The Ultimate Flex Isn't Money Anymore

Friends, we live in interesting times! As of this recording, gas is over $5 per gallon in some areas. Diesel fuel is over $7 per gallon. The world is in turmoil, the economy; not so great. AI is apparently going to make the human race extinct in the next decade, so I guess we’re stuck trying to figure out how to make the most of that time until then. The things that were important last year, heck, last week even, don’t seem quite as important this week.

One thing that has become considerably less important to me after coaching well over a thousand humans over the last 20 years has to do with status, and all the things that used to signal to the rest of the world that you had, in some way, arrived. After digging into thousands of personal and business financial statements over the years, some of the most valuable, and unintentional, life lessons have emerged for me. One of the most important is the one I’m going to share with you.

Today, I'm going to walk you through why I believe the entire game of status just changed, why so many are chasing the wrong version of it, and what it actually costs to actually be free instead of just looking free.

For most of modern history, status was simple: you worked hard for your money, then used your money to acquire things so that you could show people what you owned. The more shit you own, the higher status it was assumed you had.

The big house. The nice car. The title on the door. The corner office. You traded your life for money. You worked for decades to get those things, and once you had them, you do what you’re supposed to do when you have things, you displayed them, and everybody understood the message: this person has made it.

The thing that almost nobody tells you when you're chasing those symbols, however, is that every single one of them comes at a cost beyond just the price tag. And the cost isn’t just financial.

The house comes with the mortgage, taxes, insurance, maybe some HOA fees, and, of course, maintenance. The car comes with the payment, the upkeep, and then the ridiculous amount of emotional energy over protecting the damn thing. The title on the business card comes with meetings, expectations, and people suddenly owning pieces of your calendar. You thought you were buying status and the symbols of freedom only to find what you really bought yourself was more obligations that you have to continue working to pay for.

Whether you work for someone else or own your own business, It’s really no different. You start a business to have some freedom over your life and your destiny and maybe create some intentional legacy. Only to find that the business that was supposed to give you all that freedom is actually sucking your soul dry. It's hopefully created some income for you in the meantime, but the income doesn’t always by you more freedom.

A lot of people listening will have spent twenty or thirty years acquiring the symbols of freedom that, sadly, did the opposite. I’ve seen it firsthand more times than I care to count.

They thought they were buying their way up and out when they were actually just buying their way in to a much deeper freedom sucking black hole. As always, I say these things, not to be condescending and talk down to anyone, but as someone who has also lived it and made those mistakes.

Friends, here's what I've learned in my 55 years on this planet: status, to a large degree, used to be about what you earned and what you owned. Now, at least for me, it's becoming more about what I'm NOT obligated to do.

We see it everywhere now. Nobody's impressed by the watch or the car anymore. There’s so much of it being thrown in our faces on TikTok and Instagram over the last decade that the definition of status and freedom has changed. Add on top of that some of the things the world has gone through over the last 20 or so years; 9/11, several never-ending wars, the pandemic, and belief systems are changing. People have started to wake up to a sobering fact: none of that stuff really matters when you’re facing your mortality.

Time has always been our most valuable asset, and more people are finally waking up to that fact. We never know how much of it we have left and you never know when the last moment one will be. We all get the same 24 hours in a day, but how those hours are invested and what kind of return we get differs wildly with each person.

Don't misunderstand me, income definitely matters. But once you cross a certain threshold, control starts mattering more than the number in the bank account. And most people never stop long enough to notice that they may have already arrived. The problem for most is something we've talked about many times before: it’s called the ‘hedonic treadmill’, which is when your lifestyle moves right along with your income. You make more, you buy more status symbols and, consequently, more obligations to maintain that status.

I want to give you a different way to think about all of this and a different way to keep score. Instead of asking what your net worth is, I challenge you to ask a harder question: how much of your life do you actually control? How much of your decision making do you control? How much real freedom do you really have? Freedom that isn’t eaten up by maintaining your current status and maintaining all those symbols of freedom that you've acquired over the years?

At least for me, I’ve come to recognize five status symbols worth chasing now: time, autonomy, mobility, physical and mental health, and control over your calendar. And the weird thing is, almost none of them look that awesome on Instagram. We'll come back to those because the fifth one is where a lot of successful business owners discover they're nowhere near as free as they thought.

Friends, your real ‘life ledger’ is not filled with jet skis and expensive obligations. The real accounting of your life’s accomplishments, and in your real status, can be found in your calendar, your health, and what you can say ‘no’ to. The real status questions revolve around how much of your income depends on someone else's decisions and outlook. How much debt is quietly (or maybe loudly) making decisions for you.

