Hey parents join the LA Kings on Saturday November 25th for an unforgettable kids day presented by Pear Deck. Family fun, giveaways and exciting Kings hockey awaits. Get your tickets now at lakings.com/promotions and create lasting memories with your little ones. Radical Personal Finance episode 20. In today's show a conversation with Jake DeSilis, author of Becoming an Entrepreneur, How to Find Freedom and Fulfillment as a Business Owner and host of the Voluntary Life podcast.

So welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast for today. Today is Tuesday, July 15, 2014. And in today's show we're going to be talking about one of my favorite subjects and a subject that I feel is absolutely valuable to just about every aspect of financial planning, which is entrepreneurship.

And I'm going to introduce you to one of my favorite podcasts that I enjoy listening to and the host of that podcast whose name is Jake DeSilis. Jake lives in the UK and he's with us on the line and we'll just get right into it. Jake, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast.

Thanks Joshua, great to be chatting to you. So I don't want to sound too much like an overly adoring fan, but I do want to just tell you publicly and then tell the audience that I have thoroughly enjoyed the work that you have done through your podcast, through your website and then also through the book that you've recently written.

And I am sure that it has not been easy to produce all the content that you have produced, but I just want to say thank you for that and I've really enjoyed it. So I appreciate all the work that you've done to produce the great content over the years.

Awesome, that's great to hear. Thank you. So what I'd like to spend today doing is mainly talking about your book, which is called Becoming an Entrepreneur, How to Find Freedom and Fulfillment as a Business Owner. But before we get into that, and I hope to get into some specifics and talk about some of the ideas contained therein, could you give us just a quick background on yourself, a little bit of an introduction and a quick background on your story?

Sure. Well, I'm from the UK and I did many things in my 20s before becoming an entrepreneur. I did a lot of postgraduate study, wasn't really sure what sort of career path to go into, didn't really even like the idea of a career path and working for somebody else.

And I started a business using some of the things that I'd learned in postgraduate research about pedestrian flows. So I started my own consulting company that was advising on pedestrian movement and we were advising shopping centers and developers and built that company until it got to the point where I was able to sell it, got its profitability and then was able to sell it.

And at that point, I basically quit the rat race and decided to focus on just doing other things that would bring me fulfillment. And part of those things has been learning about other ways that other people have quit the rat race. And that's really what my podcast, Voluntary Life, has covered.

It's been about sort of the key benefits that I can see from entrepreneurship itself, for finding more freedom and fulfillment in your life. And also talking to other people who have pursued their own entrepreneurial ventures and found other ways to find ways to quit the rat race themselves. So that's what I do now.

I'm kind of a perpetual traveler. We're in the UK again at the moment, but we spent most of the last two years abroad, mainly in Mexico and South America. And I'm now focusing on writing. So I've just published the book that you mentioned and I have another couple of books coming out soon.

And yeah, just really enjoying this new phase in my life. I wasn't aware that you had new books coming out. What's the topic of your new books that you're working on going to be? Sorry, could you say that again? What's the topic of your new books that you're working on going to be?

So I've got one that's just about to come out on a website called Liberty.me. And that is a guide for negotiation. It's a book all about negotiation. So this is just a short guide. And I'm also working on a book really about four ways to quit the rat race.

So I think you've seen that presentation that I did and I'm writing that up. So that will be coming out as a book later this year as well. I have seen that presentation. I'll make sure I would encourage if anybody hasn't, I will link to it on your website or your YouTube video at least of it in the show notes because it is well worth discussing.

And I like how in that presentation you pull together the different ideas and you bring together the four ways that you see to get out of the rat race. And those four ways are off the top of my head, entrepreneurship, extreme savings. What were your four ways that you categorized it?

Yeah, so basically unjobbing is one of them. Extreme saving. Entrepreneurship in terms of getting a passive income business. And then selling a business. Those are kind of the four ways that I've seen from people that I've spoken to to find a way to get out of the nine to five and get more freedom.

Yeah, that's exactly right. Now I remember the four categories. So you pursued in your story, it was number four, building a business and selling it. Yes, yeah, exactly. And so in my work as a financial planner over the years, one of the things that I have noticed is that in many ways people have very similar goals.

