Everyone wants to be financially independent, but few are acutely aware of what it means to them, and the principles that need to be followed to achieve it.

Here are a few insights that can lay the foundation for a roadmap:

Don’t be a chicken, be a hawk. Be picky about your investments. Be focused about your goals.
Don’t be afraid to say no to 99.9% of investment opportunities. You only need to find a handful of good funds or schemes to change your life. Extraordinary returns follow extraordinary discipline. An investor’s goal should always be to make as few investment decisions as possible. Keep your hurdle rate high and embrace inaction.

Chickens will eat anything you put in front of them. They will eat insects, bugs, meat, fruit, vegetables, fish, and, yes, even chicken. They have no self-control.

A hawk can see up to 8x more clearly than the sharpest human eye. To put in comparison, if you had a hawk’s vision you could see an ant on the ground from top of a 10-storey building. A hawk’s eye is so large that it occupies a big portion of its skull. The hawk knows what it’s looking for.

The visual capabilities let the hawk distinguish the size, shape, and speed of the potential prey so it can recognize, target, and capture it swiftly. As you fly above the investment landscape looking for opportunities, develop tools, strategies, even statements, that you can apply quickly to evaluate opportunities. Know what you are looking for so you can develop the vision to recognize an opportunity quicker.

You can achieve financial independence by saving more than you can spend and investing those savings in an area where you have an advantage.
No one gets rich keeping their money in a savings bank account. For me, the advantage was microcap funds, the smallest public companies in the world. For you, it might be another area of the public markets or maybe or maybe even real estate, or some other area of expertise. Through skill and prudence, you get to a point where you finally have a choice.

There is a reason why I exclusively invest in the microcap arena. It’s one of the only places in the markets where a small, astute investor has a clear structural advantage. It is impossible for a large scheme to invest in these small companies until these companies rise and become more liquid. Great investors don’t follow large fund houses/institutions; they invest where they are going to go. Did you know that Warren Buffet, Peter Lynch, and many others started in micro and small cap stocks as well?

You will never achieve financial independence if you cannot differentiate between business performance and stock performance.
When you are holding onto a position ask yourself – Is this business growing and making more money per share than it did a year ago, two years ago? Successful investors can differentiate business performance from stock performance and can take advantage of those investors who can’t. Even great businesses get overvalued. It’s important to make investing decisions based on business performance, not stock performance. It’s also important to know the distinction between external stock market forces driving a stock price versus business reasons.

Learning and evolving is a big driver of long-term success as a full-time private investor.

Money is about freedom, not consumption.
A lot of people incorrectly assume that they need enough money to do nothing. You just need enough to do whatever you want. The power is having a choice. The choice might be to work less to spend more time with family, to go back to university, to start your own business, to travel, or perhaps even take a job that pays you less but gives you purpose when you wake up in the morning.

As you grow your capital you will reach a pivot point when you feel you finally have a choice to do what you want in life. Some of you will choose to keep your day jobs or businesses because you love them. But some of you will choose to finally break free from the routine that has been holding you back and probably branch out in an altogether different field of business which is your passion but have not been able to pursue.