Valiant Growth: Earn Self-esteem, Build Amazing Relationships And Achieve Freedom Through Radical Personal Development

Text: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DO0FQdsnsSLtAwSa29g4FdnNT0VVfDQF/view?usp=sharing

A short piece I wrote about the material culture of post-Eastern Bloc, pre-EU Romania that I grew up in. Photo credit: evz.ro, Bianca Zaharescu - It's Bucharest in 1996, I was there too. The text and some pictures: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rmy_kTZDiThV0G6msDEufoyX_-05M65tJVM_fCsG2TY/edit?usp=sharing

One year and one month ago I’ve set out to become a full-time entrepreneur. I have not succeeded. Can you learn from my mistakes? This is the final episode of Valiant Growth, season 1.Photo credit: daivinandleah via Flickr

I've been thinking about talking more about my story with breaking contact with everyone I knew three years ago and completely resetting my life while coming to England. I especially wanted to talk about the painful mistakes I have made in talking to my family and friends following my understanding of the Freedomain Radio relationship strategy. I just couldn't figure out the personal development garb to dress those in to make them fit into the Valiant Growth format. They might make it into an episode eventually, but until then, my friend Nick Hazelton solved that problem for me with 2+ hour long interview/talk on Yakkin with Nick.

I’ve been an ultra-sedentary person for most of my life and had zero interest in anything to do with physical health. But I am doing more now than I did before. And my friend Chris Stefanick can claim some credit for that. He showed me a vision of health that’s focused on living a better and longer life, having more fun, having fewer limitations, of joy in movement and nutrition and self-care not because the end result impresses someone but because it’s a path of self-mastery, of learning something new for its own sake. This is a talk with Chris. My aim is to nurture your intrinsic motivation to live a healthier life and show you some potential paths you can go down on. In the manner with which you might have gotten accustomed to on this podcast (and then gotten unaccustomed to over the past few months), we’re going to focus on the why and on strategy, and also on how to do it without a lot of (or any) financial expense or extra stuff. Take the next action by listening to one of the following episodes of Choi

It’s amazing to live in an age where all knowledge is at our fingerprints! You don’t have to transcribe ancient texts at candlelight in a monastery or do questionable menial tasks for a guru anymore to gain access to some knowledge. I had a two-hour round trip commute to the university - I quit midway when I figured out I could learn more than what a whole day in higher education had to offer by simply reading a business book in the same time. That said though, self-study has its fair share of challenges. Some of the reasons we’re not all already Internet-fed renaissance man geniuses are as follows: It can get lonely… Reading books, listening to podcasts, taking online courses - neither of these is a particularly social endeavour. Other than the most extreme introvert, most of us can benefit a lot from the synergy of group learning. ...As well as hard to demonstrate While degrees are dime a dozen these days, they still prove that some level of effort was put into their achievement and that something similar c

How do you stay frugal when friends want to go out? And can you actually find better groups and collectives instead of building independence? I answer these two questions in this extra show. 1: "What do you do when someone suggest for instance grabbing a lunch when you have no desire to spend even on drinks but find it hard to say "well, I do not wanna spend money on food or drinks"?" 2: "I find myself really valuing from the attention paid to underlying needs in this discussion. It makes me wonder: How much libertarianism develops as a result of experiencing authority figures / collectives that are uninterested in or antagonistic towards your needs, where the same authorities / collectives wouldn’t be considered a problem if they were effective at meeting needs? If authorities and collectives are antagonistic and harmful, you just want them to back off so you can get on with your life – which is the essence of being a libertarian. And certainly many of us have had experiences that fit into that category.

In 1974, a man disappeared somewhere in the Siskiyou Mountains, never to be heard of again. He wasn’t a tourist lost in the forests - he’s been living in the region for years. He wasn’t a rookie camper overwhelmed by wilderness - he had written several articles on camping and survivalism, based on his own experience of practising these skills. So what happened to Tom Marshall? Letting Go Isn't Free A basic and well-known tenet of stoicism is to stop trying to act on (and worrying about) things that aren't really in your control, or that can't at least be significantly influenced by you. Some of this is obvious and easy: the weather, traffic, the economy, chance. A lot of it is much harder: what other people think of you, bad things happening in other places, the ideas of your friends, politics. I think everybody wants to worry less - it's a massive energy drain, and it really crushes quality of life. Following this thinking does indeed deliver a lot of tranquillity - the actual reward promised by the Stoics.

