In March 2023 I was a broke music teacher.
But since then I’ve earned more money than I thought I ever would… while compromising less:
- Less hours
- Less travel
- Less unfulfilling work
Actually, I do no unfulfilling work. (It’s 4:54am on a Saturday right now. I want to get up and get to my desk 7 days a week.)
I’ve come to understand that this is possible for everyone—including you, whoever you are and whatever your background. In fact, I’ve taught over 1000 people how to do it already—and if you read this post in its entirety, you’re next.
Actually, you can get started right away if you prefer: I just released a free course called Freetirement Foundations, which guides you through the beginning steps of earning your first $100K on X.
Also, on the 22nd of September, I’ll take a limited number of students through a structured cohort course—in which you can get personal guidance from me as you go deeper into my fusion of spiritual practice, personal development and purpose-based business. (Scroll to the bottom of this post if you’re keen.)
Now, the idea of earning $100K without leaving my house seemed too good to be true the first time I heard it. Which is why I’m giving you the full timeline of how I pulled it off in this post.
But first, I need to tell you where it all started…
The 4 Killer Compromises
Right before a new technology is released, everyone fantasizes about how much work it’ll save them:
- “I can finally prioritize my health!”
- “I can finally spend time with the kids!”
- “I can finally stop burning out every 6 months!”
But then immediately after that new machinery or software is integrated, the space it creates is filled with some other task.
Our species is basically done with the burdens of survival, yet still we feel we must ruthlessly occupy ourselves with effortful activities—always in the pursuit of more.
We’ve transcended our biological needs, but replaced them with imaginary needs. This creates a huge problem:
Imaginary needs can never be satisfied, because they don’t really exist.
Think about it: where’s the cut-off? How many people do you know who’ve said, “okay, I actually have enough money now”?
These imaginary needs have been baked so hard into our collective consciousness that we don’t even question them. And so we make 4 great compromises to satisfy them…
Compromise 1: Rules
As I’ve written before, rules are efficient at a societal level, but oppressive at an individual level.
Many of my earliest memories are of wondering “why?” Mostly, why everyone was telling me to do things in certain ways but none of them could give me a good reason why.
That’s rules at their worst: remember parents and teachers giving you the “because I said so” line? Or perhaps it was a religious authority who told you “because it’s in the holy book”.
People who don’t back up their rules with arguments typically don’t have any arguments.
And look, I get it: some people just like rules. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to. The problem is that those who like rules tend to crave power over others, which means they tend to get it. And one of the most enduring inventions of those control freaks is…
Compromise 2: Schools
Humans had achieved a lot before the industrial revolution. Aside from the fact that we all learned to walk and talk before anyone could teach us how, we also achieved:
- Agriculture
- Domestication of animals
- Architecture
- The printing press
- Navigation
- Mathematics
- Astronomy
- Early medicine
- Military tactics
- Railroads
- Countless artistic masterpieces
Still, in the late 18th century the control freaks decided it would be better to make children line up, shut up, sit down and be told what to do rather than, you know, doing it.
As a kid I found this deeply confusing.
If you were lucky, you made it out of school with some degree of curiosity and creativity intact. But if you were like most, both those qualities were stifled in you. This left you at a great disadvantage in real life, where curiosity and creativity are greatly rewarded.
Compromise 3: Employment
School was never about teaching you to succeed.
It was about teaching you to conform.
Your boss has entered the chat (and she’s spamming crying laughter emojis).
If your school was progressive, you were told employment was the safe option.
If your school was traditional, you weren’t told of any other option.
But the truth is that employment is no safer than going into business yourself.
As I discussed in my post on How to Win on Social Media, every private sector employer is an entrepreneur who can go bankrupt following one bad decision. They can also make you redundant whenever they please.
Since 2000, 52% of companies in the Fortune 500 have either gone bankrupt, been acquired or ceased to exist.¹
Employment is the typical life path only because it doesn't demand creative thinking, which is much harder to teach than knowledge.
But the difficulty of a task is not, by itself, a good reason to avoid it.
