A lot of people might believe that entrepreneurs are only interested in money, but when you talk to really successful entrepreneurs, you find that they hardly ever talk about money as a goal or as an accomplishment.

For really great entrepreneurs, money is a means for gaining greater freedom.

Entrepreneurship as the gateway to freedom.

When it comes to freedom, specifically for entrepreneurs, there are two types: “freedom from” and “freedom to.”

It requires courage to go into the marketplace on your own, gaining freedom from the restraints of typical employment, but many entrepreneurs don’t go further than simply creating a job where they’re the boss.

They stay in the mindset of freeing themselves up from what they don’t like (limits on their free time and how much they can earn) without going the further step of freeing themselves to be what they really want to be in the marketplace.

The real payoff of being an entrepreneur is that further step, “freedom to”— being totally clear about what you want to do now that you’ve achieved independence.

If you don’t give yourself a vision of doing what you absolutely love while creating value out in the marketplace, you’ll always just be referring backward to what it was that you were freeing yourself up from.

“At a certain point, you need to take the letters of ‘react’ and reconfigure them into ‘create’.” Dan Sullivan
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In control vs. in charge.

If “freedom from” becomes your lifetime approach, one of your mindsets will be, “Nobody’s going to tell me what to do,” and this has enormous implications regarding what your support team looks like.

“Freedom from” entrepreneurs treat their team members as something more like servants whose job it is to do whatever they say.

The breakthrough comes when you see your team members as creative partners. This means that they can focus on using the abilities they have and that you don’t have. So, their jobs aren’t just to free you up from something, but to create something that’s far bigger than you could create on your own.

What this requires is for you to make a switch from being the person in control to being the person in charge.

I’m in control of the big vision of what I’m trying to do, but there’s a manager in control of each project I’m involved in. These managers are very good at organizing things, and they simply tell me what my role is in each activity. All of the set-up, all of the details, and all of the follow-up from the activities are handled by other people.

That’s not me freeing myself up from anything; that happened a long time ago. Instead, I’m freed up to be the one with the big vision, to be creative and innovative. I’m completely dedicated to and focused on a bigger future for myself, for my company, and for our clients. It’s all about the future, and I have a role to play in creating this future, but I need to have an ever-expanding team of other abilities in order to pull it off.

“Freedom from” is reacting, and it’s a crucial step in your entrepreneurial journey, but eventually you have to move on to focusing on “freedom to,” which is all about creating. This way, both you and all of your team members will be working toward a bigger and better future, and will only spend your time doing the things you love.