1. Scrap the permission-based mindset.

Waiting for permission is the fastest way to surrender your personal freedom and autonomy. You don’t need someone to say something is okay. If you know it’s right, based on examination and reflection, then go and do it.

You don’t need someone’s accreditation to launch into the professional world. Build a pitch deck and a value prop and start putting yourself in front of businesses. Don’t wait for someone to hire you to start working for them. If you’re excited about what they do, start creating value for free.

Waiting for other people’s okay is a surrender of your own power. It puts them in the driver’s seat, not you. The fastest way to build the life you want is to go and start building it, regardless of what anyone else has to say about it.

2. Don’t do things just because someone tells you you should.

Do things because you sincerely believe in them.

I seriously considered going to college because people told me I should. In the end, I realized I sincerely believed in forging my own path and being successful without college, and that was the conviction upon which I made my decision.

Don’t go to college just because society tells you to go to college, or because your peers or parents tell you it’s necessary. Don’t follow a standard career track just because someone told you it’s the fast track to success.

3. Understand what’s valuable and what isn’t.

Value is the underlying driving force in society — it’s what all human systems are built upon. Throughout human history, the foundation of networks has been exchange — the trade of goods and services, i.e. value.

To be a free, competent entity within this human system (in which we’re all living), you must understand value. Study what’s valuable — to employers, to businesses, to consumers, to your peers, to the people you want the freedom to interact with. Learn it. Internalize it. Learn how to shape your work around it.

If you can communicate in terms of value, and if you can provide value to people, you can create opportunities for yourself anywhere.

4. Make yourself a valuable entity.

This is a basic principle of economics — the more valuable something is, the more people desire it.

Don’t just understand what’s valuable to people — become valuable. Do things that increase your own professional and personal worth. Learn skills that increase your earning potential, and increase the range of problems you’re able to solve. Broadcast that worth by developing a website, a blog, or a podcast and building social proof. Learn how to build interesting things. Learn how to make systems more efficient. Develop assets you can use to boost your innate value.

5. Take ownership of your actions and your decisions.

With freedom comes responsibility. In every choice you make, you must both reap the rewards and own the consequences. If you mess up, say so. If you’re in a situation that you don’t like, don’t play the victim card. You aren’t a victim. You’re a free agent that made the decisions that brought you here, and even if you didn’t choose the outcome, you’re free to make choices in how you move forward.

6. Hold yourself accountable. Don’t let yourself make excuses.

It’s very easy to make excuses to other people when you mess something up or make a poor decision. It’s also easy to make an excuse to yourself.

Some days you’re tired, and you have two options before you: you can watch Netflix until you fall asleep, or you can write a blog post before you go to bed. You choose Netflix. You feel guilty, later, when you’re getting ready for bed without having written your blog post. You can make excuses to yourself as you turn out the light — “I was tired,” “I didn’t have any good ideas,” “I needed a creative recharge,” etc. These might all be valid points — balance is important — but you’re letting yourself off the hook when you brush over that guilty feeling without examining it first. You’re enabling your own passivity by rationalizing it.

This is true in both the macro and the micro — big life decisions and little, everyday things.

Excuses pave and polish the path to mediocrity. Eradicate them.

7. Don’t accept failure as a possibility.

When you’re not waiting for permission to do things and you’re taking responsibility for your actions, there are going to be bumps in the road. You have to be resilient.

In Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill has a passage about the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In that passage, he makes a very poignant point — those 56 men were signing not only a proclamation of freedom, but a document that could very well have become their death warrant. If the British were victorious and their revolution failed, each one of those men very likely would have been hanged for treason.

In their minds, there was no possibility of failure. The only viable option was success, and they would not — now could not — give up until they’d obtained it.

The road to freedom — and to success of any kind — is messy. There will be many failures along the way, and many false endings that result in defeat. If you want to take autonomy in your decisions and your life path, you must not accept failure as a possible outcome. Failure is a step in the process, not a destination. The only possibility is success.

8. Be relentless in your pursuit of self-betterment.

Victory does not come to the passive. It is granted to those who fought the hardest — and the smartest. Track your wins. Examine your losses.

Be intentional about where you’re going — set regular goals — but also trust the process. Take opportunities that make you better, even if they don’t lead you directly to where you want to end up. Have clear intentions for growth, but know that those intentions can be fulfilled in unexpected places.

