Name: 【TEDx】TEDxAsheville - Adam Baker - Sell your crap. Pay your debt. Do what you love.
Uploaded: 2017-09-17T14:58:16.000Z
Duration: 19 min 20 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I want to challenge you to answer a question.

The good news for you is that this question is actually simple.

The words in the question are actually simple.

people have been trying to answer this very same question for themselves.

People have dedicated their lives to this question,

and sometimes, they had given their lives in defense of this question.

And the question is this: what does freedom mean to you?

I'm not talking about like a dictionary definition of freedom.

I'm not talking about an academic or even an intellectual discussion

I'm talking about what does it mean to you?

that this very question has the potential to change your life

because it's the exact question that my wife Courtney and I

It was a little of an awkward timing for us to be talking about freedom.

It was the night we brought my daughter Milligan home from the hospital.

As new parents, we struggled for 30,40 minutes, whatever it was,

to try to get her to go to sleep in her new crib.

After that, we wandered like zombies out to the kitchen table.

As we sat down, I turned to her and said,

"You know, honey, I need to talk to you about something."

Which I've learned, after five years of marriage,

is that's the most terrible way you can possibly start a conversation.

And I said, "I want to talk to you about freedom."

You can imagine what her expression was, and what her response was.

But after we started talking more about it,

we realized that the timing of the situation

Because if there was one thing we were lacking at that point in our life,

It was the ability to step back and analyze

and whether that was congruent with what we really wanted.

Our financial life had degraded, I guess you could say,

And that's, "What item in our apartment do we want to upgrade next?"

or maybe we should save up and get a new kitchen table?"

"Should we switch location and just get a better apartment,

or maybe let's just get a flatter TV and call it a day?"

This was our financial life at that time.

And then, it should be no surprise on what our debt looked like.

and not even counting the tremendous amount of student loans we carried;

to start off our new marriage and as new parents.

We had four credit cards, we had store cards,

We had a loan for the jewelry I bought to get married.

and that we had one for everything except for our mortgage.

It was the most hectic time of our lives.

I'd just started in a new business, I was working 80 hours a week.

Courtney had just graduated from college,

she was starting a classroom as a new teacher;

there couldn't have been a more hectic time in our life.

As I stepped back, and I was given that clarity that night

I saw it was because that was the next item on the script

It wasn't a script that we chose. It was a script that chose us.

because we were unwilling to answer this question for ourselves.

If you're not willing to answer this question in your life,

there's somebody, a company, a person, a government, an entity

that will be more than happy to answer this question for you.

that you're living life just based on a script.

It goes a little something like this, and see if you guys can relate.

In elementary and middle school, we are taught how to be taught.

But we go on, we go to high-school, where grades start to matter,

and if you get good grades through high-school,

of getting tens of thousands of dollars in debt to go to college.

In college, you do a lot of stuff, and at the end of college,

hopefully, you get this degree, this piece of paper,

and with that comes the promise of job security

you can get an apartment and fill it with stuff.

If you weren't able to attract a mate in college,

you surely can now, with your apartment full of stuff.

Two to three years later, you may have some kids,

you may get a promotion, upgrade to a house.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TEDx】TEDxAsheville - Adam Baker - Sell your crap. Pay your debt. Do what you love.

stuff

regret

trick

crap