It seems that most people desire to have more autonomy, more control over their life, more control over their schedule, more control over their direction, and also more financial freedom. And so one of the themes that I've noticed over the years is that in general the conversation about these topics goes to building financial freedom.

And so the idea is, well, I need to build up enough savings so that I can quit the rat race and have enough money to live on a passive income source, with basically having enough savings to sustain my lifestyle. But I've observed and noticed that it seems to me, kind of one of the trends that I see, it seems to me that no one really ever quits the rat race.

So right now, in this sense, no one ever stops working. And so right now you would consider yourself to be financially independent, right? And yet you are probably working a good number of hours per week on your writing projects, on your podcasting projects. You are being productive for a fairly decent number of hours per week.

Is that a correct assumption? Yeah, and I mean, I think, you know, what I would say to that is that productivity itself brings me a huge amount of joy, as I think it does everyone. You know, we get fulfillment from being effective, from getting things done and from creating things and producing things.

The problem, as I see it, is not doing stuff and being productive. It's when you have to work on things that you don't really believe in, that don't bring you fulfillment or satisfaction, or having to work with people who you find, you know, really unenjoyable to be around and so forth.

So, yeah, I do lots and lots of stuff and I definitely see the opportunity that financial independence gives you. Not an opportunity to sort of sit on the sofa and watch DVDs, although I have definitely watched a lot of documentaries about the Roman Empire and who knows what else since I quit.

But, you know, it's actually the opportunity to do whatever you love. You know, that's what life's all about, getting a chance to work on things that you feel truly passionate about. So, I'm a big fan of getting things done and being productive. But, you know, the question is having the opportunity to work on whatever's right for you.

Yeah, and to me this seems to be the missing key that not enough people are talking about. Is that it's not so much that inactivity... So, the thing that I've shared in previous episodes of the show in my observation is that motivated, productive people are the ones who accumulate the resources to be able to retire.

To be able to not have to work for money any longer if they want to. They're motivated, they're productive, they're disciplined, they're savers. They live on less than they make, they accumulate capital and financial resources and then they can deploy that capital to the point where they can be financially independent.

But those types of people, it seems like they almost never quit. I did a show, I talked about Warren Buffet and Bill Gates and Mr. Marriott and all of these people that are multi-billionaires and they never quit because they get meaning and enjoyment out of the work that they do.

On the other hand, there are millions of people throughout the world for whom work is drudgery, for whom work is toil and labor. And many of them, it seems, desperately want to quit the rat race. But they can't seem to, many of them, not all of them, but many of them can't seem to accumulate any resources to be able to do it.

And so what I see is that in financial planning, we should add a whole other step. And the step that I see is that we should forget about the idea of accumulating capital, to only be able to live off of capital at the beginning. And we should first start with the idea of saying, how could I design a lifestyle that fits me, that allows me to have autonomy and self-control and do the things that I want to do?

And that's probably the only real way to do that, is to take control over your destiny and to be an entrepreneur in some way. And so I feel like it's this rather obvious step that we should all be talking about, but for whatever reason, entrepreneurship is not valued in our society and people don't pursue that.

So my question for you, A, do you agree with me? Has that been your experience? And B, why is it that we don't talk about entrepreneurship? Why is this not a business model or a financial planning model that's presented to people as a viable opportunity? Well, I definitely agree that entrepreneurship isn't talked about.

I mean, one of the things that I mentioned in my book is that I didn't learn anything about entrepreneurship at school, and I don't think many people do. And in fact, quite the opposite. I think that part of what happens in terms of the way that we're all socialized, especially in school, is we are taught for over a decade by people who are lifelong employees, and we're given advice by career guidance counselors in schools, by people who are lifelong employees.

And the whole design of the system of compulsory education is set up to, you know, basically put people--to create employees, basically. It's a factory for the production of employees. And so I think the funny thing about entrepreneurship is that even though it's the engine of economic growth, and even though it's absolutely essential to all of the great things that we enjoy in terms of our standard of living and the innovation that we have, and certainly it is respected still in our culture as well, but at the same time, it's actually something that people don't really get much of an insight into unless they're lucky enough to grow up amongst entrepreneurs and have contact with entrepreneurs.