9. Know yourself.

Out of all of these points, this may be the hardest. It certainly runs deepest. To truly have freedom, you must understand why you make the decisions that you do. We’re the slaves of our own minds and our own habits. We make choices all the time that seem involuntary. We often don’t know why we end up in the relationships we do, make the mistakes we do, have the mental blocks we do.Practice constant self-reflection and examination. Ask yourself ‘why’ — why do I value this? Where does this value come from? What do I fear?

Knowledge is power. The better you know yourself, the better you can take control of your actions. Rather than being reactive, you can become proactive.

10. Don’t rest on your laurels. Freedom is not only hard-earned, it’s hard-kept.

We live in a world filled with people who are more than happy to take your freedom away if you get tired of holding it — systems that allow you to follow the conveyor belt without ever having to make a critical decision more difficult than whether you want to go to state school or a liberal arts college. Maintaining your personal freedom and autonomy is much harder. It’s a constant upward path. Audit your successes the same way you audit your failures — examine them, see what you can learn and apply in the future, then file all of that away and keep moving forward.

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First, forget about finding your passion.

Follow your priorities. Instead of asking yourself ‘what would I do if money were no object’ ask ‘what am I willing to do in spite of the fact that money actually is an object?’

What are you willing to pay for? What are you willing to sacrifice for? What are you willing to do even when it’s not fun anymore? What means that much to you?

Do that.

Your passion is going to change. Or maybe it doesn’t exist yet. Or maybe you haven’t figured it out yet, or you won’t know until you try a lot of stuff.

Being passionate about something is not a prerequisite to doing something. It’s actually a byproduct of taking action. Passion is the direct result of trying a lot of things and not doing stuff you hate.

Trying to make your family proud is a huge distraction.

Most people have no idea what you’re fully capable of. They have an idea of how they want to see you live, but most people don’t sit around thinking about how far your potential reaches.

People can’t demand something from you when they have no idea what to expect. That means you must push yourself to be, do, and have things that nobody expects before they see you do them. If you focus on making your family proud, you’re going to limit the actualization of your potential to things that you think will please them based on what they already know about you and what you already know about them. That’s a disservice to yourself.

Instead of focusing on making your family proud, focus on making yourself proud. Focus on being the kind of person who can look at yourself in the mirror everyday with self respect and a clear conscience knowing that you live as you believe. Your family, if they are decent people, will be proud of you if you are living true to who you are. Their pride should not be the object of your desires.

If you need people to like what you do to badly, it has the reverse effect. People are proud of someone who takes ownership of their own lives. People are most likely to respect someone who doesn’t have that neediness to be respected.

Forget about everyone else and do the stuff that you believe in.

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One of the deadliest mistakes in a young person’s career is the absence of goals. Goals give you something to work towards, something to measure your success against, and something to give you structure. Setting goals is a brilliant catalyst for action.

For example, let’s take two cases. In the first case, you get up on a Saturday morning and you make a to-do list – your goals for the day. Your list may look something like “clean my room, do the laundry, read three chapters of Zero to One, go grocery shopping.”

In the second case, you get up on a Saturday morning and you don’t make a to-do list. You may be aware that your room is dirty, or that you’re low on food in the fridge, but you don’t consciously think about needing to do them. You may be vaguely aware that your time would be well-spent if you did some reading, but you don’t have any particular objective

In the first scenario (example A), you’re much more likely to be productive and make tangible progress towards your goals.
Once you set goals, it’s entirely within your power to execute on them. You want to be a professional writer? You can make that happen. Do you want to start a marketing agency? A drop-shipping business? Become top in a fast-growing startup in the sales department? All of these things are attainable. But you need to put in the work to make them happen. There are three key components this requires:

• A plan.
• A vision
• Discipline

Most people’s goals remain as goals and never become achievements because they’re not executing in one (or more) of these three areas. They either lack focus in what they want, or they don’t have a plan to execute, or they lack the discipline to actually put in the work.

A small note: don’t be terrified by the word “goals.” It’s synonymous neither with “commitment” nor “trapped.” Your goals don’t limit you. By setting goals, you aren’t building a cage around yourself and hemming yourself in.

Step 1: A Vision

You must always begin by clearly defining what you want.

