I notice resistance and emotional trauma that I'm still processing from growing up in the United States and as an only child of immigrants. The belief that art and music are not lucrative careers and the belief of the starving artist. There are a lot of perpetuated myths from my childhood that I'm just now realizing as I move into a creative career.

Breaking out of the myths and stories is how I heal the generations of trauma that are passed down.