It was a little past midnight on Wednesday and I was sitting in the bathtub. It was the 9th of November, and I was feeling terrible. I had no idea who the Prime Minister of Romania, the country where I grew up, was. I had no idea which party was in power in the UK, where I had been living for the past year and a half. But I had just spent 12 months following the ups and downs of of the 2016 US elections, a country that I couldn’t vote in, had no real way of living in in the short and medium-term, and hadn’t even visited. A 5 point swing in the betting odds (on average more accurate than polls) could make me feel happy, sad, angry, afraid or confident. Something was very, very wrong.   Outside of this, my general political ignorance was carefully cultivated. I had increasingly been focusing on the actionable, on what I can do in my own life, where I had the most control. You see, I knew that… Voting Doesn’t Matter If you are an anarcho-capitalist, you’ve (not) convinced many, many people of this basic tenet. I

I've become quite fed up with a show notes that had very little value to the listener. So I've decided to turn them into full-blown, stand-alone blog posts! Hence, until this experiment lasts, I am now running a blogcast instead of just a podcast. Are you as excited about this as I am?

So you’ve followed the advice my previous talk with Jake Desyllas and set up your own basic productivity system. You know that a system like that is not a pedantic badge of honour, but is in fact the best way to add actions to your ideals – to LIVE your values. You also know the three components of any successful productivity system: Capture: Get things out of your head Review: Check everything regularly Organize: Put things in their right place You probably are in a happy place - so allow me to flame some dissatisfaction. At this phase, your system can be quite clumsy. That means more effort. More effort is more fragility - will you be able to keep things going when you a hit a lower motivation cycle?   I've invited Jake Desyllas of The Voluntary Life podcast once again to help us sharpen the edges of this new set of tools we are building together. Make Your Reviews Easier How do you make sure everything's covered in your weekly review? And how do you make sure you actually do it? A Handy Checklist Going

Sometimes people tell me: “Philip, it’s all fine for you, but you can’t do this stuff with a family and car based culture”. That makes a lot of sense to me: in many ways, being a single, young person is the easiest way to keep costs on the low end.That is why I was very happy to ask Nicola, a listener who called in about his story on how he biked and lived in his tent in backyards to travel Europe to tell me more on how he, as a married man with a child, living in the sometimes less than hospitable of Montreal, Canada, find ways to work towards financial independence. Housing and transport are the two biggest expenses in a US household, and that is what came up in our discussion too. Transport Nicola has chosen to live within walking distance of his job, grocery store and daycare. He estimates that he walks about 10 km (6.2 miles) each day, which he finds a pleasurable range. Even in Montreal’s -20 °C (-2 °F) winter days, all it takes is a good jacket. In the summer, he uses a local bike share, costing him 55

Imagine that you have a magic marker. It looks like the usual whiteboard companion, but it has secret that only you know about. You see, with this marker, you can go into any store, pick any item off the shelf, and write your own price on it. And when you go to the checkout, they accept your price, no matter what it is, and everybody walks away happy. Where can you get this magic marker? You already own it! It’s called creativity. It’s also called adventurousness. Or flexibility. With those tools, you can name your own price for almost anything, especially travel. In this episode we are talking about a great strategy for frugal travel for the bold and time-rich. Travel is a prominent goal for most people in the personal development community. And while travel in itself isn’t personal development, many people have found the change in surroundings to be a powerful stimulant of creativity, finding new angles on old problems, inspiration and introspection. That is why it’s an important topic for Valiant Growth -

