how to change your life in 6 months (the freedom equation)

Overview

00:00All right. Hello, and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're gonna be covering today is The Freedom Equation. And as you can see from the overview, what we're gonna be talking about more specifically is first the overview itself, the three currencies, the three freedoms, the freedom exchange, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days.

The Three Currencies

00:20So with that said, let's get started and talk about the three currencies. So in 1748, Benjamin Franklin wrote one of the most famous lines ever written about work and money. He said, "Remember that time is money." He was making a practical point to a young tradesman about opportunity cost because every hour he chose not to work also carried the income he could have earned during that hour.

00:42More than 250 years later, we still think this way. We measure what we earn, what we spend, what something costs, how much somebody makes, and how much wealth somebody has. Yet, I think that way of measuring wealth leaves out two of the most important resources you have.

00:56Money became incredibly easy to measure because you can attach a number to it. You know roughly how much you earn every single month. You open your bank account and see what you have, and you can look at the price of something before deciding whether you can actually afford it.

01:09Time and energy, which are the two other currencies feel less precise, so people tend to spend them without applying the same scrutiny, even though both can constrain your life just as much as the lack of money can. So think about how differently you react when somebody asks you to spend 500 euros or dollars compared with asking you to give up an entire day.

01:32You immediately evaluate the financial cost because the number makes the sacrifice obvious, while you can give away hours through obligations, inefficient work, commuting, unnecessary meetings or tasks somebody else could do and barely register that you paid for them.

01:48And you can make the same mistake with energy because nobody sends you a statement showing you how much concentration, patience, motivation, or physical capacity you spent this month. You only notice the consequences once your work gets worse.

01:59You avoid things you normally care about, or you reach at the end of the day with enough time left on paper and very little usable capacity left to do anything with it. So researchers actually explored part of this problem in a 2017 paper called Buying Time Promotes Happiness.

02:12Across samples totaling people in the United States, Canada, Denmark, and the Netherlands, people who spent money on time-saving services reported greater life satisfaction, and an experiment found that working adults felt happier after spending money on a time-saving purchase than after spending the same amount on a material purchase.

02:36And I like this study because it makes the exchange visible. Somebody gives up one resource they possess, money, and receives another resource they value, time. The researchers focused on wellbeing, while I want to take the logic further and use it as a way of thinking about your whole life, because you're making exchanges between resources constantly, so what would happen if you evaluated your life with the same seriousness that you evaluate your finances?

03:00You'd have to account for everything you're spending, which means you'd need to recognize that you actually operate with three currencies every single day. You have money, you have time, you have energy, and every meaningful decision consumes some combination of the three.

Money

03:14Now, money is the first currency because it gives you purchasing power and lets you store some of the value you create today for use later. You can save it, invest it, exchange it for goods and services. You can give it to somebody else and use it to acquire resources that would otherwise require your own time and effort.

03:26Because we already understand money reasonably well, most people spend years trying to increase this one currency and assume that doing so will eventually solve everything else they care about. You can accumulate money in a way you cannot accumulate hours from your past, right?

03:39If you earn more than you spend, you can carry the difference forward and build savings, investments, assets, or ownership that continue to affect your future. That makes money extraordinarily useful because the work you did years ago can still give you options today if you preserved or invested part of the value it created.

03:59Once you have enough money, you can also use it to change the demands placed on Your other currencies. You can pay someone to clean your home, take a faster form of transport, you can hire help inside a business, you can live closer to something you use every day, or choose a more expensive solution because it requires less of your own involvement.

04:15The problem appears when you maximize money while treating every other cost as irrelevant. You can accept additional responsibilities, longer working hours, more travel, worse sleep, constant availability, or work that occupies your attention long after the work day has ended because the financial reward looks good when you isolate it from everything you had to give up to earn it.

04:36And this is also why I don't want to turn the framework into an argument that everybody should become an entrepreneur, because the structure applies regardless of how you earn. A salaried employee with a predictable schedule, enough income, good boundaries, and generous flexibility may have a better overall arrangement than a business owner earning much more while remaining responsible for everything the business needs every single day.

05:03So you can use the same reasoning when considering a promotion. The salary increase can matter, obviously, and so do the additional hours, responsibility, commute, travel, stress, and expectations that come with the role. You want to see the whole exchange before deciding whether the extra money actually improves the life you're trying to build.

