Over the past few weeks, I’ve been writing on how to achieve freedom as an entrepreneur.

Last week, I discussed how your work can help you achieve freedom by asking yourself whether the work you do is rare and valuable. Being rare and valuable is a key to earning windfall profits for your business.

Today, I share with you another amplifier on your ability to achieve freedom: location.

Enter San Francisco: Accelerating my Timeline of Action

A few years ago, after quitting my day job, I moved to San Francisco and holy cow – it was an expensive city to live in!

Moving to San Francisco forced me to accelerate my timeline for building the business behind Jeffalytics. If it hadn’t had been for living in San Francisco, then PPC Course, my first flagship course would never have been born.

It was because San Francisco was such an expensive city filled with ambitious people looking to start and grow their own startup that I became inspired to accelerate the timeline for my own business.

It’s like Warren Buffet says:

“It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.”

In my experience, that’s 100% true.

When you do this, you start picking up the behaviors, mindset, and ambition of the people around you through osmosis. Moving to San Francisco accelerated my timeline for launching my first online course.

The expenses of living in San Francisco inspired me to take massive action faster because if I didn’t take action, the expenses of living in San Francisco would have caught up to me. Either I took action or the expenses of the city would be too much, and it would be game over. Back to the bold north for me.

Moving to an expensive city like San Francisco led me to accelerate my timeline of action so that I could build out my company faster and truly achieve entrepreneurial freedom via a business that generates monthly recurring revenue.

Enter Chiang Mai: Keeping Expenses Low

Here’s the funny thing – after only a year in San Francisco, I became nomadic in 2015. I’ve been traveling full-time ever since. One of the places I lived during my journey was Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Chiang Mai has great food, smart people, and it is insanely cheap to live there.

I saved lots of money while living in Chiang Mai, but there were times that I felt a sense of loss of ambition as I worked on my business.

With a cost of living so low, there was less drive to grow the business. With ends met, it’s easy to spend more time enjoying oneself than working full throttle on growing your business.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and with your basic needs met in just a few days of work, it’s easy to find other distractions to fill your time.

Expensive or inexpensive: Which one is right for you?

Like many nomads, I’m still trying to find the perfect balance. Both of these experiences continue to influence my future choices of location.

If you are just starting off in your entrepreneurial journey, then it makes sense to control expenses then living in an inexpensive city like Chiang Mai. If you want to grow your business massively, you might eventually choose to live in a city that will level up not only your ambition but also accelerate your timeline of action.

If you are just starting off in your entrepreneurial journey, then it makes sense to control expenses then living in an inexpensive city like Chiang Mai. If you want to grow your business massively, you might eventually choose to live in a city that will level up not only your ambition but also accelerate your timeline of action.

Much like the other forms of entrepreneurial freedom, there are solutions for every step of the journey.

Have you ever lived in an inexpensive city? What about an expensive one? How did it impact your business?