Valiant Growth: Earn Self-Esteem, Build Amazing Relationships and Achieve Freedom through Radical Personal Development Philip Frey - Psychology, Productivity, Personal Finance, Financial Indepen

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 Choice Conversations:
Walking and Strength Training Losing Weight and Mindful Eating Sleep Relaxation Posture What’s holding you back from a healthier life?

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 accomp