05:20And you can apply it inside a business as well. An entrepreneur can celebrate a higher revenue month while personally taking on additional delivery, calls, management, and decision-making until the business produces more money while requiring more of the person who actually owns it.

05:37Revenue increased, yet the owner may have made himself poorer in the other currencies.

Time

05:42Now, time is the second currency, and it has one property that makes it fundamentally different from money. You receive a limited amount of it, you spend it continuously whether you mean to or not, And you cannot preserve yesterday's unused hours for later.

05:50That makes time extremely valuable, although people regularly treat an hour as cheap when no price tag appears next to whatever is consuming it. And so every obligation claims part of your available time before you decide what to do with the rest.

06:06Work takes some, right? Basic life maintenance takes some, relationships take some, and the commitments you voluntarily accept take some. Once those hours belong to someone else, your freedom over that part of the day disappears, regardless of how much money you have sitting in an account.

06:19And this is why two people with similar incomes can experience completely different lives. One person may control when they work, finish most of it within a few concentrated hours, and have large parts of the week available for relationships, health, learning, or whatever else matters to them.

06:39Another person may earn the same amount while giving almost every useful hour to work and recovery from work. And I would therefore evaluate time through control as much as quantity. Having four free hours that you can reliably decide how to use gives you something different from having four unpredictable hours scattered around obligations, interruptions, and other people's demands.

07:01Both schedules contain the same number of hours mathematically, while one gives the person far more usable choice. And so researchers sometimes use the phrase time scarcity Or time poverty to describe the feeling that you don't have enough time for everything demanding your attention.

07:15People were able to reduce some of that pressure by exchanging money for time. And so you already make these exchanges in small ways. You pay more for a direct flight because it saves several hours. You order something online because going to the store would take longer.

07:28You pay for software or professional help because doing the job manually would consume part of your week, or choose housing partly because of how much commuting time the location creates. The useful question is what you do with the time you actually recover, because buying back an hour only creates potential.

07:49You can use that hour to earn more money, train, sleep, read, spend time with somebody you care about, think, or simply have fewer obligations pressing against each other. The value comes from what the, that recovered hour allows you to actually do afterward.

Energy

08:04And energy is the third currency, and I think people overlook it most because time can remain available after your ability to use that time well has already dropped. You can technically have three hours free and still lack the concentration to write, the physical capacity to train properly, or the emotional patience to have meaningful conversations with somebody.

08:21Your calendar says you have time while your actual ability to use that time has changed. And when I say energy here, I'm using the word broadly and practically. I mean your usable physical capacity, your ability to concentrate and think clearly, and the emotional capacity you have available for dealing with people, uncertainty, responsibility, and even stress.

08:39Those forms of capacity affect one another, which is why a physically exhausted person often produces worse cognitive work, and why prolonged mental strain can actually affect everything they do afterwards. And this matters especially when you judge productivity by hours alone.

08:55Ten hours spent working tells you almost nothing about the quality of those hours If your concentration declined halfway through, you kept switching between tasks, or you spend the final part of the day doing work that somebody with more energy could have completed far faster.

09:10And it matters outside of work too, because you can create a life that looks successful economically while having very little usable capacity left for the parts of your life the money was supposed to support. You might have enough income to travel, enough free time to train, and enough flexibility to see people you care about, yet still struggle to enjoy any of it Because your work consumes most of your mental and physical resources.

09:32So once you treat energy as something you spend, you start evaluating decisions differently. Sleep, exercise, nutrition, recovery, boundaries, removing unnecessary obligations, and simplifying parts of your life become resource decisions because they affect how much usable capacity you have available for everything else.

09:54Some activities also cost far more energy than their duration suggests. A 30-minute task that you dislike or avoid for hours and keep thinking about afterwards and repeatedly return to can consume more of you than a longer task that you can perform with focused attention and finish cleanly.

10:12The clock captures duration while your experience captures the real demand, and that gives you another reason to look carefully at what you agree to because a commitment can appear affordable financially and manageable in terms of time, yet still be expensive once you include the stress, preparation, switching, recovery, and attention it requires before and after the actual event.