And in fact, you know, it's even worse than that because unfortunately popular culture often shows, insofar as entrepreneurships even get shown, which they don't very much, but when they are shown, they're typically like villains. You know, they're like evil characters who are trying to take over the world and do something dastardly, and they're often shown as being-- if not evil geniuses, then they're kind of like miserly and not people with a lot of heart and so forth.

So I think in general there's not a good basis for people to get an insight into the freedom that entrepreneurship provides, and people do get what I call employee conditioning. You know, you kind of get trained to be an employee, and consequently my experience was--and I think a lot of people have the same experience-- I had to sort of deprogram myself to a certain degree of all of the prejudices about entrepreneurship and about business in general in order to kind of make the jump for myself and decide that I was going to start my own business and go for it.

Do you think that the programming--and I'm curious. So you cite in your bibliography to your book, you cite John Taylor Gatto's book, The Underground History of American Education. And I've read that book and would encourage anybody who's interested in some of this history to go and read it. That book, it's available free online on his website, and if you'll just search you can find a PDF which is a little bit easier to read than how he's released it for sections on his website.

But the book gives you some fascinating history on the American educational system, and you open one of your chapters--I can't remember which one it was-- but you open one of your chapters with a quote from John Dewey-- something along the lines of, "The primary goal of the education system is to create well-socialized people that will fit into the social order." That's my paraphrase of the quote.

Yes. Have you been able to figure out, do you feel that this is just simply something that happened, or do you feel it was maybe more designed? For example, did the facts just develop over time in a natural way, or was it more conspiracy theory? That that seems to be the natural result of our education system, producing willing, obedient factory workers who aren't able to effectively exercise self-autonomy.

What do you think at this point in your research? Well, I think certainly there are some people who are really explicit about it. The John Dewey quote that I quoted, he's very explicit. This is our job as teachers is to mold people to fit in with the social order.

Which is the opposite of individuation. The idea that the teacher's job is to mold you to fit in with what's existing is very explicitly said by him, and there are other people who have made similar comments to that, and sort of educational luminaries have written about their ideology of education being to kind of create a more stable and passive workforce.

However, I don't personally see it as vast conspiracy, in the sense that I don't think a lot of people who are involved in education have any motivation of that kind whatsoever. I think a lot of people who are in education are as much a product of that system as they are sort of perpetuating it.

The teachers who are lifelong employees have no experience of entrepreneurship themselves, and consequently are in no position to provide any kind of grounding in it because that's an alien world to them. So I don't think they necessarily have some kind of hidden agenda, it's just so they're actually products of the same machine.

And so I think it's kind of a mixture of both. Yeah, so that sounds, I'm glad to hear that, because it sounds like you've drawn a similar conclusion to what I've drawn, is that maybe there was some design in the beginning, but as with many things, maybe it's just simply developed organically on its own.

And most of the people who are participating in the system, my brother-in-law is a public school teacher, and he has certainly not set out with this agenda, but yet you can often see the natural result, is that if you go through a lifetime of, and you've experienced this, I think you have a PhD, you've gone all the way through, and so if you go through a lifetime of schooling, whether primary education, secondary education, bachelor's degree, master's degree, PhD, in general, most of your teachers are employees.

And so in general, the employee mindset is going to be what's taught to you. Yeah, I mean imagine what it would be like if instead of that, you went through 10 years of doing placements with entrepreneurs in startups. Imagine that you had like a work placement in a new internet startup, and then you went to some kind of 3D printing startup, and then you went and worked with this entrepreneur that was doing, I don't know, trade to Asia, and then you went to a mining company or something.

Imagine what life experience you'd come out with if that was your experience. You'd be thinking like an entrepreneur because you'd be taught by entrepreneurs, and you probably wouldn't be very good at thinking like an employee. But it's not surprising if you get trained for 10 plus years, and often even 20 years if you go on to do a lot of further higher education, then it's not surprising that you're going to think like an employee, and you're going to see that as the natural order of things, and you're going to consider your career as being going to get a good job, the job being out there, your role being to go and find the job as opposed to the entrepreneur that goes and creates it, creates value where it doesn't exist before.

