Ownership: being in total control. If you don’t have ownership over yourself, than is it possible to really be free at all?
As I venture onto my next unknown venture in life, keep asking myself this question. Without ownership and without control, it feels impossible to truly create your own, desired path in life. Both figuratively and literally. If you’re not in total control of yourself–your emotions, your body, your desires–than you’ll likely end up unhappy. Without some sort of inner peace and an internal compass knowingly guiding us, we’re all lost. If you don’t know yourself and can’t control yourself, you won’t get far in life.
And then there’s the money. Most of us can’t be our own “bosses”. We work jobs because we have to make a living, and it’s expected of us. We do it for the money, and for the luxuries that whatever that money can afford us. But without being your figurative boss, you’ll never be a literal boss. Successful people’s success often stems from supreme, unquestioned confidence. You need that cockiness to run your own ship. And if you’re never your literal boss, it will be come increasingly harder, with age, to be the figurative boss of yourself. You will find yourself questioning your existence. You will find yourself waiting for that clock to hit 6 PM every day.
You will lose ambition and the desire to stretch your wings.
To choose the course of your life, you need to know your ultimate destination or at least the route you hope to take to get there. For me, that means starting my own “thing,” because if I don’t, I know I’ll look back in 30 years and what one of my many half-baked ideas could’ve turned into. Without trying, I’ll never know. And course, we all need money. At some point and time (preferably before you turn 30), you need to look yourself in a mirror and ask what you want. Is it a ritzy pent house on the Upper East side or a quiet cottage in upstate New York? It’s just to what degree we need that money. You can run your own hedge fund and accomplish the first, or you be a personal tutor (while writing a novel) and perhaps accomplish the second. But without that control and awareness of what you want, you’ll never be in control.
And for some of us, when you boil it down, sadly but truly, it can often be all about the money. If you don’t own a piece of some pie, you won’t ever have your own pie.
DJ Agent 86 – All About the Money (Instrumental Version)
DJ Agent 86 – All About the Money (DJ Butcher’s Maguire Edit)