10:32So now you have the first half of the freedom equation. You have three currencies, and the practical move is really to

Scoring Your Three Currencies

10:37stop looking at them separately. From here on, I want you to evaluate important decisions by asking what they cost across money, time, and energy because the answer can look completely different once all three appear on the same page. And by the end of this training, you'll be able to use those three currencies to evaluate your current life, understand the three freedoms they can create, and deliberately exchange the resources you have for greater control over how you live.

11:02Start by giving yourself a score from one to ten for each currency based on your current reality. Give money a high score if you have strong income, reserves, or access to financial resources relative to your needs. Give time a high score if you have meaningful amounts of usable time under your control, and score energy according to how much physical, cognitive, and emotional capacity you can actually use during an ordinary week.

11:26And ask whether a reasonable unexpected expense would meaningfully destabilize you in terms of money, whether you can fund the things that matter to you, and whether you have the financial resources left after your basic obligations. You don't need a perfect financial model here because you're trying to identify relative abundance and scarcity before we make the framework more precise.

11:42Then, when it comes to time, look at how much of your week you genuinely control once work and unavoidable responsibilities take their share. I'd pay particular attention to whether your free time arrives in usable blocks because several fragmented periods can look generous on a calendar and still give you very little room for work that requires concentration or experiences you want to enjoy without rushing.

12:06And finally, look at what you can actually do with the hours you have. If you repeatedly reach your free time without enough concentration to think, enough physical capacity to train, or enough patience to engage properly with other people, your energy score should reflect that because the theoretical availability of time doesn't really solve the underlying constraint.

12:26And so once you score all three, identify the currency that currently limits you most. You might have plenty of time and energy while lacking the money required to make meaningful changes. You might have strong finances and good health while your schedule belongs almost entirely to work.

12:39Or you might possess both money and time while your current workload, sleep, stress, or health leaves you with very little capacity to use either one. That lowest score gives you a working priority because improving the resource you already possess in abundance may change very little.

12:54Earning another ten percent can matter, of course, although somebody who already has enough money and almost no time May benefit far more from using some of that money to remove obligations from the week. And this is where the framework gets much more interesting because your currencies can interact.

13:13You can spend money to recover time, spend money and time to improve energy, invest time and energy to create more money, or accept a temporary cost in one area because the exchange creates something you value more later. We still need one more piece before you can judge whether any of those exchanges are actually good because having resources only matters when you know what you want those resources to give you.

The Three Freedoms

13:34So let's talk about the three freedoms. Hey, really quick. If you're still watching this video, that tells me you're serious about actually making a change in your life. So if you want my help personally, click the link below and book a call.

13:46We'll look at where you are, where you want to go, and what's been keeping you stuck. And if we believe that we can actually help you, we'll show you exactly what working with us would look like. And if you're not ready for that yet, that's completely fine too.

13:54You can join the Omniscient community for free, where you'll get access to more of our free trainings, and you'll be able to connect with other people that are also doing this work. On top of that, you can join the free Omniscient newsletter, where I send you ideas and strategies that I don't always talk about here on YouTube.

14:15So if any of that interests you, all links are below. But if you're ready to take this seriously, book a call. And with that said, back to the video So once you know what your three currencies are, the next question is what you actually want from them to produce.

14:27Money, time, and energy are important because they give you options, and those options affect how much control you have over your own life. I'd reduce that control into three freedoms that matter across almost every lifestyle. Financial freedom gives you control over your dependence on income, time freedom gives you control over your schedule, and location freedom gives you control over where you need to be.

14:50I'm using freedom here in a very practical sense. You have more freedom when fewer external conditions determine what you have to do, when you have to do it, and where you have to be while doing it. You can still choose structure, responsibility, work, commitment, and routine, but you choose them from a stronger position because your life doesn't collapse immediately if one condition changes.

15:11You also don't need to think about freedom as something you either have or don't have. Most people sit somewhere on a spectrum because somebody can have strong location freedom and weak financial freedom or excellent financial freedom while having very little control over their week.

15:26That's exactly why separating the three gives you a clearer picture than using one vague word like success. And this also changes the way you think about accumulating resources. If you spend years increasing money without knowing which freedom you're trying to create, you can end up optimizing an input while barely improving the life around it.

15:43The whole point of the equation is to connect what you have with what you want your life to allow.

