Hello Dear Friend,
Welcome to the Sunday edition of the Things I Wish I Knew Earlier (TIWIKE) Newsletter!
Here are three ideas on entrepreneurship as an antidote to tyranny for you to ponder in the coming week.
TIWIKE #1: Tyranny is when other people control your life
Washington D.C. is one of the most inspirational places on Earth.
A couple of weeks ago, I snuck away to be a tourist in our nation’s capital, and I came away fired up with pride to be an American. Monument after monument is dedicated to memorializing patriots who spent their lives in service of our Grand Experiment of self-governance. MLK, FDR, JFK, Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson are all represented among many others.
My favorite by far was the Thomas Jefferson memorial, which looks like this:
Encircling the dome is a quote that hit me in the gut. You can see most of it in the above photo.
“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”-Thomas Jefferson
This is the sentiment that gave rise to our nation, a visceral hatred of tyranny.
But what is tyranny exactly?
Stated simply, tyranny is when one person controls another person against their will. The central insight that differentiated America from all other forms of prior government is the recognition that the people running the government-whether they be kings, presidents, or dictators-are people just like those they govern. It makes no sense for them to exercise arbitrary power.
So these great men, our Founding Fathers, risked it all to flip the middle finger to tyranny by creating a whole new kind of government, a government for the people and by the people.
And it is our responsibility to make the necessary sacrifices to keep it alive.
In a letter to William Stephens in 1787, Jefferson summed it up better than I could: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Tyranny is the great enemy of the idea of America and the rightful enemy of every true American patriot.
Tyranny is when other people control your life.
TIWIKE #2: The American Dream is alive for entrepreneurs
Notice Jefferson specifically pointed to tyranny over the mind.
How do governments, and other kinds of institutions, establish tyranny over the mind? Some call it spiritual warfare. Others call it “controlling the narrative.” Regardless of what you call it, the way it works is simple.
They tell you a story about how reality works.
Then they change the rules to reflect their story.
Then they punish those who step outside the rules. It’s uncomfortable to recognize, but there are forces at work inside our American government who hate liberty and want nothing more than to rule American citizens like kings and dictators. Those are the same people who are pushing the story that the American Dream is dead.
They say that America is systemically racist and sexist, that there are whole groups of people who don’t have access to the American Dream.
But it isn’t true.
The American Dream isn’t dead; it’s just evolving.
The American Dream I grew up with isn’t just dying-it’s already dead. It said that you get good grades to get a good job at some corporation to work for 30 or 40 years to fill up a retirement account, buy a house with a white picket fence, and fund your family’s life.
The whole idea behind the American dream is that our country is a place where you can come to work hard and through that hard work change the economic reality for your family. You can move upward in the social hierarchy.
That remains true.
Just not in the same way.
The American Dream is alive and well for entrepreneurs. Regardless of your gender, race, sexual orientation, or economic starting point, if you start a business and grow it overtime, you can achieve the American Dream. You can make your own way in the world. And you can raise up yourself and your family into different tax brackets.
The American Dream is alive for entrepreneurs.
TIWIKE #3: Entrepreneurship is the most effective antidote to tyranny
Governments have a hard time telling entrepreneurs what to do because entrepreneurs generate their own income and do not need permission from corporate overlords.
In the years since the Covid lockdowns, it has become obvious that Covid wasn’t so much an outbreak of a dangerous pandemic as much as it was an outbreak of authoritarian tyranny. A tyranny whose main goal was to generate billions of dollars in profits for pharmaceutical companies with mandatory, experimental vaccines.
So if you worked for the government or you had a corporate job, the government could literally force you to inject yourself with an experimental concoction by threatening to take your livelihood away.
But guess who didn’t have to take the vaccines? Entrepreneurs.
The particular kind of tyranny that we are fighting in our modern time is a collusion between our government and corporations (which is the the very definition of fascism, by the way). The government has turned many large corporations into private arms that do its bidding and dirty work. But when you don’t work for those corporations, then you find yourself in a much better negotiating position with your government.
This is why entrepreneurship is an antidote to tyranny.
And that is why I want to spend my life encouraging entrepreneurship as a career path.
As many of you know, we are in the middle of the beta cohort for my Big Bad Plan Challenge, which is designed to help aspiring entrepreneurs develop written, comprehensive plans for their business and life. I have learned through the first week that this Challenge is just one aspect of a broader movement that lowers the barrier to entry into entrepreneurship as a career.
I’m calling it the Bad Plan Movement.
And by simply being a subscriber to this newsletter, you are part of it.
So thank you. It is easy to look at the large-scale trends and forces at work across the globe and feel helpless to change the direction. But the social world is just made up of a bunch of adults like you and me who are making decisions about what future to create.
When I look back on my life, I want to know that I did everything in my power to fight against tyranny so the world my children and their children get to live in is a world where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is still possible.
The Bad Plan Movement is the best way that I know how to fight that good fight.
I have some big plans for this movement, and if I can make even a fraction of those come true, then you will get to look back and say that you were there in the very beginning, that you were on the good side, that you did your part to fight the good fight. I can’t wait.
Entrepreneurship is the most effective antidote to tyranny.