I submit to you that I believe the real flex today is not how much you make, how many things you have, the logos on your clothes, or what your title is, the real flex and the real symbols of freedom lie in what you can say no to.

By the way, I probably need to clarify before going on, I'm not talking about the fake social media 'freedom' we see so often. Real freedom needs no audience. If you're flexing on Instagram or TikTok in a leased Range Rover or posting shots of your legs on a beach chair with a cocktail and your laptop, that's not necessarily freedom. Your need for validation and to flex those status symbols to the world is the very prison we're talking about in this one.

We're seeing the same thing with AI right now. People aren't just flexing cars anymore. They're flexing productivity. “Look what I built this weekend. Look at my agents. Look at my automation. Look at my cool dashboard”. Rarely do any of those people show you the customer. Nobody shows you the revenue. A lot of people aren't building businesses with AI. They're building content about building businesses with AI.

Do I believe AI can do some really cool things? Sure! I use it daily. But a lot of what's getting built isn't solving a problem anybody actually has. It's often creating solutions to problems people don't actually have. It's solving a problem that makes a good video recording. But there's a difference, and it's a massive one. A lot of people aren't building businesses with these tools despite what you see on YouTube or TikTok. They're building content about building businesses with these tools and that's not the same thing

Let's go back to money for a second, because there's a bit of a trap that I mentioned a couple minutes ago that deserves a little more attention. I referred to it as the ‘hedonic treadmill’. It's also called lifestyle inflation, and it works like a slow leak.

You earn more, so you upgrade the house. Then come the cars. Then the vacations get nicer. Then the kids go to the better school. Then the memberships pile up. Every single one of those decisions is reasonable on its own. Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to trap themselves. After all, you work hard to earn more money, and you deserve to enjoy life with those increasing resources.

I also understand as a parent that we want our children to have some of things maybe we didn’t have growing up, and often because of a lack of money. So, when you start to acquire it, you start to acquire all the things your younger self said would be the evidence that you’ve made it.

But look what happens to the total. The amount of money required just to maintain the things and that lifestyle keeps climbing every single year, quietly, in the background, and often while you're not watching. Eventually you can't leave the job you hate, because the job is the only thing paying for the life you built to prove you didn't need the job. You can't fire the clients that pay peanuts and treat you like shit because, well, at least they pay you. And you need that continuous flow of money to keep paying for the so-called status symbols in the garage and down by the dock.

Here's the thought I want to leave you with from this episode: the most dangerous kind of status is the kind you have to keep succeeding just to afford. It’s the lifestyle that leaves you no margin to have a down year, or even a down month. It’s the one that the loss of a big client or have a health challenge would completely devastate.

I know people personally, and you probably do too, who have high six and seven-figure lifestyles and absolutely zero freedom. They look wealthy at every dinner party. They have all the symbols of status and the American Dream. Yet, they are, in every way that matters, low level employees of their own lifestyle. They stop earning, the status goes away.

Let me be clear lest you start to think I'm not a fan of making money. I am! Freedom still costs money. Poverty isn’t a path to freedom either and that’s not what I’m suggesting. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that money doesn't matter, or that you can think your way into freedom with the right mindset and no financial margin underneath you. That's nonsense, and it's the kind of nonsense that gets sold to people who often don’t have enough of a cushion to even test the theory.

What actually happened is simpler than people want it to be. We spent decades confusing money and income with freedom. We can thank several things for that, but in the end, it doesn’t matter how we got her, it only matters that we’re here. Money can most certainly buy freedom, poverty rarely does. But money can also finance an extremely expensive cage, and most people can't tell the difference from the inside, because that cage often comes with some level of comfort, and maybe even a little fun. I mean, who doesn’t have fun on a jet ski or at the lake house?

The distinction I want you to walk away with from this one is this: there's wealth of possessions, and then there's wealth of control. Possessions are visible. Anybody can see them from the street, which is precisely why so many people, maybe you, acquire those things. That's the status dilemma we started this whole thing off with. We want others to see that we have arrived somewhere. We want somebody else to validate our worthiness, and the way that often happens is by acquiring fake status symbols that tell the world how important we are…or so we think.

I'm suggesting to you that the real flex should have almost nothing to do with your cars, the house, the toys, or the gated community on the golf course. The real flex now is how much control you have over your life and how much margin you've created to sustain that control indefinitely.