In the employee mindset, you think about how am I going to get a good job, what do I need on my resume, and you go looking for pre-made jobs because that's what you've been taught basically. Yeah. I've found this in conversations with friends and clients sometimes who are looking for jobs.

I have found it frustrating because a lot of times people will say to me, "Well, I'm thinking about, I'm trying to find a job." "Well, what do you want to do?" "Well, I'm not sure. It's just whatever I can find." And coming from an entrepreneurial background, largely not necessarily, my parents weren't entrepreneurs, I wasn't necessarily trained in that way, but I've spent a lot of time reading biographies of entrepreneurs and learning from other entrepreneurs' story and always been fascinated by entrepreneurship.

I've always had a list of 100 or 200 ideas that I think would be fun to pursue. And it's everything from literally opening a hot dog cart on the side of the road to some big, grandiose ideas, including this show. And it's amazing the mindset change, because it's startling to me when I talk with someone and they say, "I don't know what I want to do." And I think, "Haven't you observed something in the marketplace that's really annoyed you and thought, 'Man, that should be better?'" "Haven't you thought about how you could do this?" But it's an entrepreneurial mindset.

And I have a nine-month-old son, and one thing I think a lot about is, "How can I effectively train my son both to learn the skills of an employee, such that he does have the skill to be able to work with others effectively as part of a team and contribute to an overall purpose that he may not have originally designed, but also how do I train him to have the skills of an entrepreneur so that he can bring that entrepreneurial mindset to any job that he may have and then also have the experience of hopefully building various entrepreneurial ventures over his lifetime?" And it's something that's really important to me is how to integrate that into his educational system.

Yeah. Well, I think a few thoughts come up from what you said, and one of them is that I think a key aspect of that mindset is those ideas you talked about, you know, the hundred ideas, you know, from everything from a hot dog stand to everything else. One of the key things I think that's really important is to also be able to live with the idea that 99 of those ideas are not going to work.

Yeah. And that that's fine. You know, that's absolutely fine. There's a huge amount of trial and error and adjustment and going back to the drawing board and, I think, changing your mind, finding a different way forward involved in entrepreneurship, which, you know, is sort of part of the process, and it can be demoralizing, and it is sort of something-- it's a psychological challenge as well, but I think that that's part of what's necessary in order to really enjoy the process is to be at peace with the idea that you can experiment.

It's okay to go and come up with 10 ideas and then scratch 9 of them. And, you know, at the same time, there is also the perseverance aspects of when you do find stuff that you're able to get some real traction with, of just keeping going even though it is exhausting and it does take a long time.

But the other thing that you mentioned is about your son and, you know, the skills of being able to survive and thrive as an employee as well. And I think the thing that really crosses over and that we all need for both of those is win-win negotiation. I mean, that's actually one of the reasons why I wrote this guide about it is that I think this is another thing that we don't get really towards in school, especially because there isn't a negotiation between-- you know, there's a teacher at the front of the room, and there's a whole bunch of kids sitting there, and their job is to kind of absorb the knowledge or whatever of the teacher.

It's not a negotiation-type environment. And, you know, the key for entrepreneurship as well as for any-- working together on any project is just honing your ability to find win-win outcomes and find ways to negotiate that, you know, benefits you and benefits the other person. So having the empathy to know what the other person needs and finding a way of getting your needs met and the other person, that's so vital in all of our relationships, in our personal relationships.

And if we're working as an employee--and, of course, if we're entrepreneurs as well. Jake, if you were designing an educational plan-- and you can take this either in two directions or incorporate them together-- if you were designing an educational plan either for somebody who is an adult, maybe perhaps a young person finished with their formal education, finished with college, and they're sitting thinking, "How can I develop an-- "how can I realize that the education that I've had so far or that I've been given so far "has not really served me as well as I would like it to be and I'd like to enhance that?" Or if you were designing kind of a system of learning for a child to impart some of the lessons that you wanted them to learn, that you wanted them to have the opportunity to discover, and you weren't going to be constrained by the ideas that are in the formalized school system that they will have in some version or another, how would you design an educational system that works?

