What The Sovereign Individual Is About, or Why Should I Buy Cryptocurrency

Listen along

You are not alone if you have found your self asking, “Why should I buy cryptocurrency?”

While I was searching for why I should, I discovered a book that eloquently, and correctly, hypothesized what the world would look like after the year 2000 from the perspective of 1998. I imagine it was much like looking over a chasm’s edge.

The Sovereign Individual was written by James Dale Davidson & Lord William Rees-Mogg. I imagine writing with a partner is difficult, but these two pulled it off nicely.

How I came by the book

It is difficult to pinpoint in memory where I found this book suggestion. I don’t use goodreads or other review/recommendation websites. Most times it seems that books are looking for me.

As for The Sovereign Individual, I came across the book while digging through some cryptocurrency forum. The subtitle, “Mastering the Transition to the Information Age” seemed interesting enough.

I’ve written about this kind of stuff before.

I grabbed a copy from Lib Gen on my personal phone and had Librera Pro read the text to me (TextToSpeech, TTS). That’s right, I did not read the book. I listened to it, which just lends to the validity of this book in my eyes… or ears.

What the book is about

The Sovereign Individual is about how impactful technology is on the mega-political structures of humankind.

They, Davidson & Rees-Mogg, examine three major historical turning points:

  • The End of the Roman Empire
  • The End of the Roman Catholic Church
  • The End of the Iron Curtain

With each of these historical turning points, they look at:

  • The context for why these technologies were revolutionary
  • How each new technology fueled changes in human quality of life (for better and for worse)
  • How currency has changed with each era of mankind on account of these technologies

They elucidate that with the invention of the micro-processor humankind has transcended the need or use of the nation-state.

What does their argument look like?

Computational encryption and communication empowers man to write messages that the nation-state can’t stop. And thusly, be able to exercise sovereignty over their liberty.

Need a couple examples?

Unstoppable Messages

I can lock a message with OneKeyChain on my phone that only you can unlock. Or a group of people can unlock. In that encrypted message could be anything. And the desirous-to-be-all-seeing nation-state doesn’t like that.

If you wanted to lock a message that only I can open, here is the pgp public key I generated as an example:

You can lock messages with it and I will be the only person who can open it.

Let’s look at another example.

Uninterruptible & Untraceable Money

Let’s say that you sent me an encrypted message (thank you by the way).

In that encrypted message is an order for something that the nation-state doesn’t want you to buy, but I want to sell you.

As with any transaction, there needs to be an exchange. To fulfill your encrypted order I want to be paid in a way that follows these rules:

  • No outside party can interfere with the funds in your wallet, my wallet, or in transmission
  • The funds can be programmed to dispense once your order is filled
  • The funds cannot be traced by any outside party
  • And the communication of that money must be encrypted as well

As you’d imagine, that sounds like a tall order for you to fill. As a suggestion, a good example of money we could use is DERO.

Here is a wallet address you could send funds to:

dero1qyvqpdftj8r6005xs20rnflakmwa5pdxg9vcjzdcuywq2t8skqhvwqglt6x0g

What I think of the book

The most fascinating part of this book is the survival list they give for how to survive the death of the nation-state.

I re-wrote the list in my own words:

  • Become a customer of government, and go where you are best served
  • Cease and desist being an American Citizen, they are going to tax and regulate you into poverty
  • Live as a luxurious refugee, traveling the globe
  • Do not leave money in any country that seeks to conscript you or your family
  • Reside in a country other than where you have a passport
  • Travel widely to countries that want you and your business
  • Reside in physically secured places, safe from violence (guards, walls, security systems)
  • Hire protection, physical and legal
  • Avoid jurisdictions that were once industrial era giants
  • Keep your focus on the southern hemisphere
  • Get your business on the internet
  • Use encryption
  • Domicile your business in a tax haven/off-shore trust
  • Focus on countries with high income inequalities
  • Earn income as an “agent”, or as a gig worker; think: piece work
  • Study how and where tech is going to replace your skills
  • Generate an income by adding knowledge to products and services
  • Work for the rich, the brilliant, and the skillful – not the State
  • Divest time, money and energy from high consumption countries; trends will change
  • Clearly anticipate the concept of debt deflation
  • Invest in cybermoney (Crypto)
  • Avoid debt
  • Look at the P&L and Balance Sheet of the countries you want to do business in or live in
  • Bring innovations to countries that don’t have, or ever used, those products/services
  • Improve your thinking, communicate your ideas on the internet
  • Stop thinking conventional thoughts or using conventional sources of information
  • Make the very wealthy your customers by bringing them products and services
  • Develop and practice a code of honor from a core set of deeply held values (honor, honesty, etc…)

What I think you will get out of this book

Ultimately, I think that you will enjoy the history stuff. Really captivating how logical the history of it all fits together.

