Could You Leave on Wednesday?

A member walked into my gym on a Monday morning in 2019 with the kind of annoyed face you make when your coffee order is wrong. Whatever was bothering him, it clearly was not life or death. I asked him what was going on. He said a friend had just backed out of his boating trip.

I said, sarcastically, well go ahead and put me in your suitcase. I am ready to go.

He stopped. He looked at me. He said, could you actually come? We are leaving Wednesday or Thursday. I just bought a new boat in the Caribbean. We are picking it up and sailing it back. I do not know how long it will take.

I stood there for a second trying to figure out if this was a real conversation. This is the kind of thing that comes up in movies. Someone you trust looking you in the eye and asking if you want to sail across the Caribbean this week. It took me a minute to even process what he was offering. But I knew him. I trusted him. And I knew I needed to go home and talk to Shannon.

We had a one year old at the time. That was the biggest consideration. We talked it through. By Thursday I was on a plane to Guadeloupe, a small French island in the southern Caribbean.

We were gone for eight days. Sailing the Caribbean with no set plan and no guaranteed return date. The business ran the entire time. The staff held it down. The systems were already in place. I never got a panicked phone call.

That is the moment I realized freedom is real when it is built on purpose.

This past weekend I went to Power Monkey Camp. I did not scramble. I did not come back to chaos. Everything was already set up because I designed it that way. In a couple of Fridays, I am going to substitute teach at my kid's school because it sounds fun and my calendar already allows it.

Freedom keeps showing up in my life because I keep building the structure that makes it possible. And I have been thinking a lot lately about the different levels of freedom that exist for business owners. Because they are very different, and most people have never defined which one they are building toward.

Three Levels of Freedom

Level 1: Know your ideal week.

Do you know when you want to start your workday? When you want to stop? Whether you work on Fridays? Most owners have never defined this. They let the business fill the calendar and wonder why they feel trapped. If you want the bigger freedoms later, you start here.

Level 2: Drop everything on short notice.

This is where I was in 2019. The systems were already in place. The team was already trained. When he asked me on Monday if I could leave on Thursday for an eight day trip with no return date, the answer was yes. You cannot build that kind of freedom in the moment. You build it in the boring, repeatable systems that most owners skip because they do not feel urgent.

Level 3: Step away for months.

My friend Darren took ten weeks off this summer. Ten weeks. His business grew while he was gone. There was a podcast about it recently. He had planned ahead, built the team, and created the systems. That is the highest level of freedom. And it is available to anyone willing to do the building work.

The Real Question

Freedom comes from structure. It sounds like a contradiction until you live it. Six week training blocks. Planned calendars. Conversations with your spouse and your mentors. Systems that handle the repeatable so you can focus on the irreplaceable.

You can have all six F's in your life: Family, Fitness, Finances, Future, Faith, and Freedom. But only if you define what each one looks like. Because the moment you stop defining them, the world starts defining them for you.

So here is what I want you to do this week. Write down your ideal week. When do you start? When do you stop? What days are yours? What does freedom look like in your current season?

And ask yourself this: if someone called you today and asked you to leave on Wednesday, what would have to be true for you to say yes?

Whatever your answer is, that is your building list.

Score your own 6 F's in three minutes. Take the free 6F Focus Quiz.