What are some of your ideas in that area of life? Well, it's actually something that--I mean, we don't have kids yet, but this is definitely going to be a real practical issue if and when we do have kids. And what I think the fundamental thing for me, the fundamental question, is the difference between something that's voluntary and compulsory.

So, you know, my partner and I have spent the last couple of years traveling around South America, and we have gone to Spanish schools to learn Spanish. And those have been--you know, they've been like learning centers. They've been sort of, you know, for adults, but they've been schools, basically, where you go in classrooms and you learn and so forth.

Now, I voluntarily put myself in that environment. I want to learn Spanish. So I have been sitting in classes, and some of them were great. We went to this awesome one in Buenos Aires, and we also went to some other ones in--we went to one in Mexico that we just didn't carry on with because it wasn't very good.

So we stopped that. But the key thing is we chose to do it, and I think with education, kids are desperate to learn and fascinated by stuff, but they want to learn stuff. And the huge difference is if you try and force them to learn stuff or you basically sell the learning to them in a way that they actually really want to take it in.

And so for me, the key distinction in any education system is is it compulsory or is it voluntary? The moment that education is voluntary, then the onus goes on to the teacher to find a way to make the subject interesting and fascinating and exciting enough that the student is going to want to be part of that.

The student is going to be desperate to say, "I really want to take part in this class or this group," and so forth. And we live in a world now where there's so much education online. I mean, you can go and watch any course in MIT online, and there's all of these paid and free courses for learning any piece of software or anything else, and all of that stuff is voluntary.

And there are people just consuming massive amounts of education because they love it and they want to learn. And for me and for everyone else who's sat, you know, bored to tears in school where you're forced to sit in a subject and the teacher doesn't really have to make the lesson interesting because you've got to be there anyway, that's a huge difference.

So for me, there's really only one principle, and everything else follows from that, and that is the principle that I think education should be voluntary. And if it is voluntary, then the onus becomes on you as a parent or you as a teacher to think, "I really want my kid to learn to read.

How am I going to find a way for this to be something they're going to be interested in doing? I really want them to get basic maths. How am I going to find a way for this to be something that they're going to really want to get into?" And that's hard because there are some boring processes in every learning process.

It's uncomfortable sometimes, and if you want to learn a musical instrument, you've got to sit and practice, and it can be boring, and that's also something that kids are not necessarily that good at because they may not have so much of an ability to see long-term consequences. So that puts, I think, the teacher in a position of thinking, "How can I make this something that's fun, and how can I make this something that's rewarding to get through those less interesting or more boring parts and get on to the stuff that's going to be even more rewarding?" I think a complementary theme you're drawing between education and entrepreneurship is the idea of selling, and I agree with you emphatically on everything that you just said.

And what's interesting to me is I think that instead of forcing, which is essentially what you mean by compulsory, forcing somebody to do something purely because you can, that if we focused more on selling people on the ideas of doing something, then it would be much more effective. But in our culture in the U.S., and I would imagine it's probably similar there in the U.K., that selling is often something that is not respected, it's not admired.

A salesperson is on the lower rung of the societal hierarchy. And yet, all of us, to be effective in life, we need to be masterful salespeople, whether that is to sell our ideas in the marketplace, whether that's to sell people on the political ideas that we have, whether it's to sell our children on loving learning, whether it's to sell our students on the value of studying the subject, or to sell our spouses on why they should be our spouses, or to sell others on being friends.

Selling is such a valuable skill, and yet we have, in many ways, because you have a compulsory system, then we don't necessarily, great teachers, I think, do. They sell their students on the value of learning the subject. And some of the developments that I see is that it seems that in the current era, we need to make a transition from trying to just impart knowledge to trying to impart wisdom and skills.

In that, what seems very apparent to me is that in an age when you have Google on your hip, or connected to you literally within a couple of feet at just about all times, the need to spend a huge amount of time imparting facts and figures is significantly diminished as compared to the need of having skills for how to utilize that information.

So whether it's negotiation, I would rather scrap half of, I don't know, I'd rather scrap half of physical science and institute that with negotiation. Because what's going to do a better, what's going to be of more value in a student's life is to learn skills of negotiation that they can apply in every single day, or to memorize some facts and figures about squid and what the substance of the ink that they produce is.

