Mary Panttaja

I finished the book today—read that last chapter, which might ought to be read first. WHY do you want a 4-hour work week? Because “work” is just the stuff you do to pay the bills, and you should be spending the bulk of your time on something more important—your “vocation”, your passions, living life, learning, and helping improve things around you.

Another way to spin this is that “making a living”, that is, earning enough money to meet some specified monthly financial goal is not a worthy endeavor if it does not also meet all those other needs and criteria. And maybe there are other ways to get freedom to engage in you calling than to buy it—even if it only takes 4 hours a week.

In Updrafting, we focus on finding that right thing to be doing—the most important and fulfilling activities of your life. If you find and execute on that, then you will have lived YOUR life to the utmost. Financial success may come, but it is not the key relevant goal of the story. Just as security is fine and all, but a concern for safety should not replace your life’s intentions. No one ever climbed a mountain with safety the first thing on their list of goals. One would never leave the bedroom.

This is not to say that there is anything wrong with safety or financial security, but to emphasize that we cannot let our concern for them blind us to what is really important for us to accomplish in this life.

And maybe we don’t have to buy our freedom. Maybe we just take it. Know ourselves to be free of whatever constraints we imagine—or, at least, that we recognize them as challenges to be met, not limitations on our possibilities.