If you don’t want to read it, you can watch this video.
I’m going to give you what I went through and maybe you will find some benefit there. I grew up really, really poor. I felt poverty and lack. With my nose pressed tightly against the glass of the world, I looked at what other people had.
My mother passed on her curiosity and love of reading to me. That trait led to massive exposure without a methodology for obtaining the things we could see, look at and touch. But you just couldn’t get there because that was her limitation. She was really good at exposure but did not know how to get to those things.
I remember talking to her on Mother’s Day and she brought up the list of things I wanted. It was spooky. This goes back to things I’ve discussed in other videos. I’d written down that I wanted to be able to buy stuff wholesale as a kid years and years ago. I was surprised I had written that down. I had forgotten about it. Everything I had written down came to pass.
Just to reinforce something said earlier, write your goals down. It is not enough to have them in your mind. Write them down. Looking back, I wish I had written down more goals. I thought I was moving forward in life to get money, to get things. Then I realized what I really wanted was freedom from poverty and not necessarily to be a billionaire or millionaire.
It is a damning thing to see all these things in the world and to feel dysfunctional and that something is wrong with you because you don’t have them. As I grew older, I realized I was defining myself by things, by what I had and didn’t have. But the thirst to still have those things was still there.
I asked myself how can I get the things I want. I started to come up with ways to get everything I wanted at a discount. Who knew that would be the way the world would go.
Now what does freedom mean to you? We all live in our own skulls. We all have ideas of who we are, what we want, what we should be. Narratives are awesome if they’re liberating. They are the devil if they keep you in a mental prison.
My exercise in freedom is building businesses that provide me options to do what I want to do with my time. What’s freedom for me may be a prison for someone else. My lifestyle is very stable. It’s not really chaotic. I’m very busy because I want to be busy. I push myself to do things because the opportunities before me are staggering.
Growing up in poverty, I know what it’s like to not have shit. I know what it is like to be hungry. I know what it is like to be homeless. I know what it is like to be so damn lonely, you sit up on the stoop and talk to a crack head for two hours because there’s no one else around.
That was my life of lack. I knew I could make better decisions but I didn’t have the methodology or the processes I have now. All of my experiences groomed me for my life now.
I have tiers of friends. I’ve got this inner circle. I have the outer ring and then I have the plateau. The plateau means we’re just associates. You know my name and I know yours. That’s it. If you’re in the plateau and you call me and say, “Glendon, I have to move,” I’m going to chuckle. I’ll say, “That’s what they make movers for.” You have to be in my inner circle for me to help you to move. I hate moving.
Have you really thought about being yourself? One of the hardest things in life is to have the courage to be yourself.
My first name is Patrick. I started using Glendon when I started writing. Glendon was my middle name and I hated it most of my life. Then I decided that Glendon Cameron sounded like a nice writer’s name. So, I went to that and introduced myself to the writers’ community as Glendon Cameron.
I was also using it for dating purposes because everyone Googles everyone. I would meet someone and they would Goggle me and they couldn’t find shit. My old friends still call me Patrick.
How this relates to freedom is that it allowed me to create two identities for myself. When I’m writing under my pen name, I actually feel like a different person. That may seem pathological. It’s fun as shit, because it’s an escape.
So, that’s the whole thing with the name thing. It taught me how to deal with a lot of pressure from many different sources. As a special needs kid, everyone was putting pressure on me. My mother was on me. My speech pathologist was on me. My teachers were on me. Elementary kids are mean. My rich imagination was my escape.
You have to make difficult choices to get the freedom you want. When I left the storage auction business because of health issues, I could have easily gotten back into it. But, I made a choice. I actually had this conversation with God. I knew I wanted to be a writer.
People feel that freedom should be free. Really, there is nothing in life that is free. There’s an opportunity cost for everything you do. There’s always a cost of energy or cash or resources or emotion.
Understand, if you really want to be free, the first thing you must do is define what freedom is to you. It is likely that you will have to make a few changes in your life to be free.
That’s your goal. Take a sheet of paper and at the top, write, what is freedom to me? Take an hour and write down whatever comes to mind. Do not censor yourself. Don’t edit, just write.
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