📅 Monday, 29-09-25
reading time: 2'45"
(I'm a slow reader tho)
The ultimate goal in life (at least for me) is Creative Freedom
But what does it mean?
Take 20 seconds to stop and try to give it a definition.
This is what I came up with:
Creative Freedom = the freedom to wake up and work on creating what I want, when I want, how I want. Taking an idea that’s only in my head and pulling it into the real world, on my own terms.
But there's a problem: how do I pay rent?
My definition of Creative Freedom has a dependency on another type of freedom: Financial Freedom.
If I didn’t need to work, I’d spend my whole day making things. Visual things. Art, videos, experiments.
The problem?
Right now, like most people on the planet, I fund my life by trading hours for a paycheque. That’s the reality of the 9-to-5.
So the question becomes: how do you escape that?
I see four steps (four bosses, if you like) on the path to creative freedom.
1. Productivity ⇾ finding time
The first boss is time. With work, life admin and hygiene, social commitments and other basics, the day is gone.
So the challenge is how do you find and protect time for your creative projects? A.k.a. how do you become more productive?
This involves learning the science of motivation, designing and testing routines, building systems, developing a bias to action.
Until you solve this, nothing else moves.
2. Audience ⇾ finding people
Once you’ve carved out time, you need to work the springboard to everything else: your audience. And I don't mean this in an utilitarian way. No, you need to find real people that can support your journey and want to learn from it.
Like everything else, this is a skill. The skill of audience building is an amazing one for us creatives because it is done by sharing your creative work, through a medium that is creative in of itself (eg. video / writing).
Getting good at this means finding your voice. Which is arguably the most desirable thing for an artist.
Beyond being fulfilling for you and valuable for others, building an audience also allows you to have feedback, to bounce off ideas and gather data from tests and experiments that you can run in order to gain clarity on what you want to do and why. Your audience will tell you what resonates, it lets you test assumptions, and it gives you a role in society. Without it, your work won't develop as much and it will also stay locked in your room.
3. Hustle ⇾ finding the right idea
With an audience, the next step is finding the right creative side hustle.
This is a discovery problem: niche fit.
It has to be valuable enough for others to pay for, and aligned enough with you to last years. Otherwise, you just build a project that burns out, or even worse you box yourself in a jail that you've outgrown. The only way to find the right creative side-hustle is to start many of them in a "downscoped" version.
This "rough an dirty" version should allow you to test whether there's enough value for people even without any polish. (often referred to as "minimum viable product")
4. Scale ⇾ replacing the 9-to-5
Finally, once you’ve found the idea that fits, you need to scale it.
Turn it into something that grows, something that can replace your salary and give you Financial Independence to go full time (which is not yet financial freedom, it's independence from a single employer).
At this point, your high productivity from step 1, combined with the newly found hours, should allow you to scale systems that quickly grow your creative side hustle while keeping it decoupled from your direct time investment.
This is the path to financial freedom. And if all the steps have been aligned properly, it’s also the path to creative freedom.
⚠️ The problem of "Alignment"
Alignment is the hidden boss.
Because if you focus on financial freedom first, you might end up chasing money or views in the Hustle phase, at the expense of finding a "right fit" for your creative side hustle. The result is that once you manage to go full-time with it you have just ended up with a second job. You don't have the time to create what you want, when you want, how you want... you haven't unlocked Creative Freedom.
Creative Freedom only unlocks when audience, niche, and side hustle align with the work you’d want to wake up and do anyway.
At least directionally.
That’s how I define the path to creative freedom.
Currently I'm at the 3rd boss.
Now I’m curious:
👉 Which of these 4 bosses do you feel you’re fighting right now?
🫶
Massa
P.s.
For those serious about their youtube journeys, the link to apply for 1:1 mentorship is here: https://tally.so/r/w5RzPM
