4134: Valuable Frictions by Colin Wright of Exile Lifestyle on Personal Growth

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[00:01:04] [SPEAKER_01] This is Optimal Living Daily, Valuable Frictions by Colin Wright of Exile Lifestyle. And I'm Justin Malik, your personal narrator. Hello, old friend. I'm not calling you old. Old stands for Optimal Living Daily. This is where I narrate the best blogs I can get permission from for you. This article sort of talks about how we can get used to difficult things. I thought that was really interesting. So let's get right to another post and start optimizing your life.

[00:01:35] [SPEAKER_01] This article sort of talks about how we can get used to difficult things. I thought that was really interesting. So let's get right to another post and start optimizing your life. I've been living in Kansas for a little over seven months and I'll be here for another four before leaving in pursuit of my next adventure. I decided to move here because the very idea of doing so frightened me. Not in the giant spider crawling up your leg meaning of the word, but more like an incredible sense of discomfort and disconcertion.

[00:02:00] [SPEAKER_01] The idea of having an apartment in the US, having my own furniture, having a car, having all the things I left behind over seven years ago made me shiver. It made my gut clench up. It wasn't that I had anything against these things, but they'd become so unfamiliar, so entwined with the life I lived before I started traveling that I had trouble imagining myself connected to them. I couldn't remember what it felt like to own and maintain a car. I didn't know what kind of furniture I preferred.

[00:02:29] [SPEAKER_01] My lifestyle since leaving LA in 2009 has been immensely flexible by necessity. You can have preferences when you travel full-time, of course, but you're best served by being able to put these preferences aside in favor of what's available.

[00:02:46] [SPEAKER_01] If you cannot find the value, the joy in whatever's offered, and whatever furniture is in the flat you're renting, and whatever transportation you can hire to get where you need to go, you're in for a rocky, frustrating journey. Do anything long enough and that thing becomes your norm. My lifestyle is unusual and filled with unknowns, with surprises.

[00:03:11] [SPEAKER_01] But even such unusualness, such unknowns, can become familiar friends over the course of years. I found that I could more easily picture myself showing up in an unfamiliar city where I didn't speak the language and building a life from scratch there than I could picture myself renting a home in the US, speaking exclusively English, and going to Target.

[00:03:33] [SPEAKER_01] I came to realize that the most challenging, potentially valuable thing I could do in terms of growth was to expose myself to a lifestyle or at least a set of circumstances that would have once been unremarkable to me, to see how I responded to them as the person I'd become. I've lived in the US, rented apartments, bought furniture before, but I was a different person then. How might I interact with these things now?

[00:04:00] [SPEAKER_01] How might I live differently, placed in the same environment as before? I've learned a great deal these past seven months about Wichita, but also about myself, my preferences, my habits, my capabilities, and all under far different circumstances from what had become my norm. I utilize my time differently when part of my day isn't dedicated to learning cultural norms and the fundamentals of a new language.

[00:04:26] [SPEAKER_01] I've also found that some rituals and routines which never stuck while I was constantly in transit provide massive value when I'm waking up in the same bed every morning. I've gained valuable new perspective. I've also had the opportunity to throw myself into projects that wouldn't have been feasible from the road, or at least not to the degree that they are here, with solid ground to stand on, with a place to set up my equipment, and with a few bits of consistent infrastructure I can rely on being present each day.

[00:04:55] [SPEAKER_01] When I started this branch of my journey, I was worried I'd learn things about myself that didn't fit with what I'd suspected and what I'd assumed. I was worried that I wouldn't be capable of being happy if I wasn't always moving, always changing my environment, always exposing myself to a brand new cast of characters and dangers and backdrops. I was worried that I'd perhaps become hooked on novelty rather than the pursuit of growth and fulfillment.

[00:05:23] [SPEAKER_01] Fortunately, it seems that, though the mechanisms are often different, I can still prioritize the important things. I can still expose myself to new ideas and people. I can still consistently challenge my beliefs and body of knowledge. I can still grow as a person. I can do so more capably, in some respects, than when constantly on the move. The desired outcome is still the same, I'm just working with very different tools right now.

