Hello.
Hi.
Today I want to challenge you.
I want to challenge youto answer a question.
The good news for youis that this question is actually simple.
The words in the questionare actually simple.
The bad news is for thousands of years, people have been trying to answerthis very same question for themselves.
People have dedicatedtheir lives to this question, they fought for this question, and sometimes, they had given their livesin defense of this question.
And the question is this:what does freedom mean to you? I'm not talking about likea dictionary definition of freedom.
I'm not talking about an academicor even an intellectual discussion about what freedom is.
I'm talking aboutwhat does it mean to you? What does it mean in your own life? I know first hand that this very questionhas the potential to change your life because it's the exact questionthat my wife Courtney and I asked ourselves three years ago.
It was a little of an awkward timingfor us to be talking about freedom.
It was the night we brought my daughterMilligan home from the hospital.
As new parents, we struggled for30,40 minutes, whatever it was, to try to get her to go to sleepin her new crib.
After that, we wandered like zombiesout to the kitchen table.
As we sat down, I turned to her and said, "You know, honey, I needto talk to you about something.
" (Laughter) Which I've learned,after five years of marriage, is that's the most terrible wayyou can possibly start a conversation.
(Laughter) And I said, "I want to talkto you about freedom.
" You can imagine what her expression was,and what her response was.
I can't repeat some of it here today.
But after we startedtalking more about it, we realized that the timingof the situation was actually in our favor.
Because if there was one thingwe were lacking at that point in our life, it was clarity.
It was the abilityto step back and analyze how we were living our life and whether that was congruentwith what we really wanted.
It started for us in our financial life.
Our financial life had degraded,I guess you could say, into a simple question.
And that's, "What item in our apartmentdo we want to upgrade next?" Have you ever had this discussion? "Do we need to upgrade the couch, or maybe we should save upand get a new kitchen table?" "Should we switch locationand just get a better apartment, or maybe let's just geta flatter TV and call it a day?" This was our financial life at that time.
And then, it should be no surpriseon what our debt looked like.
We were in our young 20s and not even counting the tremendousamount of student loans we carried; we're 18,000 dollars in consumer debt to start off our new marriageand as new parents.
We had four credit cards,we had store cards, we had two automobile loans.
We had a loan for the jewelryI bought to get married.
We had a loan from family.
I used to joke we were collecting loans, and that we had one for everythingexcept for our mortgage.
And guess what? We were house-shopping.
It was the most hectic time of our lives.
I'd just started in a new business,I was working 80 hours a week.
Courtney had just graduated from college, she was starting a classroomas a new teacher; there couldn't have beena more hectic time in our life.
And we were shopping for a mortgage? This didn't make sense.
As I stepped back, and I was giventhat clarity that night from bringing Milligan home - I saw it was because that wasthe next item on the script that we were living our life by.
It wasn't a script that we chose.
It was a script that chose us.
It chose us because we were unwillingto answer this question for ourselves.
If you're not willing to answerthis question in your life, there's somebody, a company,a person, a government, an entity that will be more than happyto answer this question for you.
You'll wake up one day and realize that you're living lifejust based on a script.
It goes a little something like this,and see if you guys can relate.
In elementary and middle school,we are taught how to be taught.
We learn how to learn better.
But we go on, we go to high-school,where grades start to matter, and if you get good gradesthrough high-school, you get to have the privilege of getting tens of thousandsof dollars in debt to go to college.
In college, you do a lot of stuff,and at the end of college, hopefully, you get this degree,this piece of paper, and with that comesthe promise of job security of a steady, decent-paying job.
After that, with that job, you can get an apartmentand fill it with stuff.
If you weren't ableto attract a mate in college, you surely can now,with your apartment full of stuff.
Two to three years later,you may have some kids, you may get a promotion,upgrade to a house.
You continue this cyclefor the next 30 or 40 years of your life, until you reachthe promised land, retirement, when all your hard work pays off.
There's nothinginherently wrong with this script unless you don't want it.
We recognized at that kitchen table that we were living lifebased on this default script, and we did not want it.
So we said, "What do we want?" That took some time to explore, but we figured outthat we wanted a clean slate.
We wanted to wipe awayall the crap that was in our life, that was in our apartment.
All of this acquisition of the next thing,the next new version.
We wanted to just wipe it all away, so we were going to sellall our stuff down to two backpacks, what we could carry with us.
We were going to pay offthe 18,000 dollars in consumer debt that represented our mostirresponsible spending, and we were going to spend the yearbackpacking Australia as a young family.
That was our passionate goal that we set.
One year later, my wife Courtneytook this picture.
This is me and my daughter Milligan.
She's three and a half now,she's one in this picture.
We're sitting on a plane, in the runwayin Indianapolis, Indiana.