So I feel, the cool thing is I see it happening across the board. I see this revolution coming because it can't be stamped out. And I think a decade or two from now that the educational system is going to look dramatically different than it does today. And I'm excited about being part of that, hopefully with a financial education, providing it all for free that people can access, if I can succeed in inspiring them and motivating them to absorb the information.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, in terms of what you said about selling and school and so forth, I totally agree. And this is another aspect of, in a sense, the kind of complete insulation that people have from the entrepreneurial world, because you don't get any exposure to the absolute vital necessity of selling as part of win-win negotiation in all relationships in life when you're in school.

You just don't get exposed to that. Teachers don't need to sell. And I think you're right that intuitively good teachers sell, just in terms of trying to find ways of persuading students. They're good at it, but not because of the way that compulsory education is set up, but just because they're good at it.

But when you look at the way that selling is kind of portrayed in popular culture and so forth, it is portrayed as if it's immoral and if it's kind of somehow ripping people off when selling is actually just the active side of win-win negotiation. Selling is the process of persuading somebody of the benefits of what you have to offer so that you can also make a trade with them and both of you can benefit.

And that's what selling really means. Of course, there are people who are shady characters who use selling to try and pursue fraud or so forth, but that's not inherent in the nature of what selling is. And the only other thing I wanted to say in terms of thinking about what you said about school and not learning how to sell, the other thing that's really interesting, especially in terms of the subject of your podcast, is people get no exposure to finance either, and certainly no exposure to what it takes to create and fund a venture and what your options might be for creatively funding a venture and how you might think about what your capital requirements are, whether you really need as much money as you think you need and so forth.

These are all questions that you kind of suddenly find yourself facing if you want to become an entrepreneur. And there's been no analogous learning process in school that gives you training for that. Jake, I want to close with one last concept, and I'd like you to talk about this and then just give an opportunity to share any other information that you want people to have on you and your current projects.

I hope that at some point in the future I can have you back. I know we can't go on for hours and hours today, but I feel like you and I could probably talk for a couple dozen hours and not run out of things to talk about and sharpen each other on.

But you have this idea that somehow that entrepreneurship is inherently moral and that it somehow is good, that entrepreneurship, that business, that it's somehow inherently good. Now, when I look at entrepreneurship, and playing a little bit of a devil's advocate here to set you up for the question, but when I look at entrepreneurship, I look and say, "Well, Walmart's not good.

Look, they're defrauding people. They're treating their workers badly. They're ripping off people. They're producing bad products. Insert company here, whatever this company is." How on earth do you feel that entrepreneurship and this idea of business building and capitalism is somehow a benefit for society? Defend that idea. Well, I think people often look to big corporations like Walmart and so forth when they think about entrepreneurship.

I think it's easier to think of it in terms of the personal level. What are you going to do to make money or to survive or sustain yourself in some way in your own life? And what are you going to do to make the world better and provide something that you think is going to be an improvement?

And the way that I see it, the best that anybody can do with their own lives, for themselves and for others, is to be creative, to produce things that make other people's lives better. And that is fundamentally what entrepreneurship is. That's what I understand entrepreneurship to be. When you are an entrepreneur, you're part of a peaceful revolution.

Your role is to bring new value into the world by making a new product or providing a new service. And it doesn't have to be completely different from everything. It might just be that you realize that there's a particular service in your town that everyone who provides that service is really unfriendly, and you find a way to provide that service in a really friendly way and give people more joy in their lives.

It can be as simple as that, but that improves the world and makes the world a better place. And we know that because the only way that you're going to survive as an entrepreneur is if you're able to provide so much value that people want to pay you for it.

People are willing to give you value in return, and in doing so, they benefit and you benefit. So I see it in a very, very personal terms in terms of what can you as an individual do to make the world a better place. And I see it also as vital that in doing so, of course, we all have to stay in touch with our own ethical values and with our own ethics and act in alignment with our ethics.

And I think that's key. And I'm sure there are many entrepreneurs who have gained influence and power and have been able to exert influence in ways that are unethical, either by finding ways to influence legislation, to give them competitive advantage over their competitors by creating tariff barriers and all these kinds of things.

