Most People Can't Answer These Four Questions About Their Own Life. Can You?
Two people can earn the same amount of money and still build completely different lives.
Ten years later, one may have quietly created a life they love. The other may still be waiting for the right time, the right opportunity or enough money to begin.
The difference is not always income, talent or luck. Often, one person knows where they are going and can see the distance between that life and the one they have now. The other has a collection of hopes without any coordinates.
During nearly five years running an entrepreneur accelerator hub for a major UK bank, I coached hundreds of people as they worked towards their business and personal goals. Before that, I spent years in banking, sitting across from people and talking about their money.
I met plenty of intelligent, ambitious and capable people. Yet when I asked what they were actually trying to build, many struggled to give a clear answer.
These four questions emerged from those conversations. Answering them will not magically create the life you want. But without them, it is very difficult to tell whether your decisions are taking you closer to it.
1. Where do you actually want to be?
“I want freedom” sounds meaningful, but it is too vague to guide a decision.
Freedom from what? Freedom to do what? What would be different on an ordinary Tuesday?
Think beyond the celebration, the holiday or the dramatic moment when everything changes. Picture the life after the novelty has worn off:
Where do you wake up?
Who is around you?
What do you do that morning?
How do you spend your working hours?
What no longer takes up your time or causes constant worry?
Which parts of your current life do you want to keep?
The ordinary day matters because that is the life you will actually live.
Research by Edwin Locke and Gary Latham found that clear, specific goals generally produced better performance than vague instructions to “do your best”, when factors such as commitment and ability were present. A precise destination gives you something against which to judge your choices. Read their review of goal-setting research.
There is another problem hiding inside this question: the life you picture may not be yours.
It is easy to borrow the visible symbols of success—the house, the car, the first-class flight—and assume they belong in your dream. Some of them may. Others may simply be scenery you have seen often enough to mistake for a personal ambition.
When I worked through this for myself, part of the impressive version fell away. What remained was quieter, more specific and much closer to the way I genuinely wanted to live.
Ask yourself: If nobody else could see this life, would I still want it?
2. What does that life cost?
Most people will happily imagine a future for years without ever calculating what it would cost to maintain.
Your normal Tuesday has a number.
The home, food, childcare, travel, help, hobbies, time away from work and financial security all have a cost. Even the dream of working less needs translating into the income required to support it.
I call that amount your Freedom Number: the monthly cost of your honest version of freedom.
It is not the largest income you can imagine earning. It is not the number that sounds impressive when you say it out loud. It is what your chosen life would realistically cost each month.
Start with the life you described in question one. Work through its likely costs, including the irregular expenses that do not arrive neatly every month. Then calculate the monthly amount required to fund it.
The result may surprise you in either direction. Mine was lower than the glossy, borrowed version of success I could have described, but higher than the number I might have guessed without doing the work.
A dream you have never costed remains difficult to aim at. Once it has a number, you can begin measuring whether you are moving closer.
3. Where are you now?
This is the question people most often want to tidy up, soften or skip.
What is your real monthly income? What does your current life cost? What assets, debts and commitments already exist? How much of your income is dependable, and how much changes from month to month?
During my time in banking, I met doctors, business owners, senior professionals and people from all sorts of financial circumstances. Income was often the only number someone could give me quickly—and when the income was variable, even that could become unclear.
That did not make them reckless or incapable. Most of us have simply never been required to look at our whole position in one place.
The discomfort has a purpose. Research by Gabriele Oettingen and colleagues suggests that indulging only in an idealised future can reduce the energy people bring to pursuing it. A more useful approach holds the desired future beside the present obstacle or reality. Read the research on positive fantasies and effort.
The dream shows you where you want to go. Your current position tells you where the journey must begin.
When I completed my own audit, question three was the section I most wanted to avoid. My answer was not comfortable. Looking at it still gave me something that avoidance could not: a real starting point.
4. What is the gap between the two?
Your Freedom Gap is the difference between your Freedom Number and your current position.
People often treat the gap as bad news. I see it differently. It is the first number capable of giving you a route.
It is not proof that you have failed. It is the distance between where you are and where you want to be.
If your chosen life costs £8,000 a month and your current dependable monthly income is £5,000, the gap is £3,000. That does not tell you the entire plan, but it transforms “I need more freedom” into a problem you can begin examining.
Do you need to increase income, reduce the cost of the dream, change the timeline or combine several moves? Is the gap primarily about money, or would changing how your work depends on your time matter just as much?
You can only make those decisions once the distance is visible.
Plan backwards from the life you want
Once you know your destination and your gap, resist the urge to create an enormous list from where you stand today.
Instead, imagine you have reached the result. Then work backwards.
What needed to be true immediately before you arrived? What had to happen before that? Keep moving back until you reach one action you can take in your current week.
This is sometimes called backward planning or backcasting. Research by Jooyoung Park, Fang-Chi Lu and William Hedgcock found that, particularly for complex goals, people who planned backwards experienced greater motivation, clearer steps and better goal-related performance than those who planned forwards. Read the study on forward and backward planning.
The mountain has not become smaller. You have changed the place from which you are mapping the route.
For example, suppose your goal is to replace part of your salary with income from a business. Working backwards might reveal that, before this income becomes dependable, you need a certain number of regular customers. Before gaining those customers, you need to test an offer. Before testing the offer, you need to speak to one potential customer.
“Build another income stream” is intimidating. “Message one person on Thursday” is something you can do.
The answers matter more than a perfect plan
Real life will interfere.
Income changes. A contract disappears. Family circumstances shift. The action that looked sensible in January may be irrelevant by June.
The purpose of these four answers is not to predict every step correctly. They allow you to adjust the route without losing the destination.
When life moves you, return to the four questions:
Where do I want to be?
What does that life cost?
Where am I now?
What is the gap?
Then trace the route again from your new position.
Without those answers, changing the plan can feel like starting over. With them, it becomes a recalculation.
My current answer is 34.9%
I am completing this process on my own life and sharing the progress publicly.
I will not publish my exact Freedom Number. Your goal should come from your life, rather than becoming larger or smaller because you compared it with mine.
The number I will share is the percentage of my Freedom Number currently covered by our monthly income.
At the time I recorded the accompanying video, I was at 34.9%.
I will continue checking it and sharing whether it rises or falls. That gives me a visible measure of movement without pretending every month will be a perfect one.
Writing goals down and reporting progress may also help. In a study led by Gail Matthews, participants who wrote down goals, committed to actions and sent weekly progress reports achieved more than those who only considered their goals. It was one study, rather than a promise of success, but it supports the practical value of making progress visible. Read the Dominican University research summary.
You are, effectively, my progress report.
Answer the four questions for yourself
Set aside twenty minutes and answer them honestly:
Where do you actually want to be? Describe your normal life, not just its most impressive moments.
What does that life cost? Calculate the monthly amount required to maintain it.
Where are you now? Record the real numbers and circumstances you are beginning with.
What is the gap? Make the distance visible, then work backwards towards one action you can take this week.
There are no impressive answers. There are only answers that are true enough to help you make a decision.
The free Freedom Audit takes you through this process properly. It helps you define your version of freedom, calculate what it costs, see where you are now and identify your first move.
Complete the free Freedom Audit.
Watch the accompanying video
In Most People Can't Answer These 4 Questions About Their Own Life. Can You?, I explain where these questions came from, demonstrate how to plan backwards and share the first percentage from my own Freedom Audit.
