One of the biggest lies of success and entrepreneurship is the message of accumulating more.
True Wealth Is Subtractive, Not Additive
While growth of your business and income is inherently good, you need to realize that true wealth isn’t just about what you add, but what you subtract. Every additional possession can act as an anchor that can restrict and drain both your physical movement and mental energy.
I started with a New York apartment full of things. The first step of my journey was selling everything. Throughout my digital nomad journey, I’ve continued to shed my possessions while increasing my freedom and happiness as a result.
In physics, extra stuff is drag that slows an object’s motion.
Physical Drag: Freedom Starts With What You Let Go Of
The first form of drag is the most visible. It shows up as stuff, obligations, and loose ends that quietly pull on your attention and limit your movement.
Let’s look at how to eliminate this drag in three key areas to transform you into a more free individual, no matter what your current stage is in your journey.
Physical drag: the things you own end up owning you
Pavel Durov, billionaire founder of Telegram, famously owns no significant property or physical assets like jets, boats, or houses, that the majority of his peers do. His reasoning? “My number one priority in my life is freedom”.
Even if you don’t go on to make huge amounts of money, there’s a lesson in understanding early that physical possessions manifest as responsibility and worry.
You can’t fully enjoy a nomadic lifestyle if you’re worrying about a car or random things back home that you didn’t sell.
Do an audit of your possessions, and get rid of as much as possible. You’ll feel lighter both mentally and logistically as a result.
Digital Drag: When Tools Become the Bottleneck
The second type of drag is less obvious, but often more dangerous. It hides behind apps, dashboards, and the illusion of productivity.
Digital drag: complexity is the enemy of execution
Just as physical clutter slows your travel, digital clutter kills your operating system, whether you’re a freelancer, a remote worker, or a solopreneur.
Don’t make the mistake of subscribing to too many new productivity tools or AI models, thinking that just a few more might give you an edge that you’re missing.
While each of these things can be healthy additions, more often than not they simply contribute to overthinking and procrastination disguised as fake productivity.
To operate with high leverage, you need to ruthlessly prune your tech stack. You can do a lot with Google docs and even just pen and paper. People survived and thrived without all these tools 10 years ago, so why can’t you?
Mental Drag: The Weight You Can’t See
Even after reducing physical and digital drag, there’s one layer left. It’s the heaviest, and it travels with you everywhere.
Mental drag: our mind can be the heaviest burden
The heaviest baggage is often hidden inside of the mind as the weight of our own thoughts.
If you’ve taken the time to reduce the two previous drag points, you’ll naturally have a calmer mind with less thoughts. However, don’t expect this to come all at once. Be patient, and commit to a practice.
One of the most helpful practices to lighten your mental load is positive mindfulness.
Start by recognizing your thoughts as a detached observer, and learn how to give yourself advice and feedback neutrally, without an inner critic.
Think of your whole life as an object whose performance is affected heavily by its weight.
Once you accept this and consciously reduce your weight in all areas, you will be able to make moves mentally and financially with freedom and speed that will have anyone weighed down wondering what your secret is.
