The Freedom You Didn’t Know You Needed as an Entrepreneur

I’m going to share a story today about a post I made years ago on the benefits of being an entrepreneur, and it still gets a lot of reactions. This story reflects how I see life and business, and it shows some of the things we get to enjoy when we have control over our time, but let’s start with a topic that might get your attention.

00:24
I’m Igor Kheifets, and this is The ListBuilding Lifestyle. The podcast is for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my best selling book, the list building lifestyle Confessions of an email millionaire at www.igorsbook.com
Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files and traffic blueprints, visit www.igorsbook.com for details, And now it’s time to claim your List Building Lifestyle!

01:11
Okay, I’m gonna say something, I actually posted about this many years ago on my Facebook, and it resonated with people because they keep bringing it up in conversation many years later. And just in advance I want to say this might offend someone If it does offend you, I do apologize! I don’t share it to offend, I share it because of my unique perspective about life in general, and the hidden benefits of what we do. Then I’ll go over some boring benefits.

But first I want to share this, and I also want to acknowledge that some of my team members might get offended too. So guys, if I do offend you with this, please know that I’m not doing it on purpose, I’m just sharing from the heart and I know this will offend, because one time I had someone work with me like an agency, who was handling some of my email sequences, and when I said something like that, so they quit immediately, and they told me I was an obnoxious, I don’t remember the other word they used, but basically it told me I was an asshole. So, I am, I guess!

02:23
But here’s one of the benefits about being an affiliate marketer, or just being an entrepreneur, being an online entrepreneur, that I enjoy, that I would probably not necessarily talk openly about at a dinner party. And it’s the ability to get intimate with my wife whenever I want to. And just so it happens that my libido is very high usually in the mornings, in the middle of the day. So, you know, like towards the late night or evening when the kids are at home and you kind of your mind is fatigued, etc. It’s not like, it’s not really there, but like in the mornings or middle of the day, it is. And so one thing I’ve always enjoyed, and I’ve always done, is that even when I used to work out of a coffee shop, I would still, you know, when I would felt like it, I would just jump in the car, I would drive back home, and, you know, we would get busy with my wife. And I really appreciated that about my online business, because I believe it’s an important part of keeping the marriage going, right? And so this kind of, this action or this ability, right? Usually, you know, I interpret that as calling the shots in your life.

03:48
Now, It doesn’t really matter what the activity is, and who you do it with, but the mere fact that you can do it whenever you want, whenever, you know, you feel like it, and not whenever you have the time to do it, that’s the most important part. And it’s important because you want to do it! That’s the only criteria. It’s only important because YOU want to do it! And you want to do it now, because that’s, to me, what being an entrepreneur is all about!

04:22
They say entrepreneurs are people who’s willing to work 80 hours a week, so they don’t have to work 40 hours a week, I agree that’s usually the case, just like I told you about my best friend and some of the other entrepreneurs I know, they work really hard, they work much harder than people who’ve got a job, like anyone who thinks that an average business owner doesn’t work that much, and they’re like a typical asshole who makes other people work for them, and they exploit other people, blah, blah, blah, That’s not true! The average business owner works twice, three times, five times harder than most people who work a day job, period. It’s just facts. You look it up, the average entrepreneur works easy, 60, 70 hours a week!

05:12
Now, but that’s not what being an entrepreneur is about. Sure, it’s nice to be the one to call the shots right, to be the one, you know, who’s like deciding, okay, I work 70 hours a week, but it’s because I want to, but to me, it’s not really worth it, like, if you’re planning to work seventy hours a week, you might as well work a day job, because you’ll at least have the mental capacity to not have to worry about your business all the time.

To me, a “true entrepreneur”, let’s put it this way, a “high level entrepreneur”, I say a “true entrepreneur” is somebody who cannot physically stand having a boss,That’s, to me, the definition of an entrepreneur, you know, that person will do anything to just not have a boss, and that’s fine with me. But a “high level entrepreneur”, a person who builds businesses, a business owner, if you will. So, if you remember the “CashFlow Quadrant”, if anyone reads the book, Robert Kiyosaki talks about the quadrant of being an employee, entrepreneur, business owner, investor.

06:18
So, I’m right now in the business owner box, and I wanted to be here for a long time. First, I just wanted to be an entrepreneur, I didn’t want to have a boss. And then I want to transition, because being an entrepreneur is very hard. It’s just non-stop grinding. And what happens is you work so hard that it starts taking a toll on your relationships, it starts taking a toll on your health and on your mental fitness, right? So, for that reason, I eventually decided to shift into the business owner quadrant, where you have to figure out a way to build a business that’s producing healthy profits and delivering the product that it’s selling, but it has to be able to do it without you being in the business all the time.

Otherwise, you have no life and no ability to work on your business, and no health, okay? No relationships. It literally erodes your entire life because you become obsessed with your business, and you can really only build relationships that revolve around the business, because that’s where all your attention goes to.