The year between the kitchen tableand this picture was a tough one.
We had to analyze a lot of thingsand look inside at a picture of ourselves that wasn't the onewe wanted people to see, it wasn't the one that we projected.
We had to change a lot of habits,a lot of beliefs in order to get there, but we were able to do it.
When we boarded this plane, we had two backpacksand full of possessions to our name, and none of the 18,000 dollarsthat we started with.
And we were on our way to Australia.
>From Indianapolis, we head to Chicago,from Chicago to L.
A.
; lay over in LA, we head to Sydney.
>From Sydney, we went upto Cairns, Australia, which is a city that is just offthe coast of the Great Barrier Reef - Twenty-eight consecutive hoursof flying with a one-year-old.
(Laughter) I'd show you some picturesof what we looked like when we landed, but we made a marital pact that no living humanwould ever see those pictures.
(Laughter) But I will show youone more picture from our travels.
I'd like to just sit up hereand show you a slide-show, but I'm just going to show youone more, and it's this one.
Again, taken by my wife who, you can see, is a great photographer.
This was off the coast of Townsville,three to four weeks into our trip.
It's a little islandcalled Magnetic Island.
On Magnetic Island,we were staying at a little B&B after taking a ferry to get out there.
We went on an about 30-minute hike, and through the hike, we sawwallabies running across the path, a koala, a mum and a baby koala in a tree.
It was like we were in a movie almost.
When we got to the top of the hike, we looked out overthis isolated beach that was private, and it just really hit me.
It's a feeling I hadn't felt before,but it hit me like a ton of bricks.
I realized that we were living our dream.
Don't get me wrong, there was a long list of thingswhere we had no idea what we were doing, even at this point,while traveling, especially with a kid.
We were still learning and exploring.
But for better or worse,for the ups and downs, we were the ones writing the script; we were the oneswho were finally in control of our life.
I realize not everyone in this crowd wants to sell their stuffand backpack in Australia.
That was our definition of freedomthree years ago.
It's even changed now.
But what I do know is that you need to definewhat freedom looks like in your life, and you need to take stepsstarting today to realize that.
Where does it start for most people? It starts right here, with your crap.
Look at the crap, it's almost overflowing! It's almost overflowing into the carsthat are in the driveway.
Right now, it maybe seemslike an extreme example, but the more I think about it.
How many of you have friends that have garages, or spare bedrooms,or junk drawers, or closets that look not too far away from this? It's really not even that extreme.
It's almost more of the norm.
But I have a question for you: what happens when this personloses their job? What happens when they're offereda better job in a different city? What happens when they need to adapt either physically,emotionally, financially, to any situation that comes up in life? The answer is at best they're restricted.
They're held back, they're clogged,they're congested from adapting to any sort of change because of the amount of crapthey've brought into their life.
But we do have an out;we have a little, neat trick that we do if we have to makea transition with all this crap: we put it here.
(Laughter) Do you realize we've been creating an entire multi billion dollar industryaround storing our old crap so we can make a transitionand buy new crap? (Laughter) Think about it.
Right now, there's 2.
2 billionsquare feet of storage space in the United States alone.
This is mind-blowing.
Every man, woman, and childcould stand shoulder-to-shoulder just like this, under covered storage spaceif we had to, in the United States.
So, what's the deal? Why are we so obsessedwith buying new stuff yet so reluctant to hold onto our old stuff? How have we bought in to this addiction? I think it's becausewe've been sold a myth.
The myth isthat acquiring things in our life, in the pursuit of a living environmentfilled with things is going to grant us security.
Most of us take it so far even to sayit's going to grant us happiness.
And in the pursuit of these things,we start to identify with our things.
You can tell who's successful,and who's not.
You can tell who's hip and who's not.
You can tell whose garages look likethe picture we had before, and whose don't.
So we start to really identify ourselveswith our physical things.
But the truth that we realized, and that most people end up waking upand realize at one point in their life is that more stuff, and certainly,more crap in your life, isn't going to grant you security, and it's certainlynot going to grant you happiness.
In fact, we foundthe exact opposite to be true.
As Courtney and I went to selllayers and layers of our stuff, as we were planning to go on this trip, I'm often asked a common question,and that question is, "Did you guys sell anythingthat you regret?", "Did you ever sell anythingthat you had to buy back?", or, "Did you ever sell anythingyou were just disappointed, and you had to get back?" And every time I'm asked this questionwhen I get to share my story, I try to genuinely think about it.
I'm even thinking about it right now.
And the answer is always the same, "No.
" Not a single item.
Not a single time that I sold something, and I'd be like, "Man,I regret that decision.
" Not a single time that I sold an item,I'd go, "I feel so insecure right now.
" (Laughter) It was the opposite.
