(This post is inspired in part by Clay at The Growing Life, whose excellent post on the same general topic convinced me to share my similar mindset. I highly recommend checking out his site.)

This post is a major milestone for my blog. This is just the beginning of many future writings outlining my largely unconventional path to financial freedom. 

Ever since I read The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris last year, my long-held ideas about a traditional career and lifestyle have been overturned.  The 4HWW directly opposes the rarely-challenged concepts that almost everybody accepts without question.  It’s extremely eye-opening to see that there is an alternative to what’s been engrained in our minds since day one.

Ferris believes that time and income do not have to go hand-in-hand.  This flies directly against the conventional practice of working continuously in order to receive income.  In a typical career, one’s  income is 100% correlated with the 40+ hours that are put in each week.  Our livelihood is entirely dependent on this repetitive sacrifice of time on our part.  In addition, most people have to put in decades and decades of that work in order to leave this cycle .  There is a different way, and I want to take that route.

I want to liberate myself from this grind.  I don’t want to be entirely dependent on the system to fulfill my needs, only one pink slip away from financial hardship. I don’t want to sacrifice a huge portion of my lifetime in mostly unfulfilling work.  I don’t want to work in a system that more than anything benefits the big-shots who don’t even give a damn about me anyways. I want a Four Hour Workweek lifestyle…

 My true academic passion is undoubtedly economics and finance, and I absolutely love studying these subjects. However, I don’t particularly feel like becoming a part of that corporate field (which also happens to be crumbling by the day).  I am currently working on combining my formal studies with a far larger amount of personal studies in order to achieve things that the corporate world cannot even begin to offer me (The subject of MANY posts to come, explaining how I believe I can do this).  I’m not saying that the typical career path is an evil product of the devil’s or anything like that, only that I would like to strive for more.  I could function just fine in such an environment, but I believe to derive the utmost satisfaction from life, I need to pursue an alternative route.

As this post is just a brief outline and introduction of my goal to liberate myself from the norm, I’m going to wrap things up with three of my most basic goals in this process. These will most certainly be expanded upon largely in the future:

My three main objectives are:

1. To eventually provide entirely for myself, and feel a deep sense of satisfaction that comes from utilizing my talents and ambitions to do so.

2. To separate my income from my time, unchained from the 9-5.

3. To utilize number 2 to the fullest, living a life full of meaning and purpose that would otherwise be largely out of reach.

I realize that I am 19 years old, and I will grow out of some of my current beliefs and behaviors, but I really see this being a long-term objective of mine.  This path will require a tremendous amount of ambition, motivation, and perseverance on my part, but I believe I have what it takes.  It won’t be easy, as society programs us to plug into the system, but I’m going to embrace the challenge.  I know what I stand to gain, and I really have nothing to lose at this point, so to me it’s an easy decision.