07:28
Now, it’s freedom, I think that’s the core essence of the hierarchy of value for any entrepreneur. So, to me, that freedom, it revolves around, of course, being able to get intimate with my wife when I choose to, meaning that, you know, if I were to be working in a shop, if I own the shop, and it would work from nine to five or nine to nine, and I had to be in the shop all the time, well, guess what? You know, I’d have to somehow try and carve out a little bit of time to go and do my marital duties, when, you know, in reality, that’s just not fun, that’s just not the way I would want it to be!

08:10
So, to me, that would be, you know, a hidden benefit amongst many others. But I think this one, really, for me, gives the meaning behind the freedom that I’ve created. Now, of course, the other amazing benefits just off the top of my mind is that, first off, I can move, I can freely, physically move around as much as I want with no limitation, meaning that I started this business out of Israel, I then moved to Canada,I spent six months there In Bulgaria, and I’m back in Canada for a little bit, and I’m heading back to Bulgaria, from there who knows? You know, if I wanted to go and live in England, so I could go see the Manchester United Games, I would do that! If I wanted to live in a sunny place with access to, you know, high quality amenities, I’d move to Miami! If I wanted to move to a cheap place with a tropical climate, I’d move to Mexico or Costa Rica, right? The point being is that I can! There’s nothing that can actually stop me from doing that unless that particular country doesn’t allow me to move in, in which case, fine, but for the most part, I can just, you know, put a pin on the map and go there. That’s a benefit that no brick and mortar business owner has, period! That just ain’t going to happen for them. Because they’re tied to that physical location.

04:41
That’s also an issue, when you’re a high paid service provider in a particular country or area, right? Let’s say you’re in Denmark and you’re an architect or a lawyer, and you spend a long time and a lot of money to become that, well, guess what? You ain’t going to move! You need to be meeting with people face to face, and, you know, you can’t just pick up and leave. You’re going to go on vacation, yes! But you ain’t going to move. So, that’s not a big benefit, which I think attracts so many people, you know, to this industry.

10:19
The other thing is, and I think it’s important to mention, is that I can dial my income up and down on demand, which means, if I’m like, let’s say I got a big tax bill coming, Well, I can push harder, because I know how money happens. So, to me, knowing what I know and having mastered this sort of approach to making money, to me, it’s now like a recipe, like, if I wanted to bake a cake, that’d be a certain set of steps that I need to take, in order for the cake to eventually, you know, be on the dinner table, you know, come evening time.

So, same here, same exact thing, same exact principle, you know, for the cake, what do I need? I need flour, eggs, soda, cocoa beans, butter -What do I need?- That’s it, right? Water, anything else like I don’t usually cook, so I wouldn’t know, but I’m assuming that’s like most of it. And then I need sugar, and I need, like, a stove, and I can just follow the steps in the sequence, I can take the ingredients, mix them together, you know, do this, and then, you know, some eggs, whatever, and then I can put it in the stove and get myself a cake or a pie or whatever!

You see, to make money online, the way that we make money online here in the List Building Lifestyle, it’s the same thing! Offer, traffic, landing page, follow up sequence, you mix it all together, right? And you put it on the stove, and you give it time, and eventually you have yourself an asset that’s producing money. And then you can repeat it all over again and build another one, and eventually have yourself a ton of different income streams.

12:23
That’s actually a big benefit that you get to experience later, and that is when you start getting unexpected money, which is really fun, to be honest with you, especially on the days when you’re feeling down, like we were in Mexico a week before last, and there was a day there was really terrible weather, you know, like it was storming, the palm trees were like, you know, almost like half broken. We can’t go to the pool, we can’t go to the ocean. Everyone’s just stuck at the hotel, and all of a sudden I get a payment of $400 out of nowhere! And then a few hours later, I got another payment of $7,000 out of nowhere. And later that night, I got another one for $5,000 out of nowhere! So, that day I had over $12,000 of, you know, money that I didn’t expect to come in! And it’s, you know, it was basically affiliate programs that were paying out, you know, after a little while. So depending on what, on what the program is, sometimes it’s 30 days, sometimes it’s 60 days, sometimes it’s just recurring stuff, some of the stuff is annual, maybe I promoted something that had annual billing, so they only pay out when the next annual thing hits.

Whatever the case, you know, you’re just sitting there, you know, me and my wife were playing Scrabble because it was raining outside and the kids were busy on their gadgets, and all of a sudden, bam, I got this $5,000 payment. I mean, it’s nice. It’s really nice, It’s certainly much nicer than to get, you know, a $5,000 bill, right? So it’s a great benefit, I really like it!

