Derek Magill

Brian Aitken is 100% free again

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A few years ago I stumbled across one of the wackiest legal stories I’ve ever seen.

Brian Aitken, a marketing executive and outdoorsman was in the process of moving homes in New Jersey and had his firearms with him in cases in the car. This is a legal exemption under New Jersey state law, but Brian was arrested anyways an during his trial, the judge would not allow the exemptions to be read in court. He was convicted of multiple felonies and given a seven-year prison sentence. Brian was fortunately granted clemency after four months, but he was still a convicted felon.

Whether you want more gun control or less, we can all agree that what happened to Brian was a total injustice. When I heard about this story, I bought 100 copies of his book as part of a fundraiser for his legal proceedings and donated a Glock handgun to his campaign as well. I’ve followed it closely ever since.

I’m excited to say that in January 2018 he was finally granted full pardon, and this past weekend I attended his celebration in New Jersey.

Glockstore made a fully custom Glock for Brian to celebrate him finally being able to legally own firearms again after nearly 10 years of being a convicted felon. Congratulations Brian!

Re: Bitcoin Core and ‘Animal Farm’

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A common criticism of my recent essay Bitcoin Core and ‘Animal Farm’ is that my analogy falls apart because Core is not communist nor are they using political force to achieve their ends. [1]

On my part, I think it is a grade school level reading of Orwell to interpret his novel strictly as a criticism of Russian Bolshevism.

Orwell’s book, in his own words, is not only an analogy to the Russian Revolution, but is a broader analogy  to the process by which communities become corrupted against their original intent. This is not after-the-fact justification on my part, it comes from Orwell himself writing in the unpublished preface to Animal Farm:

The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact.

It is important to understand, as Orwell did, that a community can adopt a totalitarian ethos without acting with political force. The sinister fact about censorship in Bitcoin is that it is largely voluntary.

The theft of Gavin Andresen’s commit access on the made-up charges that he might have been hacked, the lies and slander about Roger Ver, and the DDos attacks on Mike Hearn’s Bitcoin XT are not the same as sending people to Gulags, but they are also not the actions of a community committed to open discussion, but of one committed to untruth and silencing opposition. The censorship of Reddit, the worship of credentials, redefining words to stretch the truth, and the hacking of private account are likewise not actions of a community that claims to be about “consensus.”

Orwell goes on to describe this phenomena more:

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

The orthodoxy in our case is obvious: small blocks, Segwit, and Lightning Network had “consensus,” right? Everyone agrees that Bitcoin Cash is a scam, right? The problem with this is that we can never know if it actually did have consensus or not because any opposing voice was silenced on Reddit, discredited by slander, and ultimately pushed out of the discussions. Anyone else who remained was scared to speak out, a fact which Mike Hearn made clear in his recent AMA when he wrote that the “act of voting itself was what scared them [miners], not the outcome.”

This is the kind of culture that ultimately develops in Animal Farm. It would be wrong to assume that the primary means by which the pigs kept power on the farm was through violence. That certainly existed — they slaughtered many animals — but the pigs would have had no power if all the animals had decided together to act against them. No, they were much smarter than to rely on force alone. The pigs, like Bitcoin Core, understood that if they controlled communication channels and could undermine the character of opposition, they would rarely need to be violent.

Boxer the horse works himself to death not because he was forced at the barrel of a gun (or snout of a pig) to do so, but because he was a useful idiot who had been trained to believe everything the pigs said was true because they were the pigs. Today, Boxer is the animal equivalent of Twitter users with a Lightning emoji in their name. They accept everything from Core unchallengely and label Bitcoin Cash a scam for no demonstrable reason at all, only because they’ve been told to.

Let’s look at one more passage from Orwell to end this essay:

At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. And this nation-wide conspiracy to flatter our ally takes place, curiously enough, against a background of genuine intellectual tolerance. For though you arc not allowed to criticise the Soviet government, at least you are reasonably free to criticise our own. Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill, at any rate in books and periodicals.

