The Tuesday Morning I’m Building My Life Around
What years of chasing money taught me about freedom, work, and the life I actually want
I often think about a Tuesday morning in Queenstown.
No alarm. I open my eyes to the mountains, make some coffee, and watch the lake sit still.
There is one difficult task waiting for me. Something meaningful that deserves my best hours, not whatever energy I have left after commuting, sitting through meetings, and trying to impress someone at a performance review.
Once the work is done, I go outside. I walk, run, or do anything that gets my body moving. There is fresh air in my lungs and nowhere I urgently need to be.
Later, I spend time with people I genuinely want around. People who know me well enough that I don’t have to perform for them.
That is my definition of rich.
It isn’t a million dollars, a certain number of followers, or a badge beside my name. Those things might be useful, but they aren’t the reason I’m building.
I’m building for that morning.
A morning where my time belongs to me, the work matters, my body works, and the right people are nearby.
It may sound like a small ambition. To me, it feels like everything.
I spent years chasing the wrong thing
For a long time, I thought getting rich meant getting more.
More money, more status, and more evidence that I was making progress.
The problem with chasing more is that there is always another level. You reach one goal and immediately start thinking about the next one. The amount that once looked like freedom becomes the amount you need just to feel comfortable.
I know this because I have tried a lot of ways to make money.
Lawn mowing. Agencies. SaaS. Dropshipping. Print on demand. Rank and rent. Ecommerce.
Every time I found a new model, I thought it might be the one. When it didn’t work out the way I wanted, I blamed the model and looked for another.
Looking back, the business model wasn’t always the problem.
I didn’t know what I was trying to build toward.
I wanted to be rich, but I couldn’t explain what being rich would allow me to do. I wanted freedom, but I had never defined what a free day would look like.
Without that answer, I was moving constantly without knowing whether I was moving in the right direction.
What money is actually for
My view of money has changed.
I still want to make a lot of it. I’m not going to pretend money doesn’t matter. It affects where you live, how you spend your days, who you can help, and which problems you are able to walk away from.
But money itself is no longer the end goal.
I want money to protect four things: time, energy, attention, and options.
Time is the most obvious one. Money can be lost and made again. Businesses can fail and be rebuilt. Time doesn’t work that way. Once an hour is gone, it is gone.
Energy is harder to measure, but it matters just as much. Some work leaves you tired because you gave it everything. I like that kind of tiredness. Other work leaves you empty because you spent the day doing something you don’t care about.
I have felt both, and they are not the same.
Attention matters because almost everything around us is trying to take it. Notifications, videos, advertisements, and other people’s opinions can fill an entire day if you let them.
If I give my attention to the wrong things for long enough, I will eventually end up with a life I didn’t choose.
Then there are options.
I want the option to turn down work that doesn’t feel right. I want to be able to help someone I care about without checking whether I can afford the time. I want to choose meaningful work even when it isn’t the fastest way to make money.
That is what I want wealth to provide.
What my previous businesses taught me
It would be easy to call my previous attempts failures.
Some didn’t make enough money. Some didn’t become what I imagined. Others helped me realise that I didn’t actually want the life they might create.
Still, each one taught me something.
Lawn mowing showed me the limits of trading time for money. There are only so many lawns one person can mow and only so many hours in a day.
SaaS showed me the power of building something that can work without me being present every minute.
Ecommerce taught me that a good opportunity isn’t always the right opportunity.
A leather ecommerce brand under my grandfather’s name taught me the importance of building with integrity. When a business carries the name of someone you respect, your decisions feel more personal. I started to understand that the way I build matters as much as the result.
I used to think changing direction meant I lacked discipline. Sometimes that was true. Sometimes I was simply impatient and distracted by the next idea.
But there were also times when changing direction was the honest choice.
Staying with the wrong thing for another five years wouldn’t prove that I was committed. It would only make me five years older.
Those attempts gave me experience that I couldn’t have gained from a course. I know what it feels like to become excited about a new idea. I know how easy it is to confuse being busy with making progress. I also know what it feels like to realise that a business could succeed and still give me a life I don’t want.
That experience has value, even if it came from things that didn’t work.
What I want to do differently
This time, I want to start with the life.
Before choosing the next business, I want to understand what I need it to do for me. How much time should it require? Where should I be able to live? What kind of work do I want to spend my mornings doing?
I also want to build around what I have actually experienced.
I don’t know everything about business. I don’t want to pretend that I do. But I have started enough things, changed direction enough times, and made enough mistakes to have a perspective of my own.
Writing is one way I can make that experience useful.
This is the first essay I have published, although it isn’t the first one I have written.
I deleted the others. I’m still not entirely sure why. I think they started to feel like another performance, as if I were writing what I thought people wanted to hear instead of what I actually believed.
I may return to them one day, rewrite them with what I know now, and publish them again.
As for this essay, I don’t know how many people will read it. I might look back a year from now and disagree with parts of it. That’s fine.
I would rather write honestly from where I am than wait until I can pretend I have everything figured out.
I also want to build something with leverage. It could come from code, content, capital, or eventually a team. I want my work to reach beyond the hours I personally put into it.
Most importantly, I want to build in a way I can respect.
Every shortcut I have taken has eventually cost me something. Sometimes it cost money. Sometimes it cost time. Sometimes it just made me feel disconnected from what I was doing.
I don’t want to build that way anymore.
I’m not there yet
I’m not writing this from a house overlooking the lake.
I haven’t sold a company, reached financial freedom, or discovered the perfect business model.
I recently moved to a new city without a job, a running business, or a clear service to sell. I am starting from scratch.
Some days, that feels exciting.
Other days, I wonder whether I have made a terrible decision.
Both feelings are real.
What I have now is clarity about the direction I want to move in.
I can picture the mountains, the still lake, the coffee, and the difficult work waiting on the desk. I can picture having time to move my body and spend the evening with people I care about.
I don’t know exactly what will get me there yet.
For the first time, I’m comfortable admitting that.
I may not know which business I will build, but I know what I want it to protect. I know what enough looks like for me. I know the kind of ordinary day I want my work to make possible.
So that is the plan.
I’m going to keep building, learning, and writing about what happens along the way.
Hopefully, one day, I’ll wake up on that Tuesday morning and realise I made it.
— Kal