The sad truth is that the vast majority of people don’t understand how the mind works. And compassion is appropriate here: most schoolteachers are doing the best they can. No-one taught them to think creatively either.
But that doesn’t mean you have to lie down and surrender.
Consider these ideas:
- Your work is something you’re told to do by someone else
- Your work must be completed whether you enjoy it or not
- Your work must be the major occupier of your waking time
This trio of ideas is responsible for almost as many wasted lives as war.
Compromise 4: Derivatives
I thought I was a rebel when I decided to be a professional drummer.
What I didn’t recognize was that I could only rebel as far as my environment would allow.
Among the thousands of teenagers like myself, desperate to “make it” playing rock music, that privilege was given to precisely three from my southwest region of England. (They still perform—their band is called Muse).
In other words, there wasn’t much of a scene.
Almost every other musician I knew either quit or did what I did—taught lessons and played cover tunes in whatever genre would pay.
This demonstrates what business author M.J. DeMarco calls derivatives.
M.J. grew up loving cars and so ended up driving limousines for a living. But after 3 years of that he’d fallen out of love with cars entirely.
I managed to keep my passion for music alive a good bit longer, but over those 25 years my drum kit gradually felt more and more like a tool than a medium of artistic expression.
Music also became my only source of income—and on a “time for money” basis. The hours were long and unsociable, the travel was brutal, and the pay was stereotypically low. This was a very different set of associations with my craft than I’d had when I was a teenager.
- Creativity was replaced with repetition
- Innovation was replaced with convention
- Spontaneity was replaced with monotony
I’d ended up in a shockingly similar position to the employed people I knew. The differences being:
- They had more money than I did
- They thought I was having fun all the time while, in reality, I was quite literally breaking my back
The cure had become the disease.
“Perhaps I would’ve been better off falling in line after all…” I contemplated.
I Wish I’d Known This Before Wasting 25 Years In My Old Career
You weren’t born wanting to compromise.
You were born wanting to survive.
And everyone else is the same—including your tens of thousands of ancestors.
Those ancestors were, naturally, the survivors:
- They were the best at getting resources
- They were the best at keeping resources
It’s their brain sitting in your skull, and it’s their psychology dominating the collective consciousness.
That’s why everyone wants more than they need.
That’s why you feel anxious about money sometimes, even though you have way more food, safety, comfort and entertainment than those ancestors of ours could’ve dreamed of.
When our primitive ancestors felt “anxious” (they didn’t call it that) they grabbed a spear, ran a few miles, killed a beast and dragged it home. Zero anxiety left at the end of that adventure.
When 21st century folks feel anxious they typically sit and stew in their hormonal cocktail or distract themselves (both of which lead to more anxiety).
To summarize, the four compromises in the above section feel bad because they’re based on “shoulds”, “oughts” and “musts”. They’re abstract, imaginary, made-up.
- It’s not your rumbling belly that tells you to go get resources, it’s your FOMO.
- It’s not your chattering teeth that tell you to improve your living situation, it’s your envy.
- It’s not your instinct for procreation that tells you to find a lover, it’s Tinder’s marketing campaign.
99.9% of people are playing those games, and that’s why everyone tells you that you have to go to college, become employed or—at the very least—settle for a derivative of one of your interests.
But they don’t know what I know.
They don’t know how easy it is now to make a living making the change you want to see in the world.
And hey, I don’t expect them to.
I’m on the frontier out here.
I saw the super-early adopters—the creators populating the creator economy long before it was called that.
I thought it was too good to be true.
But in 2022 I entered the game, and I was still early.
And even if you’ve not started yet, you’re early too.
How do I know that?
Because most people I talk to still go cross-eyed when I try to explain to them how my business works.
There’s never been a better time to start your purpose-based business.
The creator economy has matured enough that people like me are out here to guide you, but it’s still young enough to give you an outsized return on investment. (You can get started on $0, by the way. The only investment you have to make is in time and energy.)