14:10
Now, the other thing is, I think, you know, something to consider, right? Besides the fact that you can dial your income up and down at will, besides the fact that you get money unexpected in the mail, is that the peace of mind that you have as a result of getting rich this way versus some other way, is much more just allows you to experience and to enjoy the wealth you’re building. Because even if I were to build a profitable business, but it was full of problems, it was full of issues, It was full of constant disasters and fires I had to put out, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the wealth of building, I wouldn’t be able to have the mental capacity to be a good dad or to spend any time with my kids, I wouldn’t be able to really be present, you know, like Napoleon Hill wrote “Think and Grow Rich”, right? We all know that he’s like the Jesus of making money, of entrepreneurship, and again, I gotta say it in the form of like a symbol. Because anyone who’s an entrepreneur, we worship that guy! Even though he wasn’t a great entrepreneur himself, but he did educate millions on what it takes to become an entrepreneur, okay?

15:39
And so this same author, Napoleon Hill also wrote another great book, which I read later on, after I became rich, and it’s called Grow Rich With Peace of Mind, because getting rich is one thing, but staying rich, not doing anything crazy, not falling into some kind of pattern to self sabotage and getting rid of the money is like a whole other thing, and to be able to enjoy it and to be able to feel good about it, that’s like a whole other thing! And I think many people do get rich, but they don’t get rich with a peace of mind, and getting rich with a peace of mind while being, while becoming a business owner and not staying an entrepreneur, which is hustling, hustling . . That’s a big achievement in my opinion!

Just earlier today, I was talking to a friend, fellow entrepreneur who built a really cool business around Amazon, who unfortunately lost that income stream, also had other stuff going on, but he’s always been like a small time, if you will, entrepreneur, meaning he never had a big team of People working with him, he never really built big systems, you know, he’s been fairly comfortably making, I’d say, six figures, maybe multiple six figures a year, some years, you know, single digit six figures, some years double digit six figures, well! He’s going through a rough patch right now where his income is drying up because he kind of fell into a pattern where he didn’t want to hustle much anymore! He just, you know, kind of hit a rough patch in his personal life, and as a result, it kind of took out the motivation to hustle very hard, which he used to do, but doesn’t do anymore.

Because you can’t, you know, hustling is not a business strategy. You can’t hustle your way, you know, to your retirement. I mean, some people can, like, some people have that energy and have that passion for the hustle, you know, the Grant Cardone types, the Gary V types, you know, they can! They can work around the clock, I don’t know how they do it, I swear! I don’t understand it, I just don’t have it in me. I need a system to be working, I need the pipeline to be filled systematically, and it can be by me manually, you know, kind of doing it by hand, if you will.

18:15
It’s kind of like again, going back to the CashFlow Quadrant, there was a story, And the book starts out with a great story about a village that needed water, and so this old man volunteers to go and bring buckets of water from the lake. And he starts like a little business. He brings the water, he sells it to the villagers, he goes back, brings more water, sells it to the villagers, and at the same time, this other guy starts building a pipeline. It takes them longer to build it obviously, it takes them, like a year to build it. But he builds a pipeline from the lake to the village, and he starts selling the water to the villagers through the pipeline, delivering the water straight to their houses, and doing it cheaper than the old man can do it. And very quickly, the old man thinks, “Okay, I’m just going to go work harder”. But he can’t compete with the pipeline, because the pipeline works around the clock. Eventually, the old man injures himself, asks his son to help, and his son gets to work. But the point being is that they can’t compete with the pipeline, so the pipeline out-earns them, outperforms them, and eventually they go out of business! Because they don’t have a system, but they’re entrepreneurs trying to solve an immediate pain point with physical labor.

19:38
So I see most other businesses and most entrepreneurs kind of have that, which in many ways is because the business they choose, isn’t really primed to have the systems. Usually, it would require a really competent human being to replace the business owner, and at the same time for that human being not to be ambitious enough to want to become the business owner. Because, for example, going back to my best friend, for example, with the deli, he actually used to be an employee in the deli that he purchased. So, the guy who’s he used to work with owned two delis, so he ended up buying one of them and became his competitor, and actually outgrown his former boss.

But you see, if I was his former boss, I would have never sold him, like I would not put in charge somebody who’s as ambitious as me, about owning their own business, because you’re just creating competition for yourself, right? I would probably, you know, go look for someone who doesn’t want to own a business or just wants to operate one. And there’s people like that too.

20:56
So, my point is the peace of mind that I can have with this business as the added benefit it’s only because the business is simple enough, to be able to produce great profits, but at the same time, isn’t super complicated, where you can automate most of it using software, and you don’t have to bring a whole team of people, capable, smart people, to do it for you.

09:43

Thank you for listening to The List Building Lifestyle, get access to the previous episodes, transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at www.listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also remember to claim your free copy of my best selling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list buildings starting from scratch, plus I’ll give you 3,000$ worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email swipe files and traffic blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com, now to claim your free package!