The lesson from Orwell is that private forms of censorship can be equally nefarious and equally corrupting as public forms. He is a sad reminder to us looking back in time at what happened to the BTC community and should be a guide to us for the future as we work to spread the adoption of Bitcoin Cash.

If we lose, it is a bad sign for the entire idea of decentralized digital cash.

Like this essay and want to see more? Please consider supporting my writing and sharing this essay on Twitter with #ProofOfPig.

[1] After publishing this, I logged onto Twitter to find that the @Bitcoin account has been suspended and that Core users are gleefully celebrating having a used a centralized service to get a private user banned for an opinion with which they disagreed.

Let’s talk

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If you’ve got questions about dropping out of college, building a career, marketing, or some combination of all of them, let’s talk!

We can spend 30 minutes or more on the phone chatting about your questions, goals, and current obstacles, and outline practical steps you can take that same day to get started. Everything will be totally tailored to your specific needs, competencies, and interests and I’ll help you develop an understanding of core principles you can use to inform future actions so that we never need to speak again (except as friends).

This is currently the best way to connect with me. Sheer volume of email has required that I step back from it a bit, and though my primary goals do not lie in coaching or teaching, I’m making my Clarity.fm page available for a limited number of paying customers every month because I love to help readers of this blog.

I guarantee we’ll make it valuable for both of us. Here’s what a few people have said about our calls:

The price he charges is quite a bargain for the knowledge and wisdom shared over the phone. I was hesitant at first — because there are lots of people out there that charge more than what they’re worth — but I don’t regret my decision and I would have paid MUCH more now knowing what value I would get from the call.

Great experience, great guy to talk to! Thanks Derek!

Derek is such an insightful and resourceful mentor. He is really a “different” career coach. He gave me some really practical suggestions that I have not hear from elsewhere, and I can apply right away. Will 100% recommend to everyone that are searching for jobs and want to connect with recruiters.

During our friendly conversation, Derek gave me excellent insight in three different topics where he is highly knowledgeable. We discussed how to build a strong online personal brand, craft an effective value proposition to get hired, and how to empower myself through self-directed learning.

It’s totally worth the investment to get Derek’s insight, especially if you’re unsatisfied with traditional routes for education and job search and looking for a way to jump start your career.

Like Occam’s razor, Derek gets right down to what needed to achieve your career goals. Sometimes complex problems need you only to take the most basic of steps. Just run your thoughts to him and your bound to achieve at some good foundations to start. Derek is truly gifted at condensing all those head in the cloud ideas into the essential oils of goal success.

WHR, Would Highly Recommend.

If you’ve got a question in advance, just send me a public or private message on Twitter @derekmagill, or if you’re ready, schedule now before spots fill up this month.

7 advantages to dropping out of college

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Tell anybody you know that you are dropping out of college, and they will almost always give you the standard rundown of the comically bad things that will happen to you if you don’t have a degree. Their words make you imagine yourself, if you’re lucky, a poor coffee barista stuck forever in minimum wage, or if you’re unlucky, picking your toes in the rain on the side of the street while you wear an old trash bag as a poncho. Maybe you even get splashed by a passing car. Life without college is cruel, they say.

I don’t intend to address those scenarios in this essay other than to repeat what Oscar Wilde said: everything popular is wrong. If something has near-universal consensus, that is the leper’s bell of dogma and you ought to look elsewhere.

The truth, at least as I’ve experienced it, is that there are a number of unsung advantages to dropping out of college. And I’m not alone. I’ve met far more people than I can count from the United States to Germany, South Africa and to Brazil who have experienced the same. These advantages, if you use them well, outweigh most of the theoretical downsides of leaving college by a large margin. They include:

Most fundamentally, time and experience — Dropping out of school gave me a 3 and a half-year head start on my career. I have more skills and full-time work experience now than most people my age that I know and the accumulated career capital allows me to get much better opportunities at this age than I could have gotten if I’d spent those years in school. In your late teens and twenties, time, not money, is your most valuable asset and it moves very slowly in school. 6 months working in the real world might be the equivalent of 2 or 3 years of progress in school. Another 3 years in school could very well have set me back 8 years or more.