Financial Freedom

15:49So financial freedom means reducing how dependent your life is on continuous earned income. You have more of it when your savings, investments, assets, ownership, or income structure give you room to make decisions without immediately needing another paycheck, another client, or another sale.

16:02Someone with a high income can still have weak financial freedom if their lifestyle costs, debt, obligations, or business model force them to keep earning at the same pace just to maintain everything. And that's why income and financial freedom can move differently.

16:16A person earning three hundred thousand dollars per year with very high fixed costs may feel far less financially secure than someone earning much less with low expenses or larger reserves and income that doesn't depend entirely on daily personal effort.

16:31The first person has more money coming in, while the second person may have more room to say no, to wait, change direction, or even walk away. So one useful way to think about this is through runway. Ask yourself how long your current life could continue if your earned income disappeared today.

16:50Somebody with several months or years of expenses covered has a different level of freedom from someone who needs next month's income to meet next month's obligations, even if both people currently earn the same amount. And fixed costs matter here because every recurring obligation raises the amount of income you need before you feel free.

17:08So a larger home, expensive car, debt payments, payroll, subscriptions, and lifestyle expectations can all be perfectly reasonable choices, but they also create a financial floor you now have to keep supporting. And so the source of your income matters as well.

17:23If every dollar depends directly on your presence, your time, or your personal output, then your financial freedom still relies heavily on the other currencies. Income from ownership systems, investments, licensing, or work that continues producing value after the initial effort can reduce that dependence, although every structure comes with its own trade-offs and risks.

17:38A salaried role can still create strong financial freedom if the person saves aggressively, keeps expenses under control, invests consistently, and builds enough reserves to make work optional for meaningful periods. You don't need a business to create financial freedom because the mechanism depends on the gap between what your life requires and what your accumulated resources can actually support.

18:01A business owner can also have weak financial freedom if every month starts from zero and the owner personally has to generate the sales, deliver the work, manage the clients, and solve the problems. The business may produce a high income while remaining tightly attached to the owner's time and energy, which is why revenue alone tells you very little about actual freedom.

18:20Now when it comes to time, time freedom means having meaningful control over when

Time Freedom

18:27you work, how much you work, and what receives your attention during the week. You can still work a lot and have high time freedom if those hours are largely chosen, flexible, and adjustable. Another person can work fewer total hours and still have weak time freedom because those hours break the day apart, remain unpredictable, or depend on somebody else's schedule.

18:47So control matters a lot more than raw quantity. A person who can decide to move a work block, take a morning off, protect an afternoon, or rearrange the week has more freedom than someone whose calendar looks lighter but has very little authority over when things happen.

19:03that flexibility affects relationships, training, travel, creative work, recovery, and almost every other part of life. So you should also pay attention to fragmentation because scattered obligations can make a week feel far more constrained than the total hours suggest.

19:19A call in the morning, another in the afternoon, and one commitment in the evening can leave large gaps between them while still making the whole day difficult to use for anything demanding or immersive. Predictable time also carries more value than uncertain time.

19:33If you know every Friday afternoon belongs to you, you can actually plan around it. If free time appears randomly depending on cancellations, workload, or somebody else's availability, you technically have hours available, but very little confidence about when those hours will exist.

19:49And this is why I define time freedom through autonomy. The important question is how much authority you have over the shape of your week. You may choose to spend that authority on work, family, training, study, or nothing at all if you wanted to.

20:01And that freedom sits in your ability to make that choice without needing permission from a manager, client, calendar, or operating requirement. Somebody can voluntarily work sixty hours during an intense period and still have more time freedom than somebody working thirty-five hours under rigid conditions because the first person can reduce the load when priorities change while the second person may have no ability to move or compress the schedule.

20:23And you can measure this by looking at how many parts of your week are genuinely fixed. Work shifts, meetings, school schedules, caregiving, commuting, appointments, and recurring responsibilities all create structure. structure isn't automatically bad, but you want to know how much of your week you control before calling yourself time free So next up is location freedom.

Location Freedom

20:49And location freedom means having meaningful control over where you need to be in order to maintain your income and your responsibilities. Some people can work from another city or country with almost no disruptions, while others have jobs, businesses, family duties, property, or operational responsibilities that tie them closely to one place.

