Free

In 2018 I was riding a motorcycle 2,667 miles across the United States by myself, off-road, on something called the Trans-American Trail, and somewhere lost in the red dirt of Oklahoma I was ready to quit.

But I was done.

The decision was made then and there. I was going to ride to the next town, find a shipping company, and put the bike on a truck. Then I was going to fly home and tell people I'd done it (which I had, mostly), and move on with my life.

And the voice in my head wasn't mean about it. It wasn't telling me I was weak. It was actually patting me on the back while gently encouraging me to quit.

My Lower Self:

That was my lower self, and it felt like relief, like I could finally stop fighting.

Then I saw it, maybe a quarter-mile ahead, a little fork in the road, and a yellow Jeep flying down the trail toward me.

The Jeep didn't have to stop. But it did.

The window rolled down.

"Are you doing the TAT?"

The man behind the wheel was bald and weathered, somewhere in his sixties, and his eyes were lit up like a kid on Christmas morning. He looked like a man who'd made it through something.

"Yeah," I said. "Riding from west to east."

"Us too! This is our dream," he said, and his whole face changed. It was like he'd been waiting his entire life to say those words out loud to someone who would understand.

I really looked at his setup. Beautiful yellow Jeep, stickers everywhere, lifted, kitted out with suspension and winches.

And a trailer.

Wait. A trailer? On the TAT? Some sections of these trails are barely passable on a motorcycle. And this guy was pulling a trailer.

"I'm Thomas," he said, extending his hand through the window.

We talked for maybe ten minutes right there at the fork. He told me about the planning, the years of dreaming, the two-year Jeep build. This was supposed to be their retirement celebration. The adventure of a lifetime.

Then he told me about his wife.

Six months before he was supposed to retire, she was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer.

Just like that, the dream was off.

She wanted him to do the trip anyway and he said no way. But she said yes way. He said no way. And this went back and forth until finally he called his wife's doctor himself.

After he hung up the phone, Thomas spent the next two weeks buying that trailer and mounting oxygen tanks and a hospital bed inside it.

They were doing this thing together.

I stood there, covered in dirt and grease and grime, looking at this guy in his yellow Jeep, and I felt something crack open. I really don't know how else to describe it, but it was like a fist I'd been making for years suddenly released. Tears came and I didn't try to stop them.

It felt like he told me his whole life story in less than five minutes, and I didn't want this moment to end so I asked him if he was hungry. He said they hadn't eaten yet that day.

We pulled off at this little diner up the road in some small Oklahoma town. This place that didn't have a huge menu because it didn't need one. It had cracked vinyl booths, smelled like grease and coffee, had a single waitress who'd probably been working there for thirty years.

That's when I saw her for the first time.

Thomas helped his wife out of the trailer and into the diner. She could walk, you could tell she was strong, but the cancer had weakened her. She moved slowly, deliberately, like every step was costing her something, but she made it to the booth completely on her own.

She didn't talk much at lunch, but you could feel something radiating off her. She was glowing. She was proud to be there with him, her husband, doing this crazy adventure. Proud just to be in that little diner trading stories with people they'd just met.

It was the most romantic thing I'd ever seen, and the most heartbreaking, and the most beautiful, all at the same time.

After lunch, we walked out to the parking lot together. Thomas's Jeep sat there with the trailer behind it. My mud-covered KTM was leaning next to it on its kickstand.

They were heading west. I was heading east. And this was goodbye.

Thomas looked at my bike, then back at me.

"Would you mind if I took a picture of you? For your boys back home."

For your boys back home?

This man, pulling his dying wife across the country in a trailer with a hospital bed, was thinking about MY family.

I said sure. He grabbed my phone and snapped the photo. I didn't think much of it then, but now it's my boys' favorite picture of me.

I shook his hand and pulled him into a big hug, because words just weren't enough. He helped his wife back into the trailer and climbed into their Jeep. And just like that, they were pulling away, heading west toward the mountains, toward the adventure they'd been dreaming about for years.

I stood there in that parking lot, pretending to work on my bike, messing around with something in my backpack, and just waited until they disappeared.

Then I let it out. Years of thoughts and ideas, frustration and confusion and desperation along with excitement and inspiration and hope poured out of me right there. I stood there for a minute, and then I knew what I had to do.

I called Kelly back.

"You know what? I'm not shipping the bike home. I'm riding this thing all the way."

And then something decided to test my resolve immediately. It started raining. Not just a shower, but a biblical, nonstop downpour that lasted the next forty-eight hours straight. From that parking lot in Oklahoma until I pulled into my driveway in Ohio, it was like someone had turned on a fire hose and pointed it at the sky.

But I rode through all of it.

Because Thomas had shown me something I'd been missing my entire life.

They weren't waiting anymore. They weren't waiting for life to get better so they could finally start living.

They were living. Right then. In the middle of the storm.

The Realization

I'd spent years chasing what I thought was freedom.

For me, freedom meant financial freedom. It meant having enough money to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, with whoever I wanted to do it with. That was the goal and what I was building toward.

