But if you can create an honorable livelihood, where you take your skills and use them and you earn a living from it, it gives you a sense of freedom and allows you to balance your life the way you want.

Roddick links economic self-sufficiency to personal autonomy, arguing that earning a living through one’s own skills—so long as it is “honorable,” i.e., ethically grounded—produces a felt freedom beyond money itself. The emphasis is not on wealth but on agency: the ability to choose how to allocate time, set priorities, and shape a life that is not wholly dictated by employers, markets, or necessity. In the context of her broader public persona as a values-driven entrepreneur, the line also implies that work and ethics need not be opposed; livelihood can be a vehicle for self-realization and for living according to one’s principles.