What is freedom, anyway?
Chris Walker’s 10 dimensions of freedom. How free are you?
Hi, it’s Melissa, and welcome (back) to “your founder next door”, a weekly publication with stories and tidbits of my human journey bootstrapping eWebinar to $5m ARR. No BS, just straight-up truth bombs on what it’s like to build a company without an abundance of resources or friends in high places.
I thought I knew what freedom was, until I realized I wasn’t free 🤯
All my life, freedom has been my number one priority.
Freedom is the reason I started every job and quit every job. It’s why I left SAP 15 years ago to start my first company. I hated mornings and didn’t want to wake up with an alarm clock. I didn’t want someone else deciding how I spent my time. I spent well over a decade fighting for the privilege to have full control of my schedule, working from wherever I choose to be.
Freedom is the thing I care about most and it’s why I’m so compelled to share my experience around bootstrapping, life design, and building a company on your own terms. I defined freedom as being able to do what you want, when you want, with who you want. Time, money, location. That was the whole picture, until something happened…
Some time ago, I fell in love with someone I wasn’t “supposed” to. Where I come from (Hong Kong), there are a lot of rules around relationships. What’s acceptable, what’s not, and what’s forbidden. That experience inspired me to question my beliefs and where they came from. I asked myself: if I could love someone I never thought I would, simply because I was told I wasn’t supposed to, then what else could I be wrong about?
I realized my beliefs weren’t mine. They were given to me by someone else, who got them from someone else, who got them from someone else. I never thought to question them. That was my programming, and my human experience was limited as a result.
That realization was one of the most liberating moments of my life. It opened up entire worlds I had rejected for no other reason than being told I didn’t belong there. From that point forward, I could start from a blank slate. I could decide for myself what I enjoy and what I don’t, who I want to love and who I don’t, all of it coming from me.
At that moment of epiphany, I felt truly free. For the first time.
The irony is, all this time, I’d been building my career around freedom. Writing about it. Encouraging others to design their lives around it. Yet the whole time, I only tied freedom to external accomplishments. I had never thought about freedom as something that starts inside your mind.
All this time I was advocating for freedom, I wasn’t free.
Chris Walker’s 10 dimensions of freedom 🪽
I’ve been following Chris Walker on LinkedIn for three years. When I first started writing publicly about bootstrapping, he was creating some of the best B2B marketing content on the internet. He’d pioneered a certain style of short-form video on marketing strategy that was everywhere. Then, about a year ago, I noticed he went quiet. When he came back, his content was different. He wasn’t talking about demand gen or revenue anymore. He was talking about burnout, the inner work, and the programming that holds entrepreneurs back.
Around the same time, I was planning Season Three of ProfitLed Podcast around the theme of Passion, Profit, and Purpose, and how those shift as founders come into financial success. If you’ve been following my writing, you know the human journey of startup founders is something I care deeply about right now.
The one post that jumped out at me was his 10 Dimensions of Freedom. In it, Chris shared that he’d made the money, built the audience, scaled the business. Everything that was supposed to equal freedom. Yet he rated himself a 2 out of 10 on mental freedom and time freedom while the business was thriving. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t take a vacation without guilt. He felt obligated to be around people he didn’t want to be around. By every external measure, he’d made it. But he wasn’t completely free.
He mapped out 10 dimensions of freedom: Time, Social, Creative, Financial, Health, Location, Purpose & Mission, Relationship, Mental, and Spiritual. His insight was that most high achievers are completely trapped in several of them while chasing just one, and his rule now is that he never makes a decision that raises one dimension while collapsing another.
That post was the one that hooked me. I knew I had to have him on ProfitLed.
His framework put words to something I’d been feeling but never articulated. It felt like we were on the same path and I was excited to learn from him. I had to hear his story firsthand.
My conversation with Chris on ProfitLed 🎙️
Chris described growing up on the same track most of us are taught to follow. Get good grades, get a job, climb the corporate ladder. By his late 20s, he started questioning the rules. He’d work from home when he wasn’t supposed to. He’d show up to job interviews without shaving, in casual clothes, because if someone wouldn’t hire him for how he looked, he didn’t want to work for them anyway. He called it thinking for yourself.
