Stop Breaking Stuff – Jim Small (Entrepreneur, Author, Life Empowerment Speaker)

Jim Small is an Entrepreneur and a leading expert in international real estate investments, property management, business process optimization, and entrepreneurial growth strategies. The Paper Napkin Wisdom Jim shares with us is a unique and important idea regarding finances. He says: “Financial security is the opposite of financial freedom.”
Jim believes that living in the Financial Security model is flawed. The idea that you just work a steady job with a steady income and health care until you hit 65 and retire to enjoy life is a fallacy, he says. He believes people are tragically misled in thinking that working for retirement is a sound investment of your time and resources. It’s a flawed system because, as Jim points out, one third of Americans don’t live past 65.
If you work for the end goal of enjoying your life at 65, you’re assuming that you and your spouse/friends/etc will all still be in good health. You’re also relying on a pension that is dependent on a plethora of variables you have no control over, such as the stability of the company or your job security. No one every thinks their financial security path isn’t going to work out, but Jim says that it rarely does.
He says: “There’s all kinds of things on the road to financial security that could come and take you out of your plan, so if you’re working that plan for 10, 20, 40 years and any one of those factors effects you, you’re derailed from your life plan and that’s just tragic.” Instead of living for Financial Security, Jim says we should be living for Financial Freedom.
Jim’s point is that Financial Freedom is when you don’t work for money at all. Instead, you work to learn new things, to develop your passions, and to develop autonomy. It isn’t about spending your money frivolously with no plan in mind; it’s about not having to do things in exchange for finance and not signing up for too many obligations (car, mortgage, expensive toys, etc.).
Financial Freedom is not something that happens quickly, it takes time. It’s a paradigm shift. Jim says that you have to take some of your current profit and put it into things that provide a passive income. Invest the little bit that you can to provide you with passive income and add to it every month, eventually that will bring you autonomy. Passive investing is the key to getting your Financial Freedom and once you get it, if you don’t jack up your expenses, Financial Freedom is yours for life.
As entrepreneurs, Jim says we can often find ourselves falling into the trap of Financial Security when we’re trying to build our company up enough to make it stable. He says that he’s often seen entrepreneurs go through the start up phase and being to systematize a business only to put themselves in a position where they’re stuck with a job in a company they don’t enjoy. “Entrepreneurs want to have chaos, they want to build something new,” he says. They almost become depressed with things are stable.
Jim says that the problem is Entrepreneurs get stuck in the Financial Security trap. He says that if we, as entrepreneurs, can twist that mindset and focus on Financial Freedom instead, we can breathe in excitedly when we get a company to stability and then hand it off to a management team, or sell it, or make it passive and go on to pursue our passion in other ways.
“You can get to financial freedom without breaking your own stuff or killing your business,” says Jim. It’s a powerful reminder. I know I can think of instances in which I might have injected chaos into my own companies when it didn’t necessarily need to be there. What might I have accomplished if I had been operating from a Financial Freedom mindset?
Listen to my conversation with Jim here: