And now, the most valuable thing in life. Freedom.

Freedom is the chance to live your life the way you want. And it’s within reach even if everyone around you stays exactly as they are. So the real question is this: if freedom means living the way you want, how free are you right now?

That nagging wish for more, when you can’t even say more of what, has a name. You can’t fill it with entertainment, with things or with money: however much you have, it stays. What you’re missing is freedom.

The yearning you can’t fill with cars, with money, with anything you buy — that’s freedom you’re missing. And it’s freedom you’re after. — Michael Saylor

First of all, it’s freedom from fear. Before money, before circumstances, before other people, the first cage to get out of is the one fear built. Almost everything that stops you turns out to be a story about a wall.

Freedom means working up the courage to take your prison apart brick by brick.

The first step is to get rid of fear — and everything downstream of it: doubt, disbelief, greed, envy, jealousy.

Nobody locks the cell from the outside. We hand over the key ourselves.

But those prison walls exist only because you have chosen to allow them to stand.

Harry Browne

Voluntary surrender leads to loss of freedom.

Then comes the realization that you don’t have to take part. That’s the whole move: at any moment you can step out of the automatic reaction, out of a game you never agreed to play.

There’s nowhere to quit to and nowhere to quit from. Just don’t play the games whose rules you don’t like.

Become your own highest authority. Nobody hands out freedom; you take it up as a stance. That’s sovereignty: inner independence, where the final word in your life is yours. From there, you no longer need the world’s permission.

And live the life you want. Watch out for the traps, the comforts and obligations that quietly eat up your life. Harry Browne described them fifty years ago, and everything he said still holds. No politics, no manifestos, no nonsense, just a clear view of what holds you back and a few working ways out: accept uncertainty, and keep the power over yourself.

Life is for living, and worrying adds nothing to it. You don’t have to fix the world to be free in it. It’s enough to stop handing your one life over to fear. There isn’t that much of it.

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