21:04Neither arrangement is automatically superior, but they create very different sets of options. Location freedom matters most when you actually want mobility. If you enjoy where you live, have strong relationships nearby, and have no desire to travel or relocate, you may care much less about maximizing it.

21:24Still, having the option to spend several weeks elsewhere, move if circumstances change, or stay near family when needed can become valuable even if you rarely actually use it. Now, remote work can increase location freedom, although the label alone doesn't guarantee it.

21:38Some remote jobs still require specific countries, time zones, working hours, or frequent travel, and some businesses can technically operate online while the owner remains tied to local staff, clients, equipment, or regulations. Your legal, financial, and personal circumstances matter too.

21:54Visas, tax residency, family commitments, healthcare, property, and schooling can all affect how freely you can move. The point is to evaluate your real mobility based on the conditions of your life, not based on whether your laptop can technically connect from another country.

22:07I'd also separate location freedom from constant travel because people often confuse the two. They think that if you have location freedom, you must be a digital nomad. No, not necessarily. You can have enormous location freedom and choose to spend almost the entire year in one city.

22:26The freedom exists because you could leave, stay elsewhere, or relocate without destroying your income or your responsibilities. In fact, some people use location freedom to create more stability because they can choose the environment that suits their life best and remain there voluntarily.

22:42The ability to move gives them bargaining power over where they live, even if they rarely exercise that option. Other people willingly reduce location freedom for something they value more. They may accept an in-person role because it accelerates their career, stay near family because those relationships matter to them deeply, or build a location-dependent business because the opportunity justifies the constraint.

23:05The framework doesn't judge the exchange. It makes the exchange visible. So now you can score the other half of the freedom equation. Give yourself a number from one to ten for financial freedom, time freedom, and location freedom based on the control you actually have today.

23:19You want to judge the life you're living right now because imagined future freedom doesn't really help you see which part of the system currently needs attention.

Scoring Your Three Freedoms

23:27So score financial freedom based on how dependent you are on continuing to earn at your current pace. Look at your savings, investments, fixed expenses, debt, income stability, and how long you could continue your current life if earned income fell sharply.

23:41Somebody with moderate income and strong reserves may score higher than somebody earning much more with almost no margin. And then ask yourself how easily you could leave a bad job, lose a major client, take several months off, or absorb a meaningful financial shock.

23:56The easier those decisions become without creating panic or immediate instability, the stronger your financial freedom probably is. You also want to ignore status while scoring this. A high salary, expensive lifestyle, or successful business can look super cool and impressive from the outside while creating heavy dependence behind the scenes.

24:16So score the actual degree of financial control you have, not the image associated with your income. Now, next up is time. Score time freedom based on how much of your week you can genuinely shape. Look at your fixed working hours, meetings, commitments, commuting, recovery demands, and how easily you can move things when your priorities change.

24:36A calendar with open space matters, but control over that space matters a lot more. So ask whether you can actually take a day off without creating major problems, move work into a different part of the week, protect several hours for something important, or reduce your workload temporarily when life requires it.

24:53Those questions reveal much more than simply counting how many hours you actually work. If most of your schedule depends on other people, deadlines, shifts, or constant availability, your time freedom is probably lower than it looks. If you can decide when your most important work happens and how the rest of the week gets arranged, your score should reflect that autonomy as well.

25:09Then location freedom, score that on how many real geographic options you have. Ask whether your income continues if you leave your city, whether your responsibilities can move with you, and how difficult it would be to spend a month elsewhere or relocate if you genuinely wanted to.

25:25Then include the constraints that actually matter in your life. Family, legal obligations, property, employees, clients, healthcare, or even a partner's work can all reduce mobility, and you want the score to reflect those realities. You can also weight this score according to how much location freedom matters to you.

25:46Somebody who values deep roots in one place may deliberately accept a lower score here and remain completely satisfied, while another person may treat geographic mobility as one of the central conditions for the life they want. So once you place all six scores next to each other, you start seeing something much more useful than a simple income number, right?

26:07You can see where you have resources without freedom, where you have freedom without much resource abundance, and where one weak area might be limiting everything else. Someone can have money at nine out of 10 and financial freedom at four because their obligations keep them dependent While someone else can have money at six and financial freedom at eight because their expenses and income structure give them far more room.