I’m going to give you the full timeline of how I earned that first $100K on X. This is an example of what you can expect to happen for you if you follow the steps in Freetirement Foundations and continue learning the game afterward (more on that below).
The 2 Ingredients to My Success
Obviously I had to learn how to start and run an online business. That’s ingredient number 2.
You can skip to that if you like, but you’d be missing something critical…
Ingredient 1: Spirituality
Before I ever had the idea of starting my purpose-based business, I had to clean up the mess that was left from my trying to fit in with the 4 compromises.
In 2014 I was living like the majority of people:
- Dreading my work
- Suffering through it
- Indulging in cheap pleasures to try to claw back some enjoyment out of life
And also like that majority, I was just digging myself a deeper and deeper hole.
That hole is called coping: that dynamic of feeling “emptied” by most of your daily activities (work), then trying to “fill yourself back up” with anything you can find.
After 15 years of it not working, I finally decided to look for a solution…
And boy did I find one.
I’ve told this part of my story before, so I’ll skip the details here.
The important parts are:
- I hung out with a monk one-on-one for a few hundred hours
- I discovered a radically direct teaching of nonduality
- I did 29,366 hours of spiritual practice
- I compared notes with my neuropsychologist wife
- I realized the peace, freedom, clarity and compassion all spiritual teachings point to
Jackpot!
Ingredient 2: The Purpose-Based Business Model
When I finally showed up and started learning how to start a one-person business, I found I moved a lot faster than everyone else.
They were all struggling with:
- Overwhelm
- Confusion
- Impostor syndrome
- Self-doubt
- Procrastination
- Fatigue
- Disorganization
- Misalignment
But I’d already dealt with those issues in my spiritual practice.
Here’s how the timeline went for me:
- August 2022: Started my X (then Twitter) account, bullet-sprayed posts with no idea what would work, started making friends with other creators who were just starting out.
- September 2022: Found a community of folks who were taking the game seriously, learned from those who were further ahead and compared notes with those at my level.
- October 2022: Joined Dan Koe’s Digital Economics cohort, started one of the most inspired learning binges of my life, and started networking like crazy—which led to accidentally hosting Dan on a Twitter Space (live audio chat).
- November 2022: Started noticing patterns among my few hundred followers. (I was attracting a lot of intermediate-level meditators.)
- December 2022: Hit 1000 followers.
- January 2023: Outlined my first cohort course during a month-long vacation in India.
- February 2023: Created landing page for that course.
- March 2023: My first viral thread.
- April 2023: Launched Mindful 24/7, generating over $10,000 in 1 month.
- May 2023: Freetirement! (Closed my old business and never looked back.)
- June-November 2023: Fulfilling inbound leads from dream clients, serving them one-to-one.
- December 2023: Joined the Kortex team and started teaching over 1000 people how to Freetire themselves.
- January-July 2024: Outlining and building Freetirement Foundations and Freetirement Frameworks.
- August 2024: Crossed $100K in revenue from my purpose-based business.
If you’d told 2014 Dan that this was going to happen for him he’d have thought you were crazy.
But it did happen, and I’m here to make it happen for you too. But I need your help.
I need you, first, to acknowledge that this can happen for you.
Note that I didn’t say “believe” this can happen for you. I didn’t say “trust” this can happen for you.
You don’t need belief, you don’t need trust, you don’t need faith.
All you need to do is engage with the free material in Freetirement Foundations with an open mind.
Confidence comes after action, not before.
Take a few steps down this road.
See how it feels.
Then, if you really don’t think it’s going to work for you, drop me a message in the Freetirement Friends networking group and tell me why.
I’m here to help.
With love from my desk,
dg 💙
P.S. If you’re super keen, you can reserve your spot on the Freetirement Frameworks cohort right now. Spaces are limited.
- Enter code FOUNDATIONS here for $25 off cohort 1
- Enter code FRAMEWORKS here for $100 off the entire 4-cohort series.
SOURCES:
https://www.capgemini.com/consulting/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/2017/07/digital_disruption_1.pdf
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