There's lots of ways that people can do unethical things, but that's not inherent in entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is the process of providing, bringing new value into the world, making the world better for other people, and doing so purely through persuasion, purely through your ability to find out what--empathize with other people, find out what they need and provide to them in often ways that they never even realized that they had that need.

And when I look at the world and see all the things that I think are truly astounding, what we have created as humans, especially since the Industrial Revolution, what we've been able to do to transform our former universal poverty into a process of development that, you know, there is still poverty, but it's so much better than it was 300 years ago.

It's incredible. And all of those advances that we've had in terms of health, in terms of hygiene, in terms of longevity, in terms of our quality of life, the buildings that we live in, the cities that we live in, the transport systems that we use, these are all the results of entrepreneurs looking at problems that people are facing and finding a way to create new value and make the world better.

And that's what I see as the real positive power of entrepreneurship. That's beautifully said. If you're not sold on the idea of entrepreneurship after that, then I don't know how to help. But I agree that's an excellent example of doing a good sales job. If you're interested in more, read Jake's book.

It is highly recommended. I read it last night and this morning, and I really, really enjoyed it. Jake, how would you like people to connect with you? Where can they find you online? What would be the best place for people to get in touch with you? People can find me at thevoluntarylife.com, and you can contact me through that site.

There's also social media and so forth there, and the podcast is available there. You can add it to your podcast catcher, or you can find it on iTunes as well, thevoluntarylife.com. And you can also find links to the book on the tab marked "Books." Thanks for being with us, Jake.

Thanks, Joshua. It was a pleasure chatting to you. So that's my interview with Jake. I hope that you enjoyed the content. I really enjoyed talking with him. I've enjoyed over the years just listening to his podcast, and I would encourage you to go and listen to it. I think you'll find some of the ideas and the concepts that he discusses to be unique and interesting.

The neat thing about podcasting is, with Jake being from the UK, I've heard his voice so much. And the really interesting thing about podcasting is that when I'm reading his book, I hear his voice in my head. I hear his British pronunciations of entrepreneurship, and it's kind of a neat thing to be really familiar with somebody's voice.

In a sense, it's weird, but it's really neat to be familiar with somebody's voice to the extent that you can just simply hear them talking to you as you read their book. So I really heartily recommend it. I am planning to record a separate weekend book review. I've had an idea for a series of book reviews on shorter overviews and commentary on some books that I've enjoyed reading.

And so I plan to record that as a separate episode. And these will be occasional. The ideas will be weekend book reviews. These will be occasional, not on any fixed schedule. But as I read books and I find them interesting and want to recommend them, I'll record them as a separate audio review that you'll be able to listen to.

And I'll try to share some of the major ideas from the book, not in a summary, but just some of the major ideas that I think can be helpful so that if you're enjoying the audio podcast and you don't quite have the time to read, then you can get the gist of the content so that you can have some good ideas.

And if a book sounds interesting, you'll have a good start to go and read it. But I strongly recommend his book. I read it completely and highlighted it extensively. In the show notes, I am going to be listing a link to my highlights. So check the show notes. If you're interested in reading my highlights from the Kindle version, then you'll find that in the show notes, and you can kind of get an idea of some of the content that he shares in the show.

And feel free, please, go and listen to his podcast. Go and check out some of the work that he's done. I'm excited and looking forward to some of the additional content that he's creating in the future on entrepreneurship. And then in the show notes, also, watch the speech that he gave on the four means of achieving financial freedom.

I think he does a good job of synthesizing some of the different ways that can be -- where financial freedom can be achieved. And then notice the themes in his work. Is that -- and notice the theme and the value of entrepreneurship. And I want to read one introduction here from -- one passage from the introduction to this book that is right from chapter one.

And to me, this is, again, kind of the obvious statement that we don't talk about. Many people, as I've talked with them about financial planning, really what they desire is freedom. And so for them, the idea of retirement is an idea of freedom. The freedom to not have to go and work a job that they hate.

The freedom to not have to associate with coworkers they don't enjoy. The freedom to not have to spend hours on the highway sitting in traffic. And that can be accomplished through savings and frugality and investing. It can be. And I'm working on that because I believe that one of the most ultimate levels of freedom is the ability to be a capitalist.

