I keep coming back to two little phrases.
I have to.
I get to.
Same four letters in the middle. Wildly different feeling.
On paper, the job hasn’t changed. But your place inside it might have.
Now, before we turn this into a motivational poster, let’s be sensible: plenty of people are under real financial, family, and physical pressures. Changing a sentence doesn’t erase an obligation.
But it can reveal where the real problem lives.
Sometimes it’s the work. Sometimes it’s the conditions. Sometimes it’s the lack of options. Sometimes it’s the story you’ve been telling yourself about who you’re supposed to become.
I once thought my goal was to escape the work I knew. These days I’m more interested in having a say in how and why I do it.
And that has an interesting consequence for making a living.
You can build a business to own your life. Or you can build a business that quietly owns you.
A calendar full of clients may be an excellent business. It may also be a surprisingly sophisticated job you can’t take a day off from.
The thing you built to create options can quietly begin collecting them back.
Which makes me wonder if there’s an even stranger question hiding here:
What kind of life would make the business worth building in the first place?
No need to answer right this second. We’re just wandering.
But it’s worth keeping that question in your pocket when somebody promises you a faster route to “freedom.”
If this all sounds suspiciously philosophical for a fellow who started out making thirteen dollars on the internet, you should see the accounting.