Today I want to challenge you.

I want to challenge you to answer a question.

The good news for you is that this question is actually simple.

The words in the question are actually simple.

The bad news is for thousands of years,

people have been trying to answer this very same question for themselves.

People have dedicated their lives to this question,

they fought for this question,

and sometimes, they had given their lives in defense of this question.

And the question is this: what does freedom mean to you?

I'm not talking about like a dictionary definition of freedom.

I'm not talking about an academic or even an intellectual discussion

about what freedom is.

I'm talking about what does it mean to you?

What does it mean in your own life?

I know first hand

that this very question has the potential to change your life

because it's the exact question that my wife Courtney and I

asked ourselves three years ago.

It was a little of an awkward timing for us to be talking about freedom.

It was the night we brought my daughter Milligan home from the hospital.

As new parents, we struggled for 30,40 minutes, whatever it was,

to try to get her to go to sleep in her new crib.

After that, we wandered like zombies out to the kitchen table.

As we sat down, I turned to her and said,

"You know, honey, I need to talk to you about something."

(Laughter)

Which I've learned, after five years of marriage,

is that's the most terrible way you can possibly start a conversation.

(Laughter)

And I said, "I want to talk to you about freedom."

You can imagine what her expression was, and what her response was.

I can't repeat some of it here today.

But after we started talking more about it,

we realized that the timing of the situation

was actually in our favor.

Because if there was one thing we were lacking at that point in our life,

it was clarity.

It was the ability to step back and analyze

how we were living our life

and whether that was congruent with what we really wanted.

It started for us in our financial life.

Our financial life had degraded, I guess you could say,

into a simple question.

And that's, "What item in our apartment do we want to upgrade next?"

Have you ever had this discussion?

"Do we need to upgrade the couch,

or maybe we should save up and get a new kitchen table?"

"Should we switch location and just get a better apartment,

or maybe let's just get a flatter TV and call it a day?"

This was our financial life at that time.

And then, it should be no surprise on what our debt looked like.

We were in our young 20s

and not even counting the tremendous amount of student loans we carried;

we're 18,000 dollars in consumer debt

to start off our new marriage and as new parents.

We had four credit cards, we had store cards,

we had two automobile loans.

We had a loan for the jewelry I bought to get married.

We had a loan from family.

I used to joke we were collecting loans,

and that we had one for everything except for our mortgage.

And guess what? We were house-shopping.

It was the most hectic time of our lives.

I'd just started in a new business, I was working 80 hours a week.

Courtney had just graduated from college,

she was starting a classroom as a new teacher;

there couldn't have been a more hectic time in our life.

And we were shopping for a mortgage?

This didn't make sense.

As I stepped back, and I was given that clarity that night

from bringing Milligan home -

I saw it was because that was the next item on the script

that we were living our life by.

It wasn't a script that we chose. It was a script that chose us.

It chose us

because we were unwilling to answer this question for ourselves.

If you're not willing to answer this question in your life,

there's somebody, a company, a person, a government, an entity

that will be more than happy to answer this question for you.

You'll wake up one day and realize

that you're living life just based on a script.

It goes a little something like this, and see if you guys can relate.

In elementary and middle school, we are taught how to be taught.

We learn how to learn better.

But we go on, we go to high-school, where grades start to matter,

and if you get good grades through high-school,

you get to have the privilege

of getting tens of thousands of dollars in debt to go to college.

In college, you do a lot of stuff, and at the end of college,

hopefully, you get this degree, this piece of paper,

and with that comes the promise of job security

of a steady, decent-paying job.

After that, with that job,

you can get an apartment and fill it with stuff.

If you weren't able to attract a mate in college,

you surely can now, with your apartment full of stuff.

Two to three years later, you may have some kids,

you may get a promotion, upgrade to a house.

You continue this cycle for the next 30 or 40 years of your life,

until you reach the promised land, retirement,

when all your hard work pays off.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this script

unless you don't want it.

We recognized at that kitchen table

that we were living life based on this default script,

and we did not want it.

So we said, "What do we want?"

That took some time to explore,

but we figured out that we wanted a clean slate.

We wanted to wipe away all the crap that was in our life,

that was in our apartment.

All of this acquisition of the next thing, the next new version.

We wanted to just wipe it all away,

so we were going to sell all our stuff down to two backpacks,

what we could carry with us.