[00:05:51] [SPEAKER_01] Producing my podcast, writing a new book, and learning to cook have been immensely enjoyable projects I've thrown myself into here. I'm also currently learning to play piano and produce music, which is another intellectual side path I've long wanted to take, but found to be difficult to practically manage while living out of my carry-on. But the major growth here, in my mind, has taken place on an experiential level.

[00:06:18] [SPEAKER_01] It seems silly, I know, that things like receiving mail each day and having a reliable access to Netflix would be novelties worth mentioning. But for me, these tiny luxuries are revelatory. I understand so much more than I did when I arrived here in Wichita. I'm able to keep up with pop culture, and I better understand the priorities of people who live far different lives from mine. I could theorize and approximate this knowledge before, but now I get it.

[00:06:47] [SPEAKER_01] I have an experiential understanding of these concepts. I feel like a part of me that had atrophied and had become two-dimensional is rounding out. I'm learning a lot, and even though what I'm learning are things that many people on the planet already know, like how to play the piano and how to cook, that doesn't make the knowledge any less valuable. Coming back to the U.S. has been a valuable friction for me.

[00:07:11] [SPEAKER_01] It's been uncomfortable, especially at first, but has challenged me, pushed me, forced me to expand my horizons, and faced difficulty. It's not a hurdle to leap, which can be faced heroically, but rather a small, abrasive point of resistance that's easy to ignore, and even easier to leave unchallenged, unfaced. It's not impressive to move to Kansas, but to someone, someone like me, it turns out, it's immensely valuable.

[00:07:44] [SPEAKER_01] You just listened to the post titled, Valuable Frictions, by Colin Wright of ExileLifestyle.com, and I'll be right back with my commentary. Support for today's episode comes from Square, the business platform that helps sellers become neighborhood favorites. Payments, point of sale, online orders, inventory, staff, all in one place, so you can focus on your customers instead of your to-do list. One thing about my favorite gelato place, besides the flavors,

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[00:08:39] [SPEAKER_01] Right now, listeners can get up to $200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com slash go slash old. That's s-q-u-a-r-e dot com slash go slash o-l-d. Get started with Square and build a setup that works the way you do. Back to school starts now. Get long-lasting battery life on the Dell XPS laptop powered by Series 3 Intel Core, so you can work from anywhere.

[00:09:08] [SPEAKER_01] Now starting at $699 with exclusive student pricing starting at $599. Complete your setup with savings on select monitors and must-have electronics and accessories. Limited time deals and free shipping on PCs and more await you at dell.com slash deals. That's dell.com slash deals. Thank you to Colin. This one was more of an autobiographical post, more rare,

[00:09:37] [SPEAKER_01] not the typical kind of article that I read to you, but I thought it was really interesting. This article was written in 2017 at a time when he was already known as the minimalist who never spends a lot of time in one place, always on the move, only for about a year at a time, I think. He would travel from one country to the next, bouncing around with the location of where he's going to live next being decided by his readers.

[00:10:03] [SPEAKER_01] They would literally vote where he would live and then he would just go live there. And he left his home eight years before that, back in 2009. That was when minimalism wasn't nearly as popular as it is today. But back to the article, there's a point in there that is worth mentioning again. He said, do anything long enough and that thing becomes your norm. But what takes it to the next level and that I thought was extra interesting was that

[00:10:30] [SPEAKER_01] he said even his life with how unusual it is of relocating so frequently, living in a place completely unknown to him, so many uncertainties and surprises, even that became a norm for him. So much so that living back again in the U.S. was frightening to him and enlightening. It's funny how that works out. Just shows how acclimated we can get. So with that, have a nice and surprising day.

[00:10:57] [SPEAKER_01] Hope you're having a great morning, afternoon, or evening, whenever you're listening to this. And I'll see you tomorrow where your optimal life awaits.