To be able to sit back and live based upon the production from the capital that you've accumulated, from the financial capital that you've accumulated. But in the beginning of your life, you're born with a large amount of human capital. Not quite unlimited, but essentially unlimited. You have an amazing ability to do almost anything that you want to do.

That's human capital. Now, you've got to transform that human capital into financial capital. And then when you have enough financial capital, then you're not required to expend your human capital to support your lifestyle. But the neat thing about that is that there's not only one form of financial capital called savings.

There's another form of financial capital which is income. And that income can be earned in any number of interesting ways. So, I want to read this first section from his book. It's six paragraphs from chapter one. And chapter one is entitled "Breaking Free." It opens with a quote. "Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work.

And in that work, does what he wants to do." R.G. Collingwood. "Entrepreneurship provides the best opportunity for anyone to experience the three most fulfilling intrinsic motivations in life. Purpose, mastery, and autonomy. Purpose is the motivation that comes from having an important reason for whatever you do. It is the conviction that what you're doing matters.

Your work means something significant to you. You have the satisfaction of knowing that you are doing something useful with your life and that your work has value in the world. Mastery is the motivation that comes from a desire to achieve a high level of skill, control, and self-expression through what you do.

It is the sense that you're involved in work that enables you to gain a greater sense of effectiveness and consequently greater self-esteem. Everything you do when starting your own business is a chance at mastery. The entrepreneurial skills that I found hardest to master were also those that became the most rewarding.

Learning how to sell, learning how to create a working enterprise, and learning how to make a profit. Autonomy is the motivation that comes from wanting the freedom to do what you think is best with your life, not what anyone else thinks. Entrepreneurship is the only opportunity to seek financial freedom.

The freedom not to work on anything that you don't enjoy, that is open to anyone. This is the most genuine sense of freedom that you can experience. As an entrepreneur, you alone determine your goals. You have the opportunity to master your own challenges. You have the maximum freedom possible in what you do.

Your own efforts lead to your own achievements and rewards. Entrepreneurship is an opportunity to live a purposeful life without regrets. It is the freest and most self-excu-- and most fulfilling way of life I know. Hopefully you're inspired to go and read Jake's book. I highly recommend it. He talks a lot about fear.

He talks a lot about conditioning, about the things where we're scared to fail and where that comes from and how to overcome those fears. And he talks a lot about his practical experience in entrepreneurship. And he is certainly, in many ways, an inspiration. He worked hard. He took risk in business, built a business, sold it, kind of achieved his number.

And now he's working on projects that are important to him, and he's doing them of his own volition. But yet that's what the original entrepreneurial venture was in the beginning. So notice also again that he is continuing to be productive. This myth that we play for the rest of our life once we reach a certain financial freedom, I believe it's just that.

It's that as humans, I really feel we're driven to be productive. That's our show for today. Again, today being July 15, 2014. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being a part of this show. I trust that you've enjoyed the content. If you have any feedback for me, I'd love to hear it.

I'm learning to be a better interviewer, and that's only going to come with more practice as I continue working at it. But I really enjoy doing these things, and I hope that you enjoy listening. I would be thrilled if you have any feedback for me. Send me an email at joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com.

Today's show notes are all found at radicalpersonalfinance.com/20. radicalpersonalfinance.com/20 for today for episode 20. So any show notes that you're interested in are all going to be found there. If you've enjoyed the content, may I ask a favor? Take a moment. Hit pause on your player. Hit pause on your computer.

And would you please leave me a review in iTunes? It could be good, bad, indifferent. You can say that the content was great. You can say that it was terrible. I don't mind. I'll read that information. I'll take it back in. But that would really help us. The way that the iTunes rankings and all of the podcatching rankings work is based upon reviews.

So the more reviews, the more exposure, the more exposure, the more great guests I can bring on. And so it's all kind of a virtuous cycle. If you would do that and then send me an email letting me know that you have done that, I would thoroughly appreciate it.

And I will thank you personally with a gift of some kind to thank you personally for doing that. It would just mean the world to me. So email me at joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com and consider leaving a review. I would thoroughly appreciate it. In the meantime, have an excellent Tuesday. Go out and live free as you define it.

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