26:28Those mismatches tell you where the interesting work begins. High time resources with low time freedom may mean that your schedule stays fragmented or controlled by others. High money with low location freedom may mean your income depends on a physical business, office, or client base.

26:46strong energy with weak financial freedom may mean you have the capacity to build something but haven't yet converted that capacity into financial security. And this gives you a much better diagnosis of the problem because you stop trying to improve everything at once.

26:54You can identify which currency you have available, which freedom you care about most, and which current constraint keeps the two from connecting. You may also realize that the freedom you thought you wanted isn't the one creating the biggest problem.

27:10Someone can spend years chasing location freedom because it sounds attractive, while their real frustration comes from having almost no control over their time. And fixing the schedule may improve their life far more than moving countries ever would.

27:22So at this point, you've mapped the inputs and outputs. You know what you possess across money, time, and energy, and you know how much control you currently have across finances, schedule, and location. The final section is where we connect them because the practical value of the whole framework comes from learning how to deliberately exchange one currency for another and use those exchanges to increase the freedoms you care about most.

The Freedom Exchange

27:47So let's talk about the freedom exchange. So now you have the full map. You know the three currencies you can spend, and you know the three freedoms those currencies can help you create. Now you need to stop treating those six things as separate scores and start looking at the exchanges happening between them.

28:03Because nearly every meaningful decision in your life changes more than one category at once. You give something up, you receive something back, and the quality of the decision depends on whether that exchange moves you closer to the life you actually want.

28:15You already make these exchanges constantly, even when you never name them. You accept a higher salary and give up more time. You spend money on convenience and recover energy. You move somewhere cheaper and improve your financial freedom while reducing access to certain people or opportunities.

28:32You take on a demanding period of work because you believe the temporary cost will create more options later. The problem begins when you only notice the most visible side of the exchange. Money usually gets your attention first because it comes with a clear number, while the time, energy, or freedom attached to the decision stays vague.

28:46Once you put every part of the exchange on the same page, choices that looked obviously good can become much less attractive. And you also have to judge an exchange based on your current situation. Spending $1,000 to recover 10 hours may make perfect sense for someone who has strong financial resources and almost no time, while the same exchange could be reckless for someone with weak finances and plenty of available hours, So the same decision can be smart for one person and completely unnecessary for another because the currencies they possess are very different.

29:24And I call this currency conversion in a way. You deliberately use the resource you currently have in abundance to improve the resource or freedom you currently lack. The idea sounds pretty simple, but it gives you a practical way to act on this course from the first two sections, because your lowest number no longer becomes something you merely observe.

29:42It becomes something you can try to improve by asking which stronger part of your life can support it. And if money is currently your strongest currency and time is your weakest, you can use money to remove low value demands from your weak.

29:55You can also outsource repetitive work, pay for faster transport, choose convenience when the recovered time matters, hire support, or pay someone with better skills to complete something that would take you far longer. You still have to evaluate the return because spending money to save five minutes rarely changes your life, while spending money to recover several hours every week can really alter the shape of your schedule.

30:18And I look for recurring exchanges first because a one-time convenience helps once, while removing a repeated task can return time to you every single week for months or years. You also want to decide what the recovered time is for. If you save five hours and fill all five with random low-value activity, the exchange produced very little.

30:38If those hours go towards focused work, relationships, training, recovery, study, or simply creating a less crowded week, then the money produced something you actually care about. If time is your strongest currency and money is your weakest, you can invest some of that time into building skills, doing additional work, creating assets, improving your earning ability, or pursuing opportunities that may increase your financial resources later.

31:01And this exchange makes sense when your schedule gives you capacity that currently produces very little value, and you have a clear way to direct it towards something useful. So learning becomes especially valuable here when the skill has a direct connection to earning opportunity or leverage.

31:18You can spend hours reading broadly and enjoy it, but if your actual goal is financial improvement, you should probably favor skills that people already pay for, that improve your performance in your current role, or that help you create something valuable for yourself.

31:33This exchange also takes longer because time spent today rarely turns into money immediately. You may need months of practice or applications or networking, content, sales activity, or even just business building before the financial side changes meaningfully.

31:46And that delay matters because you need enough time and energy to sustain the investment before you expect the return. So if your weakest currency, on the other hand, is energy, you may need to spend both money and time to improve it. You can protect your sleep a bit more, reduce unnecessary commitments, improve your nutrition, train consistently, create more recovery, do some blood work, deal with health problems, or even change parts of your work that keep producing stress and exhaustion.

