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

Valiant Growth Now a Blogcast

03/28/17 • 8 min

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

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?

Previous Episode

0050 - How To Make Your Productivity System Easy To Run - with Jake Desyllas

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 through these steps will give you the confidence that you aren't missing anything:

1. Clear the decks

Get all the emails, text messages (known as Inbox 0) and social media that slipped through. Everything relevant must be in your capture system (notebook, index cards, Evernote etc.) before you start. Remove old notes from the system itself if needed.

2. Look at your projects list

A project is anything composed of more than one step. It's really helpful to keep a list of these so you know everything's moving forward. Looking through it weekly will generate most of your next week's tasks/to-do list.

3. Review your ideas

Now that the past and present is under control, look towards the future. It's well-worth keeping lists of someday/maybe projects, to-read lists, ideas lists - this where things will go when the inspiration strikes for things you'd like to do in the future. Check on these as part of your weekly review - maybe the time is now for something and exciting!

Jake likes to do step one and then step two and three separately, since they require a different mindset - one is a more administrative kind, the other a more strategic and visionary one.

Making Sure You Actually Do It

As with everything else, habituation is very powerful (maybe necessary) to get this done week by week. Pick the time and day that makes sense in your life. This could be a great time to put some great work music on, or even go to a nice cafe (just don't tell me about it).

I like pleasant company, so I've got a running weekly appointment with my buddy Nick Hazelton the Anarcho-Yakitalist where we do a large part of this process together. This has been by far the most successful approach that I took and it made not missing weeks really easy.

You can get some inspiration on how different people do this by looking up the early episode of the Getting Things Done Virtual Study Group podcast.

Not Just Weekly

Weekly reviews aren't meant to cover everything. Different intervals make sense for different parts of your life.

Consider including a quick morning recap into your start of the day where you overview what you can accomplish today (if you are going to the city, check to see everything you need to get done there etc.) and pick out the most important tasks of the day (three is a popular number).

Jake's and I both do financial reviews on a monthly basis - might as well have that in your system too! I also have month plans, prepared near the end of the month for the next one.

Yearly reviews are also a very powerful tool for big picture overview. Even the dreaded New Year's resolutions are a form of recurring review.

Better Tools

There's always a risk when adopting something more complicated. In Jake's own words:

“when you feel you can trust them" (19s)

That said, there comes a time when you want something more organized and efficient than a simple notebook or note capturing software. In some cases, it's about learning to use what you have better, other times it's about learning about something entirely new.

Paper-based

I'm not a big fan of paper (my handwriting comes out pre-encrypted) but many prefer the simplicity, ease of use, and even elegance that comes with a physical, paper-based system.

Probably the biggest downside of simple using a notebook is that is very hard to quickly and easily overview what's going on. Notebooks...

Next Episode

0051- Politics Don't Matter (When Compared)

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. It’s old news. It’s passé. It’s the uncool half-brother of “Taxation is theft”.

There are some cool arguments for this. I don’t think you should check them out though, and I’ll tell you why in a second.

Back to 2016: The belief didn’t save me though, nor did it save many others from getting caught in the hype. This is more popular outside of election years to begin with, and 2016 seems to have been a particularly bad one too.

I should’ve focused instead on...

Political Action Doesn’t Matter

As in getting involved in politics is a waste of time. This one is a little bit more niche, a little bit more contentious. It’s the closet of the libertarian house, or the attic.

It’s where you retire to when you have had enough of the party downstairs, and want quietly scroll the Facebook feed on your phone.

I knew this one too. I had no intention of going to protests, writing to my local politician or donating to her. I cared little of party politics (I did furtively check the election results of a few libertarian parties in some countries)

And yet this perspective gave me no protection from the non-actionable, because...

I Was Still Up To The Neck In It

I’ve been using a light tone so far, but I don’t want to trivialize this: I really, really wanted the government the go away. I was angry about money being collected at (an implicit) gunpoint. I felt sad about the waste of resources and of human lives in war, in the countless failed projects and initiatives. I was stunned at how many programs that were supposed to do good had had the opposite effect. I still feel these emotions.

Though I was apolitical in some ways, politics still very much pervaded my thoughts, my conversations and my decisions.

My learning, however, was chipping away at my enthusiasm. Stoicism made me focus more on what was and wasn’t within my sphere of control. Nonviolent Communication helped me connect with people of different views, and I suddenly could see the evil enemy no more.

And Then It Clicked

In the bath tub that night I realized how much the past 12 months sucked. I had ran around in circles and achieved nothing. I’ve missed great opportunities to connect with, be taught and teach with all the people I’ve talked politics with. I’ve alienated those who had different views and built a false sense of belonging with those who had the same.

I’ve wasted their time. I’ve wasted my time.

I hadn’t released a Valiant Growth episode in three months and yet my concern was what some guy on a different continent thought about the value of political action. (My lull of productivity wasn’t because of this, but I sure could’ve used that focus and emotional awareness to see what was going on instead!)

I had no plan of action of moving on from my job, something which I really wanted to do, but was losing sleep over how another guy thousands of miles away had changed his public views on the election of a country neither of us lived in.

I had mislived.

The Things That Matter

I made a mental list in the bathtub that Wednesday night. I asked myself

“When I wake up tomorrow, what would I rather see have happened?”

Never mind what I can do. Just what would be the biggest gift the Universe could give me. Guess what.

The government ending wasn’t even in the top 20.

Sure, it may take half my income, if I’m really not careful. Well, some people increase their incomes tenfold in a year (and then make...