career Archives - CLIPPING CHAINS

March 28, 2024March 28, 2024

A Therapist on Satisfaction in Sport, Life, and Love

If you haven’t noticed, the concept of achievement and even competitiveness has weighed heavily on my mind as of late. A gift of the nontraditional life is the opportunity to step back and see the world around us with a degree of unusual clarity, far from the treadmill. For years I valued athletic and professional progress in ways that weren’t making my life better, but I thought they were. I searched for and implemented solutions to the wrong problems. Meanwhile, what truly mattered—mainly my relationships—withered on the vine. The journey toward rectifying these tendencies continues today.

My guest today, Lincoln Stoller, is a former mountaineer who now specializes in psycho-, hypno-, and neurofeedback therapy, in tandem with numerous other counseling and coaching services. Lincoln holds a PhD in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics from UT Austin, including a post-doc assignment at UC Berkley. Lincoln eventually moved from quantum physics to create a management and automation software platform for businesses, learned to build Norwegian log homes, traveled and lived abroad in far-flung foreign lands, and is even a certified pilot. To say Lincoln lives well outside of the bounds of normalcy is probably a half-truth at best. As he says in the interview, we should “just keep doing out-of-the-box stuff. And if people aren’t calling you a little crazy or a little nutty, then you probably aren’t exploring enough of the boundaries.”

Today’s conversation revolves around the high-risk potential of hard-charging performers and achievers, whether they exist in sports, business, or other areas of life. While these individuals hold our collective attention and admiration, Lincoln outlines how their psychological roots run shallow. They often struggle to stay satisfied with themselves or those around them. Lincoln might even say he holds an anti-hard-man philosophy. I think you’ll see why.

February 28, 2024February 29, 2024

Four Years of Financial Independence: The Slow Growth

For four years I’ve watched something slowly bloom. In my old life, the “before time” you might call it, I moved from task to task. If I wasn’t working, I unknowingly made a practice of turning recreational or hobbyist pursuits into something that, from an outsider’s perspective, looked an awful lot like work. Goals and accolades were everything, and the more quantifiable, the better. But the farther I’ve separated myself from this life in space and time, the more clarity I’ve gained.

Grasping for metaphors, I was tempted to explain this budding awareness as a slowly growing flower. But for perhaps all the wrong reasons, I hesitated to describe my growth and awareness as floral, preferring to drop the metaphor. But I can’t quite shake it, because I have watched something slowly grow. It’s not me that has bloomed–again, all the wrong imagery–but it is the world I could not see then. I could not see the flawed logic buried in the cold and wet earth because I identified with it. It was my life, so I could not reject what protected me. And four years later I’ve watched something slowly take root.

January 29, 2024January 28, 2024

A Unique Form of Real Estate Investment in a Tough Housing Economy (with Michael Farnsworth)

If you follow economic news at all, you’ve taken note of the changing conditions of the American housing economy in the last few years. First, high demand, low supply, and cheap debt fueled an extraordinary (and unhealthy) price surge. In response, the Federal Reserve ratcheted up interest rates to cool an overheated economy in the wake of pandemic-related disruptions

In years prior, economic conditions supported a vast proliferation of real estate investment. Individual investors to multinational corporations scooped up properties across the country for cheap. The returns were fantastic. But in my mind, those days were decidedly over.

When my guest today, Michael Farnsworth, discussed his novel concept of real estate investment, I was all ears. Do many of the real estate investment rules-of-thumb still function in a world of 7%+ mortgage rates and all-time high prices? Is now really the time to start a real estate investment portfolio? Is this even the time to buy a personal residence? And when it comes to short-term rentals, what are the ethical considerations for local economies and community fabric? We cover all this and more in today’s episode.

January 8, 2024January 9, 2024

Facing the Rest of the World with a Nontraditional Lifestyle

When I left my corporate career in early 2020, I didn’t fully understand the ways that I would, in later years, slowly become decoupled and desynchronized from a society that values hustle, status, and self-worth generated to a large degree around our career titles. You’ll read the same thing repeatedly on the internet: Ignore the haters, do your thing.

But when I actually sit down and talk with those who are living a similar nontraditional lifestyle, regardless of their financial position, I find that the tidy internet talking points leave many of us dissatisfied. After all, humans are one of the most social species on the planet. We shouldn’t be surprised by the difficulty in overriding instinct, to go against the grain of what the herd values most. My thinking has evolved dramatically on this subject in recent years, so let’s dig in.

December 26, 2023December 25, 2023

“The Rewards of Being in One Place for a While” (Meghan Walker and Callan Cooper)

By popular demand, I’ve decided to extend a travel series centered around the topic of building community or maintaining our need for social interactions when away from home. Community building is especially complicated when abroad, where cultures and languages vary considerably from our own. My guests today, veteran travelers with considerable expat experiences, are perfectly suited to discuss this topic.

Meghan Walker, a previous guest who writes at awaytofi.com, spent many of her formative years living abroad in Kenya and New Zealand. Her husband, Callan Cooper, is an expat living in the United States from New Zealand, where they met. Meghan and Callan joined me in my home in Colorado for a rare in-person interview, where we discussed in detail the beauty and challenges of international extended travel, careers, evolving travel philosophies, and financial tactics that can have you living a similar life much sooner than you think.