So, I built businesses and created passive income. I accumulated options, and I kept waiting for the day when I'd finally have enough to feel free.

And there was Thomas. His wife dying in a trailer behind him. One of the freest people I'd ever met.

Read this next part twice if you have to.

We think freedom is having enough money or resources to do whatever you want.

Freedom is simply the realization that you can do whatever you want.

It's so much bigger than money.

They understood that the door was never locked.

But I didn't. I'd been standing in front of it my whole life, waiting for someone to open it from the other side. Waiting for enough money, enough time, enough proof that I'd earned the right to walk through.

Nobody was coming to open it and nobody needed to.

Your lower self will give you a thousand reasons to keep waiting, for everything. Mine sure did. It dressed them up as responsibility, as practicality, as just being smart. But it was just fear keeping me still.

The truth is very simple. You can move whenever you want and you always could.

The Two Lies

So why do we keep chasing the external version of freedom? Why do we keep waiting for the money or the time or the someday-when-I-have-enough?

Because of two lies the Machine taught us about how life works.

Lie #1

Life happens TO you.

The world is against you. You're a victim of circumstances, timing, other people's decisions. Life is something that gets done to you, and your job is to survive it. Freedom means escaping. Building a fortress big enough to keep life from hurting you (this is what most people do).

Lie #2 — Sounds like an upgrade

Life happens FOR you.

Now the universe is on your side. Everything happens for a reason. Trust the process. Visualize and manifest. Freedom means receiving. Waiting for the universe to deliver what you've been asking for.

Both lies have something in common.

Life is still happening from the outside in. In the first version, life is attacking. In the second version, life is providing. Either way, you're passive. Just waiting around for some external force to determine your outcome.

You're still not free.

Life doesn't happen TO you. Life doesn't happen FOR you. Life happens THROUGH you.

The universe isn't against you and it isn't for you. It doesn't care whether you build something meaningful or waste your entire existence. It's neutral, indifferent, just there.

But life was meant to be lived inside out. Instead of letting the world happen to YOU, YOU need to happen to the world.

You are the one shaping it.

The Proof

Your gut already knows this is true. Your brain wants evidence anyway. Fair enough.

In 1967, a young psychologist named Martin Seligman ran an experiment on dogs at the University of Pennsylvania. The setup was simple. He put dogs in a box with two compartments separated by a low barrier. One side delivered an electric shock and the other side was safe. When the shock came, the dogs quickly figured out they could jump the barrier to escape.

Then Seligman added a wrinkle. Before putting a new group of dogs in the box, he restrained them and shocked them repeatedly. These dogs couldn't escape. They couldn't do anything. They just had to sit there and take it.

Then he put those dogs in the box with the barrier. He shocked the floor.

They didn't jump.

They just lay down and whimpered. Even though the barrier was right there. Even though safety was inches away. Even though all they had to do was stand up.

He called it Learned Helplessness. For fifty years it was the accepted explanation for depression, for staying in bad jobs, for giving up on dreams.

Except it was wrong.

In 2016, almost fifty years later, Seligman went back with a neuroscientist named Steven Maier and looked at the actual brain activity during those moments. What they found flipped the whole theory on its head.

Passivity wasn't learned. Passivity was the default.

When a human experiences prolonged, uncontrollable stress, the brain's factory setting is to shut down. To stop trying. To wait. This isn't a glitch, it's biology.

So what is actually learned?

Control.

The dogs that jumped didn't have special genes. They had learned, somewhere in their lives, that their actions could change their circumstances. They had built the neural pathways to override the default shut-down response.

The dogs that lay down didn't learn helplessness. They just failed to learn control.

The Factory didn't break you. It just kept you in the default setting. All those years of raising your hand and waiting for the bell and following the syllabus didn't teach you to be helpless. They just never taught you that you have the power to jump the barrier.

The best news Seligman found in all those decades? Once you learn control, you can't unlearn it. He called it immunization. Once your brain builds those pathways, they stick. Future stress doesn't knock you down the same way because your brain now has evidence that action works.

You were never the problem. You just never learned that you have control.

The Declaration

One moment you're standing in the hallway, staring at the door, waiting for permission. The next moment, you realize no one is coming to open it.

So what do you do?

You open it for yourself.

Thomas and his wife had a lot of reasons to not go on this trip. They did anyway. He didn't wait until he felt ready to drag a hospital bed across the Rockies.

He just went.

So then why do most people spend their whole lives trying to "get" free? Because we think freedom is a pile of money or an empty calendar. We think it's waiting for us on the other side of some achievement.

You might be like me, and you might think that freedom is having enough money or resources to do whatever you want. But one of the most liberating things you'll ever read, and I hope you understand, is that freedom is simply the realization that you can do whatever you want.

The entirety of your life is a choice.

What door have you been standing in front of?

What permission have you been waiting for?

Who exactly do you think is coming?

You are the one who has to make the decision to create a life you actually want to live.

I AM FREE.