We were going to pay off the 18,000 dollars in consumer debt

that represented our most irresponsible spending,

and we were going to spend the year backpacking Australia as a young family.

That was our passionate goal that we set.

One year later, my wife Courtney took this picture.

This is me and my daughter Milligan.

She's three and a half now, she's one in this picture.

We're sitting on a plane, in the runway in Indianapolis, Indiana.

The year between the kitchen table and this picture was a tough one.

We had to analyze a lot of things and look inside at a picture of ourselves

that wasn't the one we wanted people to see,

it wasn't the one that we projected.

We had to change a lot of habits, a lot of beliefs in order to get there,

but we were able to do it.

When we boarded this plane,

we had two backpacks and full of possessions to our name,

and none of the 18,000 dollars that we started with.

And we were on our way to Australia.

>From Indianapolis, we head to Chicago, from Chicago to L.A.;

lay over in LA, we head to Sydney.

>From Sydney, we went up to Cairns, Australia,

which is a city that is just off the coast of the Great Barrier Reef -

Twenty-eight consecutive hours of flying with a one-year-old.

(Laughter)

I'd show you some pictures of what we looked like when we landed,

but we made a marital pact

that no living human would ever see those pictures.

(Laughter)

But I will show you one more picture from our travels.

I'd like to just sit up here and show you a slide-show,

but I'm just going to show you one more, and it's this one.

Again, taken by my wife

who, you can see, is a great photographer.

This was off the coast of Townsville, three to four weeks into our trip.

It's a little island called Magnetic Island.

On Magnetic Island, we were staying at a little B&B

after taking a ferry to get out there.

We went on an about 30-minute hike,

and through the hike, we saw wallabies running across the path,

a koala, a mum and a baby koala in a tree.

It was like we were in a movie almost.

When we got to the top of the hike,

we looked out over this isolated beach that was private,

and it just really hit me.

It's a feeling I hadn't felt before, but it hit me like a ton of bricks.

I realized that we were living our dream.

Don't get me wrong,

there was a long list of things where we had no idea what we were doing,

even at this point, while traveling, especially with a kid.

We were still learning and exploring.

But for better or worse, for the ups and downs,

we were the ones writing the script;

we were the ones who were finally in control of our life.

I realize not everyone in this crowd wants

to sell their stuff and backpack in Australia.

That was our definition of freedom three years ago.

It's even changed now.

But what I do know is

that you need to define what freedom looks like in your life,

and you need to take steps starting today to realize that.

Where does it start for most people?

It starts right here, with your crap.

Look at the crap, it's almost overflowing!

It's almost overflowing into the cars that are in the driveway.

Right now, it maybe seems like an extreme example,

but the more I think about it...

How many of you have friends

that have garages, or spare bedrooms, or junk drawers, or closets

that look not too far away from this?

It's really not even that extreme.

It's almost more of the norm.

But I have a question for you:

what happens when this person loses their job?

What happens when they're offered a better job in a different city?

What happens when they need to adapt

either physically, emotionally, financially,

to any situation that comes up in life?

The answer is at best they're restricted.

They're held back, they're clogged, they're congested

from adapting to any sort of change

because of the amount of crap they've brought into their life.

But we do have an out; we have a little, neat trick

that we do if we have to make a transition with all this crap:

we put it here.

(Laughter)

Do you realize we've been creating

an entire multi billion dollar industry around storing our old crap

so we can make a transition and buy new crap?

(Laughter)

Think about it.

Right now, there's 2.2 billion square feet of storage space

in the United States alone.

This is mind-blowing.

Every man, woman, and child could stand shoulder-to-shoulder

just like this,

under covered storage space if we had to, in the United States.

So, what's the deal?

Why are we so obsessed with buying new stuff

yet so reluctant to hold on to our old stuff?

How have we bought in to this addiction?

I think it's because we've been sold a myth.

The myth is that acquiring things in our life,

in the pursuit of a living environment filled with things

is going to grant us security.

Most of us take it so far even to say it's going to grant us happiness.

And in the pursuit of these things, we start to identify with our things.

You can tell who's successful, and who's not.

You can tell who's hip and who's not.

You can tell whose garages look like the picture we had before,

and whose don't.

So we start to really identify ourselves with our physical things.

But the truth that we realized,