December 4, 2023December 3, 2023

Tyler Karow: The Tiny Future of Affordable Housing

I’m a little unsure of the best way to frame this introduction. In some ways, this is a story of embracing climbing for all the right reasons. Pursuit of technical mastery and love for the outdoors over the gamification of grades and emphasis on physical training. On the other hand, this is also the story of early adulthood in the modern era. The narrative to pursue something like climbing full-time is strong in the outdoor world. But most I encounter eventually find that climbing alone leaves us yearning for meaning and purpose. My guest today, Tyler Karow, spent nearly three years on the road pursuing climbing. Today he balances considerable climbing achievements with a secondary passion for building and a desire to be a part of the solution to America’s affordable housing crisis.

Karow is a 29-year-old climber known for his big wall accomplishments in Yosemite, Patagonia, and around the globe. His resume includes a ground-up free ascent of Golden Gate (5.13a) on El Cap, and Yosemite’s Triple Crown in under 24 hours, only the eighth time this feat has been achieved. Notably, Karow climbed the Triple while working a full-time (plus) job. He holds a B.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Southern California and is a licensed civil engineer and general contractor. With this background in engineering and construction, he envisions a career helping to build prefabricated tiny home communities. This emerging approach to construction helps to reduce the cost of new housing and more efficiently add supply to a stressed housing market.

This episode is an Oreo of sorts, with a focused discussion of Tyler’s climbing achievements and work/life balance in the beginning and end. The middle of this discussion takes a deep dive into the affordable housing crisis, the complex nature of new construction, and Tyler’s vision for the future of American affordable housing.

September 25, 2023September 24, 2023

Dr. Jim Dahle of the White Coat Investor on Building the Ideal Life

Jim Dahle is the founder of the White Coat Investor, a widely consumed personal finance and investing blog and podcast specifically designed for physicians and other high-income careers. What Jim created in 2011 as a simple blog has grown into a multi-media empire that now employs fifteen people and hosts content from a range of columnists.

Jim has cut back from his full-time (plus) emergency physician career and White Coat Investor responsibilities to focus on what makes life worth living, and that’s where I wanted to pick up this conversation. Jim is a climber, husband, and father of four. Today we discuss how he’s managed to step away, at least slightly, from his hard-charging career and blogging days to what he’s now describing as his ideal life.

September 11, 2023September 10, 2023

The Great American Student Loan Debt with Emma Crawford

In America, student loan debt has exploded over the last twenty years, with the average inflation-adjusted federal loan debt per student rising from under $29,000 in 2011 to nearly $40,000 in 2020. Students and their parents are paying an increasingly costly price for college education, outpacing growth in expected starting salaries.

After more than three years, loan payments are coming due again after the expiration of a Covid-era forbearance program put in place under President Trump and extended under President Biden. My guest today, Emma Crawford, is intimately familiar with student loans as both a borrower as well as a former university aid advisor, and now as a financial planner.

Emma Crawford is the former Director of Financial Wellness and Financial Aid Advising for the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. She holds the Certified Financial Planner (CFP) designation and is a fee-only financial planner for Perk Planning, based out of Madison, Wisconsin. Emma joins me on the show today to discuss the evolving and complicated world of student loans for the first two-thirds of the show. The final third of the interview is dedicated to discussing the equally convoluted world of financial planners and advisors. We discuss the nature of fee-only advising and who may find this type of service appropriate.

July 31, 2023July 30, 2023

The One Time to Be Average with Dave Rosen

Dave Rosen is a climber and ophthalmologist in his final year of residency. And Dave grew up like so many of us: broadly exposed to the importance of money and taught a thing or two about saving, but investing was a foreign concept and his lack of knowledge was a source of shame.

While Dave skimmed over it, he’s no slouch as a climber. He has bagged a pile of double-digit boulder problems up to V12, sent 5.13c, and developed numerous boulder problems, particularly in the South Mountain area near Phoenix where he and his wife lived for medical school for four years. He is hard-working, analytical, and pragmatic in his career and life approach.

In this conversation, we discuss how Dave found climbing from the world of canyoneering, his early exposure to money and how that has markedly changed in recent years, the constant pull of greener grass, working backward from an ideal lifestyle, and the ethical and moral dilemmas of early retirement.

June 12, 2023June 13, 2023

Mike Piper: Down To The Essence Of Smart Money Management

Mike Piper is a CPA and the creator of the Oblivious Investor blog, where he teaches a philosophy of simple and low-maintenance investing.

Mike’s simple philosophy distills down to three primary principles:

Diversify your portfolio
Minimize costs (commissions, fees, mutual fund expenses, taxes)
Ignore the noise.

Mike began his career as a CPA before realizing he could support himself by writing books. Surprisingly, he left his secure job during the 2008 financial crisis. He has gone on to publish seventeen books and is widely considered an expert in social security, tax, and a number of other personal finance topics. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Morningstar, to name a few.

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