In 2019, after being pushed out of a startup, he started Refine Labs, a B2B marketing agency with $3,000 in the bank. He sold his car to buy himself more runway. Got a roommate to save $700 a month. Within months, he picked up a handful of consulting clients and was making more money working 20 hours a week than he ever had in corporate, with time left over for photography, yoga, and his health.
Then the business exploded. Revenue went from $600K to over $20M in about three years. But as the numbers grew, so did the cost. Chris described a repeating cycle he calls the success game: learn, grind, achieve, optimize, burn out, repeat. He was trapped in it without realizing it. He believed that success required suffering, and because he believed it, he invited suffering into his life. He’d sit at his laptop on a Saturday morning doing nothing productive just to feel like he was busy and important. He thought that if he pushed harder, worked more, hit the next milestone, he’d finally feel enough.
It didn’t happen.
He was having anxiety multiple times a week and telling himself, “This is normal. I’m just like this.” He carried self-doubt for 33 years while being one of the loudest, most confident voices in B2B marketing. When I asked how those two things could coexist, his answer was that you can be brilliant in one domain and completely stuck in another.
His breakthrough came when he realized that anxiety and self-doubt aren’t personality traits. They’re symptoms. When you get an email from a client and feel anxiety, the email isn’t causing it. The belief underneath is: I must not be doing a good enough job. Maybe they’ll leave. If they leave, I’ll have to let someone go. The email is just a trigger. The belief is the source. Once he started questioning the beliefs instead of managing the symptoms, everything shifted.
Chris calls this reframing. Instead of accepting a belief as fact, you question it. When you change the belief, the emotions, decisions, and outcomes that flow from it change too.
On money, Chris told me he never felt more free than when he was earning $20K a month with three happy clients and no employees. As revenue scaled to $20M+, he kept chasing more without understanding why. He described this as being stuck on the hamster wheel. He said that when you outsource your self-worth to external outcomes, it’ll never be enough. The shift was seeing money as a byproduct of making an impact, not the goal itself.
When he started to feel like the work he was doing was purposeless, he made a decision to exit Refine Labs at its peak. He sold the company’s equity at roughly 20% of what it was worth because his freedom mattered more than maximizing the number. He sold his shares in another software company, Passetto, for $18 because the people building it every day deserved to own it. These decisions didn’t make sense on a spreadsheet, and they didn’t need to. He was at peace with that.
I asked how he uses his 10 Dimensions of Freedom to make decisions now. He said he never makes a choice that compromises any of them. No customer worth $5K month is worth his mental freedom. No investor is worth his time freedom. No relationship that drains him is worth his social freedom. I had always thought life was about trade-offs, but perhaps that is my own programming.
After we hung up, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Chris said about reframing our beliefs and how the beliefs we choose to hold shape everything that follows. Change the belief, change the outcome. In that way, we can design our future.
That conversation ended up being a catalyst for me. It unlocked something I’d been stuck on for over a year with eWebinar. Within days, I wrote the power of reframing your business.
It led me to completely rethink how we position our product, which I laid out in the strategy that got us to profitability and kept us small. This conversation was a butterfly effect that’s still rippling through my company right now.
To hear our full conversation, tune into this episode of ProfitLed here: Apple, Spotify, YouTube
Till next time,
— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️
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Freedom gets more complicated once the business grows.
More revenue and more scale don't always mean more control over your life.
That came up repeatedly in a piece I wrote on the true cost of scaling.
🔗 https://millennialmasters.net/p/the-true-cost-of-scaling
This is helpful. I tend to get stuck thinking about it as a hierarchy of needs and almost criticizing myself for worrying about the things at the top of the pyramid because I'm fortunate to be able to spend as much energy as I do thinking about them. It is helpful to think about it as an equilibrium, no one thing being more or less important than the other intrinsically. It's on us to assign our own value to each one.