As we sold layersof our crap, we realized, and we felt the weightbeing lifted off of us.
We felt more flexible, more agile, easier to bounce backfrom anything negative that was going to come into our life.
We were more freeto capitalize on opportunity.
We weren't held backby our physical possessions any longer.
Not only that but we startedto look at other people and realized that these people's identityis not based on their stuff.
Their identity should be basedon their experiences.
It's not about collectingexpensive stuff or nice stuff, it should be aboutcollecting rich experiences.
We should identify with peopleand identify with ourselves based on a series of experiencesin our life, not what we own.
But I want to talk to you a little moreabout the American dream as well.
We're all familiarwith the American dream, and it's not even that American anymore,it's all over the world.
There's this ideathat if you work really hard, you're able to buyinto this fantastic lifestyle.
That much is still true.
As much as I've outlined and suggested that consumerism is a problemfor most of us, and it is, if the equation stayed this linear,stayed this simple, it would be easy to deal with.
You want more money, what do you do? You buy less.
You want to switch jobs or work less? You buy less.
Sounds simple, almost too simple.
And it really is.
But over the last 20 or 30 years,we've played a little trick on ourselves.
We've added in a piece to this puzzlethat makes it much more vicious.
We've found a way, that we no longerhave to work hard before we buy, we no longer have to workfor that lifestyle; we can just tap right into it.
And of course, you knowwhat I'm talking about - it's debt.
So we buy; in order to buythat fabulous lifestyle without working for it,we all go into debt.
We do this at a young age,we do this at an old age - it's the norm.
Debt has been aroundfor thousands of years in some form or another.
But we've perfected itin the last 20 or 30 years.
We've perfected the daily use of it.
We've perfected itfor everyday activities.
What that does iswe're out to buying that lifestyle and our justification for this- and we're good at justifying it - is we're going to be going to workso we'll just buy into this lifestyle now, and then we'll pay offour debt, as we work.
So it keeps us going back to work.
That would be great if we liked our jobs.
Most of us don't like our jobs.
In fact, most of usstrongly dislike our jobs.
We don't have the flexibility to switchbecause we got into debt.
Not only we have to pay the bills now,we have to pay our debt.
So we go back working longerand harder hours at jobs we already hate.
Is there a better equationfor stress on the planet than spending the majorityof your waking hours working a job you hate to pay debtfrom a buying decision you made years ago? It's no wonder we're stressed out.
It's no wonder we're overworked.
How do we deal with that stress? There's two waysmost of us deal with that stress: we eat, and we buy.
We escape the daily grind by buying.
We deserve it, we work hard.
That's how we justify it.
Some of us buy clothes,some of us buy gadgets, most of us buy vacations to warm placesjust to escape our jobs.
But we didn't have moneyin the first place.
That's why we're in debt.
So how do we pay for this escape?With more debt.
And you can see that this isa snowball, it's a cycle that has millions of you trapped,millions of us trapped all over the world.
My message for you today is that your life is too importantto stay trapped in this cycle.
Nigel Marsh had a TED talk in Sydney, and he summed this upmuch better than I can.
He said, "There are thousandsand thousands of people out there living lives of quiet,screaming desperation working long, hard hours,at jobs they hate, to buy stuff they don't needto impress people they don't like.
" (Laughter) When I first heard him say thisin his own TED talk, it almost knocked the wind out of me.
It actually almost hurts to repeat thisbecause it's so true.
But I want you to imagine.
Imagine what your life would be like, how much more fulfillingyour life would be if starting today, you made a commitment to start collecting experiencesand not things.
I want you to imagine how much more opportunityand flexibility would be in your life if you removed the stressand the weight of your debt.
I want us all to sit here and imagine how much morean impactful world we would live in if each and every one of usgot to wake up in the morning not because our alarm clock went off but because we were excitedabout dedicating ourselves to work we loved,to a job we actually enjoyed, to a business that was basedon our passions.
The problem is complex,but the solution is very simple.
Remove the excessthat is holding you back.
Remove the crap from you life.
Remove the daily relianceon debt from your life, and you'll be more free to start doingwork that you actually care about.
That's the path to security.
That's the path to happiness.
One more observation that I have for you: do you realize that we're the freest peoplein the history of mankind? Do you realize that you walk amongst the freest human beingsto ever walk the Earth? What are you doing with that freedom? How are you utilizing this amazing giftthat you've been given? It starts by answering one question: what does freedom look like to you? It's the answer to this question, your own unique answer to this questionthat has the power to change your life.
It's your own unique answerto this very question that has the potential to change the worldif you'll step up and let it.
So my challenge for you today is to go outand find your answer to this question and when you do,that will be an idea worth sharing.
Thank you.
(Applause).
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