By the way, the kind of freedom I’m talking about requires more discipline than the job most people are trying to escape, not less. It takes discipline to start really earning money and NOT go out and blow it on the things your 13-year-old self said he would have once he had money. Freedom without a plan, without some discipline, and without structure doesn't turn into peace and prosperity. It turns into what we call ‘drift’. A wide-open calendar isn't necessarily a gift if you don't know what to do with that open space.

I see it every day as I coach appraisers and entrepreneurs how to build systems and efficiencies that buy back their time. They become more efficient, they free up some time on their calendar, and then they don’t know what to do with that new freedom. Without some kind of plan for your newfound freedom, most people will just get bored and squander it by doing the very thing that will put them right back into the position they started from: they start to acquire things that help them fill up the time.

Real freedom isn't the absence of a schedule. It's a schedule you build with intention and purpose, that you have the discipline to actually keep, because nobody's standing over you making you keep it.

I want to give you one more thing to think about before we close, because I don't want anybody watching this to walk away using "freedom" as an excuse to avoid all the hard things in their life.

Just saying ‘no’ isn't automatically freedom. Sometimes saying no is just avoidance. Saying no to training your body isn't freedom if your body and your declining health eventually remove your choices. Saying no to discipline isn't freedom if the result is a life you can no longer control. Real freedom includes the capacity to do hard things voluntarily, before life forces harder things on you.

So, let's bring this all the way back around.

The guy with the expensive watch and the nice car isn't automatically the richest person in the room anymore. And neither is the guy faking his freedom on the beach vibe coding his next big play…that likely never comes. If your definition of ‘rich’ and ‘wealthy’ only entail a number, I believe you have it wrong.

Real wealth was never about what you can display. It was never about fake status. It's about what you can walk away from. The ability to leave a client, a job, a relationship, a business model that no longer serves you, without needing anybody's permission, and without falling apart the moment you actually get the freedom you said you wanted.

That kind of freedom doesn't come from just posting less or owning less or building a following around how little you supposedly do. It comes from doing the unglamorous work nobody films and posts on social media. Building the margin. Building the structure. Building the skill of sitting with an open calendar and using it on purpose, with intention instead of drowning in it.

Time.
Autonomy.
Mobility.
Health.
And Control over your calendar.

The real flex and the real status symbols are control over those five things. Being able to say no to the things that waste your time so that you can say yes to things that give you more of it back. In my book, that’s real status. Being free to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for the reasons you want to do them is real wealth. Autonomy over your choices is freedom. Freedom over your calendar is the real status symbol.

Your ability to lift and move heavy things the way your body was designed to do, even as you advance in age, or maybe I should say, especially as you advance in age, is the real status symbol. Trading your health for money and status, only to eventually trade your status and money to recover your health is not freedom, it's the height of stupidity. How many wealthy people (based only on the numbers) do you know or have read stories about that are overweight, out of shape, and miserable in spite of their vast resources?

Maybe the goal was never to look rich on the outside. Maybe the better goal was to become hard to control. To own your time, own your choices, and own your health. To be able to leave when you want to leave, stay when you want to stay, go when and where you want to go, work on the things that truly matter, and walk away when they don’t.

A bigger house can impress people…for a little bit. A nicer car can signal success, depending on your definition of success. A title can make you feel important…until it doesn’t. But none of those things mean much if somebody else owns your calendar, your attention, your mobility, your health, or your decisions.

So, here's a few questions for you to ponder as we end this. If you want to know how wealthy you actually are, write some these down and meditate on them over the next 30 days or so:

Money

·Can I stop working for thirty days without panic?

·Can I say no to my biggest client?

·If my income stopped tomorrow, how many days until I'm making decisions out of fear instead of strategy?

·How much of what I own actually owns me back?

·Do I control my calendar, or does my mortgage own it?

Health

·Can I still do the physical things I could do ten years ago, or have I traded my body for my business?

·Is my body physically capable of doing the things I truly want it to do? Or am I dumbing down my bucket list because I know I’m incapable of doing those things today?

·If real freedom showed up tomorrow, are my body and mind capable of using it?

Work

·Have I built a business, or did I just build myself a more expensive job?

·If nobody was watching, would I still call myself free?

Your answers to those questions will tell you more about your freedom than your car does.

So, of course, build the income, build the business, build the assets, especially the assets that earn you income while you sleep. But build them for a reason. Build them so you need less permission. Build them so you have more choices. Build them so your life belongs to you. Because the ultimate flex is not showing people what you can afford, it’s showing yourself how little of your life is for sale.

Do more, be more, live more, and give more.