I also think it will give you a reason to think deeply about where you live, and the direction your nation-state is going.

Possibly rethink how you use the internet to your advantage and not your detriment.

But if for nothing else, I would hope that you would consider what having a peer-to-peer (P2P) form of money means for humankind.

How to move the plot of your life forward

The reason that I started studying literature, or books in general, as a young man was simply because that’s just what you did under my parents’ roof.

Now as an adult I read because reading is the fastest way to make marked changes in my life and my understanding of life. It is as necessary to read as it is to go to the gym, go to work, and spend time with my family.

So why do I read mostly non-fiction? Because that’s where the good stuff is.

Okay so you don’t like non-fiction, I get it. It doesn’t have the usual plot and character development you want out of a book. Would you reconsider non-fiction if I told you something that would blow your mind? Of course you would.

You are the character that develops when you read non-fiction, and as you read the plot of your life thickens in light of new information.

Don’t believe me? Ask your self this, when the character of book is faced with some incredible insight, like they cracked open the mystery of the bad guy or whatever, does the story just stop there? No. They go on to take that information and turn it into something useful, like saving the world.

So what I am saying is, your life is in peril. You need to crack open the mystery. You are the only one who can and no one can do it for you. So where to start? Try this here, or here, or maybe even this here.

Engineer Your Process of Sales with Sales Process Engineering

Sales, and the standard sales environment, are a forgone conclusion for most folks.

Some say that sales is not for them, they simply can’t handle the pressure.

If sales is one of the highest paying jobs you can have where a degree or a license are unnecessary to achieve incredible amounts of wealth, you’d think more people would flock to such an opportunity. But they don’t.

Let’s look at why that might be the case.

If you are in a standard sales environment, as a salesperson, then you know you are someone who works on commission. Additionally, more often than not, you are paid on commission only. This means you have to close deals to get paid.

Closing a deal sometimes takes a lot of hand holding and supervision. Then again, as not every sale closes, salespeople compensate for that by taking on volume. The irony of this is that as the salesperson gets busier and busier, the number of customers growing higher and higher, the commissions seem to get thinner and thinner relative to work load. Why? Because the salesperson is free to as they please and end up having to do more account management then meeting new customers.

Does this sound familiar? It does for me as a Realtor. The irony is that as soon as I have a ton of clients from marketing my butt off, I now have no time to market my self and earn new clients. This creates a cyclical effect. Market for clients, hand hold till closed, free up hands, and repeat. And if I didn’t close enough deals in a given time period, it can be a little painful trying to make it through the next cycle. Especially if some or all of those deals fall through.

After a few of these cycles, I felt that there had to be a better way. I mean, there has to be a smarter way to make sales more predictable and more persistent, like a machine. This had been my questions for years, that is it was my question until a few weeks ago. What did I learn?

Do you remember that book I read about Theory of Constraints, or The Goal? Well, after reading that novel I was on a mad hunt to learn about how the theory of constraints impacts the sales profession, or the sales departments of the company. And guess what, I found it.

As it turns out, the modern industrial production complex has completely outpaced the market’s ability to demand product. Sales Process Engineering, as it turns out, is a massive field of study that understands that sales is the bottleneck. As such, sales process engineers structure a system that is designed to act as an effective bottleneck for the capacity of the company. If you are interested in learning how you can implement one sales process engineer’s vision of structuring your sales department, check out Justin Roff-Marsh’s entire book on his website for free at https://salesprocessengineering.net/the-machine/.

Cool book.


What you will learn while reading his book is that when it comes to sales, there are four principles you have to follow to create a sales force the likes of which you have never seen.

1. Centralize Scheduling

When is comes to being in the sales game, the idea of agents having complete autonomy of their actions and time is standard. This standard has been so ingrained in how we conduct business that what I am about to say next will sound like blasphemy: stop paying agents on commission and pay them on salary.