For example: you may start out with the goal of becoming a well-known author on Medium, only to find as you gain more writing experience that you’re fascinated by copywriting. Because you already have lots of writing practice under your belt, making the transition to copywriting is easy, and you only discovered you liked copywriting in the first place because you were exposed to it by researching one of your Medium articles.

Clearly Identify What the Goal Is. One of the biggest killers of achievement is ambiguity. I hear young people make ambiguous statements all the time — “I want to be a marketer,” or “I want to be a writer.” These are good first steps, but they aren’t enough.

Be Very Specific. Let’s say you’re a young person with a writing dream. Great. What specifically does that mean? Are there benchmarks you can measure success against — perhaps the work of other writers you admire, or the publication standards of a magazine you respect? What specific types of content do you want to create?

Again, don’t feel hemmed in by these specifications. It’s okay to change them later. Your focus will evolve as you move through the process – that’s normal.

Step 2: A Plan

Once you’ve clearly defined what you want, you need to make a plan for making it happen. The more tangible you can make this part, the better.

Don’t Overplan. Adhere to all of the above steps, but don’t get lost in the process. This is an easy place to get stuck in an endless feedback loop of planning and re-planning – i.e., procrastination. Don’t. Try setting a time limit while you make your plan, and force yourself to move on when you hit it. You can always make changes later. Right now, you need to launch very quickly from planning to action.

Make a Timeline. Nearly as deadly as not having a goal at all is having a goal that doesn’t have a specific target date. “I want to be a marketer . . . someday.” There’s zero incentive to move towards that goal in any specific time frame, and this makes procrastination incredibly easy. “I’ll do it tomorrow. That’s not failing to achieve my goal.”

Go back to the goal you’ve set and add at the end a target date. “I want to be x by x time.” Now your goal is finite, and now you’ve added another dimension to your measure of success — the measure of time.

Break Your Timeline into Segments. This is especially important for bigger goals. Breaking your plan into bite-sized chunks is important, because realistically, you can only focus on one piece at a time.

Make a Schedule. Google Calendar is great for this (and it’s a tool I’d recommend every young person familiarize themselves with. Knowing how to use Google Calendar is imperative for scheduling professional meetings, and it’s immensely valuable for organizing your own time).

Block off time on your schedule each day to work. Google Calendar has a great feature that allows you to set reminder notifications to tell you when events and time blocks are coming up. Use it.

Step 3: Discipline

Even if you’ve successfully made it through steps one and two, you’re far from being home free. This last step is where the work actually happens, and it’s also where it’s easiest to get bogged down and lose the game.

Discipline is hard. It requires showing up again, and again, and again – relentlessly hammering away at your goals until you form them in the shape you desire. And as Steven Pressfield discusses in The War of Art, resistance – the force standing in the way of you doing the things you want to do – is strong. Even the laws of physics can be applied – do you remember learning about inertia in high school? A body at rest stays at rest.

To attain your goals – or, if you want to sound heroic, to battle the laws of physics – you must practice discipline.

• Adhere to Your Schedule. Making your schedule is not enough. You must stick to it. Make breaking your commitments a non-negotiable in your mind – it is not an option, ever. If you have 2-5 blocked off on your calendar every day to practice your writing, then from 2-5 you entertain no other possibilities but to write.

• Make Yourself Publicly Accountable. This is a good trick to force yourself into action. Tell people what you’re working on. The higher the external stakes, the harder it is for you to cop out. Far more than we hate failing in front of ourselves, we hate failing in front of others.

• Find an Accountability Partner. This one is huge (and it’s one of my favorites). See the above, about failing in front of others. You can always tell yourself “I’ll do it tomorrow” – your own self completely understands why you’d much rather go finish binge watching the last season of Westworld and save your work for later. It’s much harder to make those same excuses to someone else. You don’t want to come up short when someone else is watching, and you don’t want to let them down.

Make the above-mentioned schedule and send it to your accountability partner.

Bonus Step 4: Maintain Your Focus

I.e. refer to steps 1-3 regularly.
It’s easy when you’re in the middle of the process to lose focus. Make sure you’re regularly checking back on your vision, and make sure you’re touching base with (and tweaking, if necessary) your schedule. Keep all of these things where they’re easy to reference, and refer to them often.

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