I've started releasing guest appearances I've made on other podcasts. The first one is an interview with Joshua Sheats on Radical Personal Finance about hitchhiking and budget travel in general. I share my experiences and we both go in depth on tactics around hitchhiking, housing, transport and ultralight backpacking. Here are Joshua's show notes: Do you wish to set out and travel but feel like you lack the money? Well, what if you did it anyway and just adjusted your style of travel to fit a more modest budget? My guest today is long-time listener of the show, Philip Frey. A few years ago he did exactly that. He set out across Europe with a schoolmate and they managed to cobble together a very fun trip on a very modest budget! In today’s show we discuss Philip’s experiences and advice for how to replicate a trip like his. I also share some of my tips and ideas for how I would approach a trip like this for myself. Enjoy the show! Joshua Philip’s website: http://www.valiantgrowth.com/ A stand-alone episode t

Early Retirement Extreme may be one of the four ways to quit the rat race on the surface. I think, however, that underlying ERE is a much deeper philosophy. In fact, I’d say that saving a lot of money, investing it and living of the income is a completely optional part of ERE. What this approach has taught me is the value of resilience, independence and living a well-rounded life. Through looking at our needs (and the strategies handed to us by the mainstream to meet them) critically, we can continously uncover new, more optimal ways of life - irrespective of what of what is in our bank account/investment portfolio. A more detailed discussion of the ERE philosophy at http://valiantgrowth.com/e30 Get Early Retirement Extreme The Book at http://valiantgrowth.com/ere Donate to the podcast at http://valiantgrowth.com/support

On the final day of the 21 day ERE makeover (but only penultimate of the series), Jacob addresses a simplified approach to investing, called Dogs of the Dow. Original article at http://earlyretirementextreme.com/day-21-investing-for-early-retirement.html A more detailed discussion of the ERE philosophy at http://valiantgrowth.com/e30 Get Early Retirement Extreme The Book at http://valiantgrowth.com/ere Donate to the podcast at http://valiantgrowth.com/support On the final day of the 21 day ERE makeover (but only penultimate of the series), Jacob addresses a simplified approach to investing, called Dogs of the Dow.

Frugality and high-quality products are not antithetical - you just have to own classics. Join http://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com for ERE specific advice, and http://valiantgrowth.com/community to meet fellow Valiant Growth listeners. Original article at http://earlyretirementextreme.com/day-20-own-classics.html A more detailed discussion of the ERE philosophy at http://valiantgrowth.com/e30 Get Early Retirement Extreme The Book at http://valiantgrowth.com/ere Donate to the podcast at http://valiantgrowth.com/support

A TV (or insert other entertainment technology here) will cost you some money, but it will cost a lot more than that for your growth - if you aren’t aware of what you are doing. But entertainment is not the greatest threat - in fact, for many of you, it may not even be all that significant. The allure of narrow technical skills over broad life skills (personal development) can just as well cost you in terms of your long-term happiness. Presentation on personal development (skip intro): https://youtu.be/-k8TQ5oXSUc?t=17m50s Original article at http://earlyretirementextreme.com/day-19-getting-rid-of-your-tv-addiction.html A more detailed discussion of the ERE philosophy at http://valiantgrowth.com/e30 Get Early Retirement Extreme The Book at http://valiantgrowth.com/ere Donate to the podcast at http://valiantgrowth.com/support

Self-imposed constraints (a.k.a challenges) can be a great tool for accelerating your frugality, building your self-esteem, and having fun at the same time. Original article at http://earlyretirementextreme.com/day-18-join-a-challeng.html A more detailed discussion of the ERE philosophy at http://valiantgrowth.com/e30 Get Early Retirement Extreme The Book at http://valiantgrowth.com/ere Donate to the podcast at http://valiantgrowth.com/support

We throw things out too easily sometimes. The good news is that you can become a handyman perhaps more easily than you’d think. And perhaps one day you can start building your own things! Original article at http://earlyretirementextreme.com/day-17-maintaining-andrepairing-things.html A more detailed discussion of the ERE philosophy at http://valiantgrowth.com/e30 Get Early Retirement Extreme The Book at http://valiantgrowth.com/ere Donate to the podcast at http://valiantgrowth.com/support