CHAPTER 19Free minds create
I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Postscript
I spoke again with Melissa a couple of years after she sold her business.
She had trained her replacement, and eventually sold the business to her in several instalments, with a period of overlap where Melissa continued to do the marketing for her, providing Melissa with not only a lump sum, but a small income stream during the transition.
Having ‘retired’ so young I was curious to see what Melissa was up to.
Was financial freedom sitting on the beach every day, while everyone else was at work?
Well, that was definitely part of it, she informed me happily. But something else had happened when Melissa had finally gotten free of the Income Trap entirely.
Like a lot of people discover (sometimes almost too late in life once they retire the more traditional way), freedom from the nine to five, freedom to choose what to do during the best hours of each day, and every day, freedom to think and to create is incredibly liberating.
It looked like Melissa’s freedom, rather than cause her to waste away in idle pursuits, had instead only begun to unleash her creative juices.
In her first job Melissa had been dependent; after starting to save and value her freedom her new job offered her more independence, but it wasn’t until she’d started her own business that she’d become truly independent. But like we saw in chapter 7, there are levels higher than just independence, ...
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