32:12None of those changes feel productive in the narrow sense of earning more, yet they can improve what you're capable of doing with every other hour afterwards. And so somebody with enough money and free time can still struggle to build anything meaningful if their concentration and physical capacity remain low.

32:26So improving energy can therefore increase the usefulness of both other currencies because the same two-hour work block becomes more productive, and the same free evening becomes more enjoyable when you have the capacity to use it properly.

32:44I'd also look for energy losses you can remove before trying to add more recovery practices. Some commitments require very little clock time and still consume a large amount of attention before and after them. So if one recurring obligation keeps creating stress out of proportion to its value, removing it can improve energy without requiring another habit, purchase, or complicated routine.

33:04So once you understand conversion, you can use the framework before making major decisions. Whenever an opportunity or a commitment or a purchase or a move or a role or a lifestyle change appears, you just write down what it costs you in money, time, and energy, and then write down what it changes in financial, time, and location freedom You're trying to make the hidden parts of the decision visible before excitement, status, fear, or habit pushes you into an exchange you never properly evaluated.

33:30So say you receive a promotion that pays twenty percent more.

Evaluating Major Decisions

33:36The financial gain is obvious, it's twenty percent more. But the role may also add responsibility, extend your working day, require more meetings, increase travel, or make it harder to take time off. Once you include those costs, you can decide whether the additional money actually creates enough future freedom to justify what the role asks from you now.

33:57And the answer may still be yes, because the promotion could improve your skills, reputation, savings rate, or even future opportunities enough to make the temporary cost worthwhile. In that case, you're consciously accepting lower time or energy freedom for a period because the exchange supports a larger goal you care about.

34:11But you may also decide that the salary increase doesn't justify the added demand because money already scores highly for you and time scores really badly. That decision can look irrational if you only measure success through income, while it makes perfect sense once you remember that another currency currently limits your life a lot more.

34:33Now take the opposite example. You own a business and consider hiring someone to handle work you currently do yourself. That decision reduces money in the short term because payroll increases. Yet it may recover several hours every week and reduce the number of small decisions, interruptions, and responsibilities that you personally carry.

34:53If the person eventually handles the work without your constant involvement, the hire can increase time freedom and potentially location freedom as well. You may become less necessary to daily operations, which changes the business from something that only produces income into something that also gives you greater control.

35:07The exchange only works if the recovered time or energy actually exceeds the management burden you create. A poor hire can cost money and still require your attention, while the right person can remove a whole category of work from your week.

35:20That's why you judge the complete exchange after implementation instead of assuming delegation automatically creates freedom. You can also use the same model for lifestyle decisions. A more expensive apartment close to your work or gym may actually reduce financial efficiency while returning several hours of your time every week.

35:42Moving to a lower cost country may increase financial freedom, but it might reduce access to family, professional networks, or even just certain opportunities. So a cheaper choice can carry a large time or energy cost, and an expensive choice can sometimes produce a better overall arrangement Your own values matter because you decide which freedom deserves priority.

36:03Someone who wants to travel for several months each year will probably assign more value to location freedom than somebody who wants to raise a family near relatives and remain deeply connected to one community. So the framework helps both people because it forces them to make the exchange consciously.

36:18Your priorities can also change over time. You may accept lower time freedom while building a career, studying, growing a business, or even raising young children and later decide that the same exchange no longer serves you. So a decision that made sense during one period can absolutely become expensive once the goal that justified it has already been achieved.

36:41And this leads to one of the most useful parts of the whole framework because freedom often develops in stages

Freedom in Stages

36:46Yes, you may need to sacrifice some freedom temporarily to increase a currency and then use that stronger currency to buy back more freedom later. The important part is really knowing which stage you're in and having a clear condition for when the exchange ends, because temporary sacrifice can turn into a permanent lifestyle very easily when you keep moving the target.

37:02Someone with very little money may reasonably spend large amounts of time and energy increasing income first. They may work more, learn new skills, take on extra responsibility, or build something alongside their existing work because financial scarcity currently constrains nearly every other option they have.

