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Take Advantage of Decentralization
Tesla. Bitcoin. Brexit. Uber. Youtube. 3D Printers. The business landscape has been and continues changing rapidly under our very feet. There has never been a better time in human history to give up your cubicle and strike out on your own. Technology has boosted levels of individual productivity so high, that a resourceful person can now perform workloads previously reserved for whole departments or even small companies from a generation ago. You’ve gotta leverage that advantage to achieve your own goals. Be your own business. Be your own boss.
What Does It Mean For You?
Be your own boss
Let’s start with the obvious one. But it should be noted that being one’s own boss is much more than not having someone tell you what to do. Being your own boss is controlling your own time. To some, the power to decide when to do things is just as important as deciding what needs to be done. Working a 9-5 means if you ever completely finish a task, you have to find more work to do. Probably not hard – you may have an infinite number of tasks that always fills at least as quickly as it empties. OR, if you really can’t find any, it means faking being busy and trying not to watch the clock, all the while thinking about what you’d rather be doing. Too much of that can be soul-crushing. Working for yourself means filling that time with what you think is best. That could mean an invigorating bike ride or a run, some additional productive work, some R&R, or time with the family, etc. But no busy work or faking it. Being boss also means…
Reap the fruits of your own labor
If you’ve worked in a corporate (or worse, government) office, you likely found that except in the extremes of egregiously bad decisions or absolutely spectacular performance, your paycheck stays exactly the same whether you give say a 95% effort, or a 60% one. That can make it really tough to put in the 100% effort, or even a consistent 95 once you’ve been there for a little while. But when you personally benefit from 100%of the work you do, staying enthusiastic about getting things done is a lot easier than if you know it might be marginally reflected on your bonus every 6 or 12 months. Good is owning 100% of your own productivity. Even better is generating a passive income that pays you even while you aren’t working.
Do more with less
Like I said before, there’s never been a better or easier time for this. The dinosaur corporate and centralized model is collapsing under its own weight. It lumbers and stumbles, struggling to keep up with an ever-more fragmented, decentralized and efficient business landscape. Be a nimble entrepreneurial mammal and eat their lunch.
- [Decentralization will be the theme of the 21st century. Politically, the EU appears to be coming apart at the seams, considering the threat of Grexit, the successful Brexit vote, popular support for secession growing in Italy and France are all trends showing a preference for local decision-making over central authority. Nationalism is to Globalism as Individualism is to Collectivism. Media has completely disintegrated with the internet 2.0 as popular bloggers and YouTubers came from nowhere and are outperforming massive media groups with virtually none of their overhead. You also have people like Dave Rubin and Greg Hunter leaving larger media groups to produce their own content. Cable and telecom companies are suffering as Internet companies, Netflix and the like, eat their lunch by distributing content to customers a la carte. None of these trends are showing any sign of letting up anytime soon.]
The largest (though not only) contributor to this trend is technology. Never in history has it been remotely possible for one person to be so productive. The centralized hierarchies of the 20th century are less necessary and in many cases downright inefficient and burdensome today.
Markets are global
Whether you want to disseminate information or sell products,it has never been easier to find and reach your target market. Social media like Facebook, Minds.com, Twitter, and YouTube let you connect to the right base especially if it is a niche, or widely distributed around the globe. This makes passion projects a lot more viable too, bringing you that much closer to making the perfect living doing something you love. A niche for every business, and a business for every niche!
Information is liberated
It might not always be free, but the chains holding back the flow of information are shattered. Not only do you have access to all of it, it’s in our pockets now. For example, I am listening to free lectures from Princeton through coursera on my phone. But it’s 2017, and you don’t need me to go on ad-nauseam about how much information is available online. The simple point is that for super cheap or free you can learn damn-well just about anything. Coding, cooking, small business strategies, physics, stock trading, psychology, pet care – whatever you need to get your venture up and running, all can be learned in your pajamas without spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and 4-5 precious years. Just as important, you can share YOUR information to everyone, and if people like it and want it, you can get paid for it.
Payments are peer-to-peer
If someone likes what you have to offer (products, services, info), they can pay you directly. You don’t need to rely on anyone else. Services like Square, PayPal, and Patreon are all ways for people who like your stuff to get money to you directly. Better yet, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin make those payments immune to fraud and are truly peer-to-peer, making them unstoppable and thus immune to censorship. All of these mean getting paid quicker with fewer or no intermediaries, reducing or even eliminating gate-keeping, fee-taking, counter-party risk and overhead.
Manufacturing? No factory needed
Manufacturing has always been tricky to do on a small-scale because of the benefits of economies-of-scale (the up-front costs of making a thing are spread out over more units, making each one cheaper to produce per unit). But as long as you aren’t trying to compete with Ford, CNC machines and 3D printers offer garage-level solutions to some small-scale manufacturing. Drop-shipping (designing a product and hiring someone else to make, store and ship them for you) is also an option for some small business models that gives you some flexibility.
Income security, not job security
One of the oft-cited benefits of a job in government or big corporation is job security.
[At Aberdeen Test Center, where I used to work for the federal government, there was a new hire who actually punched another employee in the face in the parking lot over morning traffic. He had been on the job less than 1 month. He was not fired. 1-week no pay.]
Traditionally, this has been more-or-less true, but of course, not at all a certainty. In the coming years that “security” is likely to be less of a guarantee than before. The unfathomable amount of debt that governments, both federal and local, have shouldered is going to catch up to them and they may have no option but to cut benefits, pensions, and even jobs. We’ve already seen the shadows cast by these debts emerge a few times with debt-ceiling and “looming government shutdown” circuses during the last presidency. Be sure that those problems are not solved and we’ll see them raise their heads again, worse and more frequently. Likewise, the problems in the US economy which led to the 2008 crisis have not been meaningfully addressed. If the wrong set of circumstances arises again, many people would find themselves out of a job again, with very little power to change that.
However, if the same rough macroeconomic circumstances disrupt your own business, you have the helm – you control your destiny. You can choose to weather the storm, adapt, or in the worst case – close up shop. But compared to being let go, you’d be in a much better position because you are not reliant on being re-hired in a down economy. And you are already in possession of most or all of the skills required to begin a new venture, regardless of it being out of necessity or by choice.
People who see trends before everyone else and act on them ride the momentum of those trends and gain the biggest advantage from them. It won’t be long before the world starts to get wise to the possibilities of combining so many disruptive technologies; possibilities that are available all the way down to each individual. In fact, many already are aware and have been making out like bandits for years. The earth is shifting under our feet. Stake out your piece of it.
Today.