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Rebellious Thoughts #50 - 🤘 Am I really free?

Rebellious Thoughts #50 - 🤘 Am I really free?

Gus Balbontin
September 06, 2024

By Gus Balbontin

Hey Rebels!

As always, I promise to provoke you in less than 5 min once a week so that you can stay adaptable and on top of your game.

Today I’m writing the 50th edition of this newsletter…. wow!!
If you want to check all the previous ones click here.

YEW!

Yesterday while I was getting another tattoo I wondered how much surface area a human has…

As in…

How big is the canvas we can tattoo on?

Turns out it’s about 2m² for the average human.

About the surface of a door!

You can fit about 2000 anchor tats on you… random thought ha!

Ok let’s get into it, today is a bit deep… stay with me!

Another one…

I recently picked up again a wonderful book by Nassim Taleb called Skin in the Game - another day I’ll share some thinking around his concept of “antifragility”… awesome.

He is a controversial character and there are things he says that I don’t agree with, but that’s why he is an amazing author to read.

There are a number of linking concepts in his book that look into a profound concept that I, and I am sure many of you, have considered before:

Am I really free?

Do I live exactly where I want to live in the way I want to live doing exactly what I want to do?

Is freedom ever free? What price do we ultimately pay? Are we pets of our own made-up systems?

Is this what a midlife crisis is? haha

The realisation you spent your entire life constructing systems and structures to find freedom, only to realise you have to maintain them rendering the freedom useless?

In the book, he says that you can be financially free not because of your means but because of your lack of wants.

“Fuck off money” can look like this: “I have all I need and I don’t want anything else” - perhaps this is where freedom really lies… in reducing the wants, in fending off expectations.

As we get older of course it becomes less about what we have and more the fear of what we can lose.

Maybe that’s the trap, we are afraid of letting go.

We protect the very systems we created to be free but now imprison us.

Nassim suggests that freedom is to a certain degree associated with risk-taking - either risk leads to freedom or comes from freedom.

Pause here… that is deep.

Here is an example of risk coming from freedom and I do it on stage regularly: cursing.

Of course, cursing in public is observed as foul and wrong. English manners were imposed on the middle class as a way of domesticating them together with the fear and consequence of breaking rules. If you can swear in public, if you take the risk on stage in front of 500 people, you are ironically free - cos you have nothing to lose.

Cursing interestingly allows me to project authenticity.

When I am on stage I want people to know that the content I am sharing with them is not sanitised, this is me at my rawest, uncomplicated, uncensored - real.

I use it to send a message of strength in vulnerability. I am the same as everyone else here, sometimes my brain adds a little colour to emphasise a point I have no better language for. It works in my case and it’s an example of risk coming from freedom.

Another day cursing at the office.

There’s a quote about swearing that goes something along the lines of “swearing is like salt - too much and you ruin the meal, not enough and you can’t taste it” hahaha - I season my keynotes really well! hahahha!

Does the idea that we need to be employable own us?
Is that system in control?
Do we work hard our entire lives to be employable or buyable and we fear upsetting our employer or customer or potential future employer?

We park our unrealistic dreams to follow realistic expectations of a system we created that owns us.

Stephen Fry writes in one of his pieces: “Orwell famously suggested that language preceded thought, such that if the word ‘freedom’, for example, is removed from the dictionary, then the very idea of freedom will disappear with it and be lost to humanity”

Is that it? We just need to select it and hit delete to finally be free?

So this week's challenge…

CHALLENGE OF THE WEEK:
Explore freedom, to see if we can have less wants or just the right amount, to observe the systems we created that now own us, to figure if the price we pay for our “freedom” is worth it…

Love

:-)

Gus

P.S.S. Wonder what I even do in “real life”?

1/ Co-founder and Director at Neu21.
We combine creativity, innovation and insight to create unstoppable organisations and products customers love. Book a Discovery call to learn how we can help your organisation

2/ I coach high-performing professionals and execs and help them take it to the next level. Book a 1-1 Coaching session with Gus

3/ Join our Career Rebellion Group 3 Waiting List!
A workshop of 4 sessions to bring a thoughtful revolution to your career and your life.

4/ This week I kicked off the first of the Rebellious Thought Sessions, a series of FREE monthly talks where I free flow, provoke and share more of my ideas. If you haven’t signed up yet and want to be part of it SIGN UP HERE!

My recommendations:

You can’t miss this workshop organised by Neu21!