Valiant Growth: Earn Self-Esteem, Build Amazing Relationships and Achieve Freedom through Radical Personal Development - 0053 - Put Your Self-Study on Steroids: The Interview Learning System (with Shane Radliff)

0053 - Put Your Self-Study on Steroids: The Interview Learning System (with Shane Radliff)

08/23/17 • 43 min

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

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 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).

It lacks guidance

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.

The speed of learning is unpredictable

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.

It’s too easy to abandon

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?

The Study of Direct Action

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?

The Interview Learning System

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...

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...

...As well as hard to demonstrate

It lacks guidance

The speed of learning is unpredictable

It’s too easy to abandon

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?

The Study of Direct Action

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

The Interview Learning System

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

Previous Episode

Valiant Feedback 001 - Staying Frugal When Going Out, Looking For Better Governments

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. Within an environment full of dysfunctional powerful people, libertarianism and anarchism are very coherent and life-supportive psychological defences. Yet if powerful people in your environment are functional and benevolent, you can live very well despite their presence – and in fact gain from nurturing, support and resources that they can provide.

We become more dependent upon independent judgement and extensive individual boundaries when we cannot trust others to use their power benevolently. So perhaps another alternative, which is also actionable, is to move to a part of the world which has a collective and authorities that you can trust to reliably support your and other peoples’ needs being met. An additional actionable step is to work on your skills of self-expression, developing the ability to approach and communicate with powerful people in a way which is most likely to result in increased connection and better needsmeeting. People who are good at this are often the people who are actually making the world we live in a better place in tangible ways – including moving it in a more socially and economically free direction. And after successfully acting upon these, the otherwise very important libertarianism psychological defence of simply wanting segregation from powerful people (which is what vonu sounds like to me) may no longer be so necessary.

To give an example drawing on what was mentioned in the podcast: I’d be much less interested in homeschooling and unschooling if I could reliably expect schools to be highly functional, needsmeeting, human-friendly places – and in the right part of the world, surrounded by the right people, that may well be possible."

Next Episode

0054 - Why You Want to Exercise and Live Healthy (with Chris Stefanick)

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 Choice Conversations:

What’s holding you back from a healthier life?