Freedom

I wish I could jump a mile high. I wish I could be a millionaire overnight. I wish I could become someone's best friend by giving them a silly look. But I can't. Because to get anything done, we need to understand the rules of the game and play them well to achieve what we want.

We're bound by rules. Rules are what facilitated our existence. Without the rules of nature, the amino acids in prehistoric primordial soup couldn't have come together in a repeatable formation, evolved over millions of years to create us.

Without the rules of law and capitalism - our man-made laws - we couldn't have formed the civilization we have done today.

Without the laws of neuroscience and psychology, people would be (even more!) completely unpredictable, impossible to form friendships and relationships with.

We're all bound by laws. We're ensnared by them.  There is no trick to get round them, no shortcut out of the game we're born into.

How do we resolve this feeling of utter hopelessness? Of feeling trapped in a corner by hidden forces: strings that pull us taught and loose when it's the correct time to do so?

We need to find freedom within the boundaries of the laws we're born into. We can't jump a mile into the air: we will never naturally be able to do so. But we can jump ever so slightly higher than the next guy, if we train hard for it. We can earn more than the average guy if we put deliberate practice into the rules of business, the rules of capitalism, the rules of technology and science and life - and apply them in a way where we profit from the trends and products that occur due to these rules.

We can always find constraints if we look for them. But we can find small areas of freedom if we look for them as well.

"Man is free the moment he wishes to be" - Voltaire