Valiant Growth: Earn Self-Esteem, Build Amazing Relationships and Achieve Freedom through Radical Personal Development

Are you up to date on your personal finance knowledge?

Whether yes or no, you will enjoy this conversation with Joshua Sheats of the Radical Personal Finance Podcast, where we talk about why this field is worth pursuing, what the low-hanging fruits are for beginners, what the stages of financial independence are, and whether you should or shouldn’t give unsolicited advice.

I highly recommend checking out Radical Personal Finance at radicalpersonalfinance.com. Maybe begin with looking up your stage of financial independence?

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Website: http://valiantgrowth.com

Why pursue radical personal development, and until when? Is there an end goal?

These questions have been on my mind for a long time, and I finally feel that I have a good answer to them.

The end goal is independence, or even better, becoming self-contained:

“Having all that is needed, in itself.”

We gain great benefits from relationships: the ability to powerfully fulfill our needs and have a support network that is far superior to what we can create on our own. But entering relationships with great neediness is a recipe for disaster.

When we don’t have the inner resources to meet our needs to an at least satisfactory level, our connections go from being a great boost to being a lifeline - hence codependency, jealousy, clinginess. Also, it grants immense power to the other party - and that rarely ends well.

This applies both on the emotional level, but also on the financial one. Abusive partners and abusive bosses stem from the same source: a lack of independence, or a lack of belief in one’s ability. Once you win the lottery, the tables turn. And since that’s not going to happen, you must build skills instead.

Once you’ve developed a base level of emotional support skills, self-esteem, productivity and financial stability, you really have the power to only allow win-win relationships in your life. Where you are the least developed is where you’ll have the worst relationships - hence a broad focus is the richest approach.

You could carry this vision further, and aim for total independence: how about being able to build your own house? Provide your own self-defence? Grow your own food? When you start on the path of radical personal development, these might the 80% of effort, 20% of reward skills. But there may come a time, when more basic levels are stable, when this becomes a priority.

Aim to be free of needs that you can’t meet on your own. Aim to be self-contained.

This is, in it’s essence, a state of mind - but it is earned through building skills. It is knowing how to be gentle and supportive to yourself. It is knowing how to build and maintain a list of valued friends. It is a bank account, or a vault of gold, or a bitcoin wallet.

These are the building blocks of independence, and independence is the end of goal of personal development.

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Website: http://valiantgrowth.com

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.

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:

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.

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 can be expected in an employment situation. “Trust me, here’s a list of books that I’ve read” is not an easy sell (it did work for a few people, however).

For a beginner, staring any complex field of study in the eyes for the first time is a very scary experience. Where do you begin? What’s good material and what is rubbish? What a good level to aim towards? These are often questions that are hard to answer without the aid of someone already knowledgeable in the field.

Take any course, and you have a very clear finish date. You’re going to go and show up x days of the week for y hours, and you’re going to go through z material - because you “have” to. I’ve been consciously focusing on my own productivity, routines, procedures, goal-setting, and motivation for 2 years now, and still, it feels like the stars must align just the right way sometimes for things to be finished in their planned time.

There’s a lot of inertia when embarking on getting a degree or a specialization: once you’re on that raft, you’re probably going to float down all the way, detours or not. Quitting university is hell for a number of reasons. Quitting self-study often costs nothing and involves just you. Wake up, delete a folder, boot a game or Facebook and you’re out. From 21 to 23, I’ve picked up and dropped at least five different lines of study.

Now that these flaws are spelled out, we can probably come up with a number of solutions for each individual problem. But how about fixing all of them in one go?

My friend Shane Radliff had an ambitious goal, and self-study just didn’t seem to cut it. He was aiming to create a comprehensive database of direct action - alternatives to politics, ways to create personal freedom without asking for permission, or being dependent on the choices of large groups of people.The problem? There are at least 25 different approaches, and many of them are not particularly well-documented. He couldn’t just sign up for the course, or buy the encyclopedia of actionable freedom. Collecting all of this information and studying it on his own would’ve put Shane on a long and unpredictable timeline. It would’ve been a lonely endeavour, hard to demonstrate (if that was ever needed), it lacked guidance, and it would’ve taken a great deal of willpower over a long time period - jeopardizing the project’s completion.

In short, it would’ve had all of the five drawbacks of self-study. So how did Shane proceed?

Instead of trying to figure out everything on his own, Shane chose to contact experts and ask them for an interview on their specific direct action strategy. In his place, I would probably have been concerned that nobody would answer - but it turns out that he had a response rate of 85%! (more on that in the accompanying podcast episode above the article)

It seems that people like to talk about their field of expertise. :) And since Shane intended to create a public resource from the get go, he recorded and edited these interviews and released them weekly or bi-weekly on his podcast feed (you can find the whole series on the Liberty Under Attack website).

I’m not going to sugarcoat this for you - this was quite a monumental task. From January 3rd to July 14th, 2016, a significant portion of Shane’s time (and those of his co hosts) was invested in releasing 27 episodes of the Direct Action Series. We were in a mastermind together at the time, and every week, for months on end, the goal he would set at the end of our talks would invariably revolve around recording or editing an episode of his series.

My own experience is that it takes more than five hours to produce one hour of an interview, including research, schedul...

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?