Every day, we live busy, and if we are asked – why living so busy? Usually, and for most of the people, the answer is “busy to make a living”. We wish we were able to make a good amount of money, i.e. to achieve the financial freedom.

So instead of being busy, maybe it’s wiser to take a step back, pondering the goal of being busy, which is to achieve the status of financial freedom, and make some efforts to figure out a “less busy” way to hit this goal.

Let’s first to think about the successful and extraordinarily successful people who have already happily in this kingdom of freeness.

I found those doctors, lawyers and mid-upper managers in big corporations are quite well paid, and after a sufficient number of years of saving up their income, or placing them wisely into financial assets such as stocks or bonds, they can maintain their comfortable lifestyle by passive income derived from the accumulated assets after ceasing their practice or retirement from serving companies.

In comparison, people who are doing lower-level sort of labors such as being a assembling line worker, restaurant waters, nurses, clerks, or even a programming technician, who tend to be paid higher than an factory staff, however, overall, they all earn much less. Not ironically, these people have the busier days too because they are more probably locked up to their working place and schedule without much flexibility or reprieve to think and to learn.

I think the key difference between the former and latter group is the former requires more technical professionalism, while the latter kind of job is homogeneous, thus, easily replaceable.

Therefore, majority of the people are competing ferociously to get into the first group. Middle-class families are anxious sending their kids to elite colleges to obtain degrees in finance, laws, medicine and management etc.

However, is it really the whole picture?

Raising the bar from familiar neighborhood to a space most of us are so distant from,we shall see the top richest people have an entirely different set of characteristics.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, Bill Gates of Microsoft, Jack Ma of Alibaba, Mark Zuckerberg of FaceBook, Steve Job of Apple, Larry Page of Google… these people are extraordinarily wealthy because they created business to offer products and services greatly needed by the market.

On the other hand, Peter Thiel, Warren Buffet, Charlie Munger, Ray Dalio, Xiaolai Li , Masayoshi Son… these people are not entrepreneurs themselves, or at least, their major fortune is not from creating products directly, but by investing into great business.

Both of these two groups of people share one common trait – insight. They have the insight that is invisible to contemporaries, the former group has the ability to execute, the latter group has the gut to bet on. However, they should be distinctly distinguished from reckless gamblers because they operate based on insight and knowledge, while gamblers operate on impulse and ignorance.

If you ask Charlie Munger, Xiaolai Li, what are you doing everyday? They are not physically toiling away with extremely busy schedule, rather, they would tell you, all day long, they are “busy” reading and thinking. They are reading and thinking all day to obtain pair of eyes so they can see things most people are blind to.

I also notice there is another niche group of free people. And even though this group is not the mainstream, in the future, I conjecture they will grow up rapidly and substantially. They are those movie/TV/sports stars, social media stars. A good looking person or some young guy playing minecraft everyday posting their activities on YouTube or Instagram are attracting millions of followers, forking over millions of dollars into their pockets as a result. These people don’t necessary read or think a lot to attain insight, but they do possess some talent which might be inborn, to their maximum benefits, they play out their natural talent, enjoy their life and by the way, also make tons of money to live an extravagant life!