37:25But at some point, another dollar can become way less valuable than another hour. And once income and savings reach a level that gives you stability, continuing to maximize earnings may actually create a smaller improvement in your life than using part of that money to really just reduce workload or increase your flexibility.

37:40And you need to notice that moment because people often keep playing by an old priority after their situation has changed. someone who spent years solving a money problem can continue maximizing money even after time has become the real scarcity, simply because earning more has become familiar and measurable.

38:01And so the same thing can happen with any currency. You may spend years protecting your time and eventually realize that your lack of income now limits your choices. You may chase location freedom and later decide that stability, community, or a specific opportunity matters more to you.

38:13Periodically rebalancing the equation keeps your current goals connected to your current reality. And I'd revisit the six scores every few months or after any major change in your life. You don't need complicated tracking. Just write down your money, time, energy, financial freedom, time freedom, and location freedom.

38:30Score each from one to ten, and then compare the results

The Six Score Audit

38:36with the last time you did it. And then look especially for a score that moved because of a decision you made. If hiring increased time freedom but hurt your financial freedom more than expected, you learned something. If earning less improved energy and time without creating meaningful financial stress, then you learned something there too.

38:54The framework becomes more accurate as you compare your predictions with what actually happened. There's also one question I'd use whenever you feel stuck between two options. What am I giving up? What am I receiving? And does this exchange improve the freedoms I actually care about?

39:05That question forces you to see the decision across all six dimensions, and it prevents one visible benefit from dominating the rest of the calculation simply because it happens to be easier to measure. So start with what you're giving up. Include the obvious financial cost and the less visible costs in time, attention, physical capacity, flexibility, and mobility.

39:29You don't need to turn every decision into a spreadsheet, but major choices do deserve enough thought that you can name the real price before you commit. After that, name what you expect to receive. Maybe you get more income, fewer responsibilities, better health, more flexibility, stronger career options, or greater geographic choice.

39:44Keep the answer concrete enough that you can later judge whether the exchange actually delivered what you expected. And then finally, ask how long the exchange lasts. So a demanding six-month period with a clear end can be very different from accepting an open-ended arrangement that permanently consumes the same amount of time and energy.

40:04Duration changes the cost, and it also tells you when you should reassess whether the trade still makes sense. And then compare the exchange with the life you say you want. If you claim time freedom matters deeply to you while repeatedly choosing more income at the cost of your schedule, your decisions are producing a different priority from the one you describe.

40:25And that might be creating a lot of cognitive dissonance, which is more cognitive load. That doesn't make the decision wrong, but it gives you honest information about what you're actually optimizing. Now, your calendar, expenses, commitments, and workload reveal your real exchanges much more clearly than your intentions do.

40:43Look at where your money goes, what occupies the week, what repeatedly drains your energy, and which obligations you cannot easily change. Those things show you the equation you're currently living. From there, you can decide whether you want to keep it.

40:56You may look at the six cores and realize that your current arrangement already serves you well, or you may see one area that has stayed low for years while you keep accumulating more of something you already have enough of. So with that said, let's go over the review.

Review

41:11We talked about the overview, the three currencies, the three freedoms, the freedom exchange, the review, and your action items for the day or the next few days. First, write down the six parts of the freedom equation today. Rate your money, time, energy, financial freedom, time freedom, and location freedom from 1 to 10 based on your current reality.

41:25Don't use the person you expect to become in a year or the life you think you should have. Use the actual finances, schedule, capacity, obligations, and mobility right now because you need an honest starting point before you can make a useful decision.

41:38Then find the lowest score and ask whether it actually matters to you. If it does, identify which of your stronger currencies could help improve it. You may have money available to recover time, time available to build money, or enough financial and time resources to make energy your priority.

41:59Pick one bottleneck instead of trying to improve all six categories at once. Then make one deliberate exchange during the next week.

Actions

42:06Cancel or delegate something that consumes disproportionate time. Spend money to remove a recurring demand. Dedicate a block of available time to increasing your earning ability, or protect time and resources for something that restores your capacity.

42:19Write down what you expect to give up and what you expect to receive, and then review the result afterward and decide whether you'd make the same exchange again. With that said, I hope this brought a lot of value. If it did, please let me know.

42:31If you want to work with me one-on-one, as always, make sure to book a call from the link in the description or in the pinned comments below. Thank you for being here. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.