Ability to Say No is Important
This song of Janis reduces the meaning of freedom to one aspect only: The ability to say no. But in truth, freedom is something else: It is the ability to make a choice. This means that you can do something, if you decide so, or you can leave it. Freedom means that you have the ability to determine the course of your live. Freedom is self determination.
If you have nothing, you are not free. If the essence of freedom is the ability to determine the course of your life, then you must have resources to be free. If you have nothing, and somebody offers you food, you must say yes to survive. And, having nothing, you must say no to many opportunities life has to offer because you cannot afford it. If you have nothing, you cannot help others. And if you have nothing, you cannot choose what to learn.

Master Your Things and Social Status
Janis Joplin misses the essence of freedom, when she said “nothing left to lose.” I do not say that anybody should be a slave of things, or of status. It is mostly status, talk of other people about somebody or something, and fear of that, what enslaves us. If we have useless things, we tend to forget them. Useless items will waste our resources, and slow us down, but they will not be able to control our mindset.

Fear Makes Slaves
Fear of gossip surely has the potential to kill off our ambition and make us say yes where we should say no. In postwar Germany, where I grew up, there were plenty of people who should have said no. And there was even more pressure on others, not to speak up and tell the upcoming generation what really happened. So, nothing left to lose said for me merely: “Do not provide others any leverage to force you to do anything.” This has some truth in itself, but it also smells like lost opportunity. It defines the essence of freedom in negative terms.

Positive Approach to Freedom
Let’s try it the positive way. If the essence of freedom means to have choices in life, and to choose what is right for me, how do I get there? This is not a trivial question, but one thing is sure: It involves learning. To identify the right choice, you need to anticipate the possible results. After making a choice, which means in this context setting a goal, you must learn how to reach there. This is done most effectively by looking for people who have done the same thing before. If you study them carefully, you will be able to follow their way.

Internet as a Game Changer
The beauty of the internet is that you can meet there people, who have achieved all kind of things. And many of them are more than willing to share, how they did it. Some provide Others offer and programs showing you how they reached the degree of freedom they have achieved. They help you to learn their trade and show their tools. Iif you have access to the internet, you can certainly reach such people.

Accept Your Responsibility
But this puts the blame squarely on yourself, if you allow yourself still to pose as a victim. Make the right choice, decide to grow. Determination to grow is the final essence of freedom. This determination will not remove the consequences of past mistakes immediately. But it can improve life faster and more profoundly than you can imagine. Wake up! Every journey starts with a single step.

Personal Growth Means Taking and Giving
You may already have noticed, that on my list of goals are both, getting and giving. Improving financial metrics, getting the means for an enjoyable and convenient life, like a nice home, and taking care of others, giving to our family, but also to others in need.
To grow means in way to increase our ability to get and to give. This is like a cycle, taking better care of our customers or clients, getting more money for it, improving lifestyle, thus getting better energy, give more to those in need, close to us and not so close, learn by giving.
Now there needs to be a balance between giving and taking. Without this balance, personal growth can easily change into personal decline.

Giving Without Getting Leads to Decline
He, who gives more than he has, runs into a debt problem, ending up at a point where he cannot give anymore. And he, who takes without giving, will inevitably disconnect himself from other people, end up in an emotional vacuum, and personal growth will again make space for personal decline.

Taking Without Providing Leads to Decline
Why giving without taking does not work for a long time, is self explanatory. But why is it not possible to grow if somebody takes and takes, without giving? Think about it: If you see people suffer, and you know that you could help them out with ease, you will have to close your mind and hard, if you want to avoid giving. While closing mind and heart, you will not be able see, hear and feel other information. You have blocked the entrance door for it. This forces a person into decline.

Get More so You Can Give More
This means, the trick is: Getting more, to be able to give a bit more. This will lead again to get more, this will allow again to give more. In the process you will grow in spirit, in knowledge, and in happiness.
Obviously, you cannot help everybody, and you cannot help somebody forever. If Bill Gates would give only one Dollar per day to every hungry person in the world, it would not take a week until he for himself would have to beg, and then he would not be able to help anybody else.

You Can Change Only Your Own Life
Another example is a drug addict. Nobody can help him, before he makes a serious decision to change his life. And that is not only true for drug addicts, but for almost everybody. This is, because the ultimate help is not a material gift, but support in personal growth.
This is perfectly expressed in the old adage: “It is good to give to a hungry a fish. But it is much better teaching him fishing“.

What is Success?
This is not so simple. There are a few hurdles, hidden traps. The first one: Success is a word with many different meanings for different people. It means actually only, that you reach your goals, but it does not say anything about your goals. If you define the wrong goals, which do not correspondent to your needs, you will be successful and miserable. And do not think, this is a rare occurrence. Many are in that state.
One more hint: Success is a state of mind. It is not about having things, but about being what you are, living your own life. There are successful gardeners, successful dentists and successful musicians. Each of them may have very different things, the dentist has possibly more than the gardener etc. But there are also miserable dentists or lawyers who have all the money they ever dreamt of, but still unhappy.

Find People to Copy
After you defined what success means for you, look for people who are successful in that sense. Find people, whom you like. This means people, where you can say I would like to be like them, to behave like them, to think like them, to live like them. Study them and copy them. Do what they are doing. Over time you will get their results.

Possible Role Models
If you are looking for success in internet marketing, I want to suggest a few people whom you should study:

• Lisa Diane
• Frank Kern
• Mark Joyner
• Mike Filsaime
• Clayton Makepeace
• Jeff Johnson
• Jeff Walker
• Ewen Chia

Take Your Time. Do Research.
These eigth are a good beginning. Look at them, what they are doing, how they behave, their results. Watch them over some time. Suscribe to their newsletters. Read their free materials, watch their videos.
After some time, maybe you find a person, whom you want to copy. Or one of them leads to to somebody, whom you want to copy. Then just copy the behaviour, thinking, actions of the person, who is like you want to be.