Okay, you are over your shock. When it is assumed that free agents have free use of their time, it is assumed that they have the ability to best manage their time. This is patently false, as we stated above, that as an agent takes on more and more clients, they end up investing more and more time into account management than meeting new people and prosecuting new sales. I can attest to that.

When an agent has the ability to dictate their own schedule, the rest of the company has to comply with what ever that schedule may or may not be. This disallows for the company becoming more efficient or more effective because they would rather avoid the expense of the salesperson altogether. If the company is willing to pay the salesperson on salary, they get to dictate how they use their time, and thereby creating a routine of work of which can be divided among many other team members, which results in greater throughput. The only way this is done is by centralizing the schedule of the team and putting everyone on salary so that it operates as designed.

If you would like to know how I implemented this in my own business: email me.

2. Standardize Workflows

Now, do you have everyone on a salary?

Have you dictated everyone’s hours and what you expect them to do in those hours?

Great!

What you are going to do now is you are going to create a workflow. Yes, that’s right. You are going to create for your sales team a conveyor belt of work the likes of which they have never seen.

If you haven’t done this before, you are going to map out your process of work. That’s right. You are going to draw a straight line and tell the story of how you received a request from a customer to the moment the job is done. Once you have done this, you are going to see how your workflow rolls out and who is involved and what needs to happen at every stage.

The true beauty of seeing the workflow is that it makes for a powerful means of making subtle improvements to how your sales process rolls out for each and every customer. What’s more, is that over time you start how your team can make profound advancements in their sales throughput.

If you have a workflow laid out and people aren’t being paid for their time, only their piece rate (which is what commission is), than you have a workflow where people work when they want to, doing what they want to, for what ever reason they want to. How can you build standards for the company if no one can be held to a standard?

3. Specialize Resources

Once the sales start moving through the workflow and small tweaks are made to the workflow, the team is going to start seeing specialized problems inherent to the workflow. These kinds of special problems will result in development of specialized solutions that can generate tremendous value. Value that can translate to the team, the customers, and even other vendors who want to make use of the solution.

With that said, some specialized resources will be a result of developing the kind of customer base where only some customers will actually fit down the workflow. This improved product market fit will result in greater delivery of service. And, as many can attest, with the help of implementing tools specialized to the problems of these customers and the workflow, throughput will continue to expand.

You are starting to see now that as soon as you can dictate how time is used, like a conductor of a symphony, you will be able to compose music the likes you have hardly even dreamed of.

4. Formalize Management

But here is the thing, once you get to a point where there is immense division of labor, there also is an immense need for management. While it is fun to be part of an organization where everyone is a jack of all trades, a company that has grown to such immense throughput that every single person is doing an individual job, that company has need to ensure that everyone’s work is being managed accordingly.

Yeah, no only truly likes being managed. But then again, no one likes being in the dark about what is expected of them either. Management has a sacred role of making sure that meeting the needs of the customer, as well as the needs of the team, are not cause for the death of the company altogether. This might come as a surprise to many, but companies are made to make money. Companies that make money have an interest in making more money. And companies that are making money don’t want to see a death dive in sales or in staffing.

And here is the thing, the customer isn’t going to know that a company is having a massive HR problem. The customer isn’t going to know that all of the suppliers have dried up. The customer isn’t going to know that the database is destroyed or high-jacked by ransomware. The only time that customers know that there is a problem is when they have made a demand of your business and it doesn’t deliver on its promises. Management is the intercessor between systems, tools, staff, and fulfillment.

Likewise, employees aren’t going to know that your customers have a new set of demands. Employees aren’t going to know that they are operating on a tremendous loss. Employees aren’t going to know that the company is going to be shut down. And employees aren’t going to know that payroll isn’t going through this week. That is, they won’t until it happens. It is management’s job to act as the guardian angel who calmly helps employees understand the new set of expectations from the customer and the company and the future.

So…

Now that you have an idea of what you can do to improve your business, or you at least know where to find an incredible book about improving your sales process (here), I challenge to get to it! And the very first step starts in getting everyone on the same page about how time is going to be spent on the calendar. After that, we can talk about how we are going to act in that given timeframe. Along the way we will become specialized and develop a tremendous insight of how to manage our process. Sounds like an enterprise worth joining in on, huh? Well, if you are interested in learning more, contact me or check out the rad book I read.