Lowered expectations from others — Since I started my career at 19, a lot of what I did was given much more praise and reward than it would get now at 24. You have a chance to be the “whiz kid” when you’re 19 because people don’t expect as much of you and it can dramatically accelerate your career. Older, more experienced people will go out of their way to open doors for you if you do well because they want to play an active role in the life of an “upcoming star.” Try doing the same things at 24 and people will treat you like you’re average Joe. Likewise, mistakes that are made at 19 are much more forgiveable than at 24.

Income history — Having more years of income has translated into huge positive lifestyle benefits. Not only did I learn the hard financial lessons early on — the first year I made 6 figures I wasted most of it — but now I’ve got nice cash savings that allow me to have a great lifestyle and do what I want. I could lose my job and be fine. I know people today who are just starting the long road to financial security and their options are limited because of it, which brings me to the next advantage…..

Avoiding debt — Want to pick up and move across the country for a new opportunity? I can do that because I don’t have college debt payments. What about taking a job at a new company that offers low salary but equity with a huge upside? I can do that as well much more easily than people who have debt. Maybe you want to travel the world and not worry about money too much? I’ve done that as well because I have no debt. And yet the average graduate today has over $35,000 in debt. I know people who spent 4 years in college only to have to postpone their professional and lifestyle goals 4-8 years more because of debt.

Self-knowledge and confidence — I’m nowhere near the same person I was when I first started working. Earning an income, creating value for a company, being thrust into situations that require you to act way above your maturity level to succeed, these experiences change you for the better. Instead of spending those three years in classes, I spent three years developing that knowledge and confidence that I would have had to develop anyways if I graduated later. It’s another kind of head start and it’s made a huge difference in my life.

Avoiding bad habits in college — For many, I would say the majority, college is a 4-year vacation from real-world responsibility. If you think you’re going to come out on the other end of that time ready to go, you’re wrong. My two years in college were some of the most destructive years of my life in personal development terms. Leaving college was a reality gut check that I had a lot of improvement to do. 2-3 more years of that environment would have been terrible for me, as it is for so many people.

Building your own credential — When your degree status is not the most interesting thing about you, you have to get creative with early career opportunities. I was forced to learn how to signal value without a traditional certification and the lessons I learned allowed me to get opportunities that might traditionally require degrees and sidestep HR departments, resumes, and all the other barriers to entry that so many college graduates struggle with. I had to build my own credential in the form of podcast interviews I’ve done, my personal website, my writing, work experience, and testimonials. Nowadays nobody ever asks me about my degree because I had to spend three years making sure it was the least interesting thing about me.

So let the record show that whatever disadvantages there are, there are many advantages to leaving school early. I don’t regret it personally in the least and in fact, the only thing I wish I did was to leave earlier. Some of those advantages could have been even more useful if I’d had another year or two.

My student ID expired

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My college days are officially over. Though I dropped out of the University of Michigan nearly 4 years ago, it was only a week ago that my student ID actually expired for good.

I regret nothing about leaving college. To stay when I hated it would have been an egregious betrayal of myself and my vision for the life I wanted and the world I want to create. Like it did so many of my peers, it would have stunted my mind, calmed my ambition, and held me back, perhaps permanently.

Instead of jumping through academic hoops, I spent the last 4 years building a career and a business. I spoke in dozens of countries, saved more than enough money for a house or anything else I need, traveled nearly full time for fun and work, have had my writing viewed by over 2 million people, and studied and read more than I ever did in school. It hasn’t been perfect, but compared to what I would have done in college and what I would have had to show for it, the difference cannot be priced.

My friend Leon likes to joke that I’m a professional dropout. I’ve worn that as a badge of honor, and it is, but I have a lot more I want to do now and ending the grip college has on the lives of so many young people is just one of them.

So, goodbye to all that.

Where creative project ideas come from

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I read today a great article from Amy Peikoff on the inspiration for her wonderful side project, @AynRandBot, a Twitter account that posts several quotes a day from Rand’s books, letters, interviews and talks and has over 20,000 followers.

If you’ve ever struggled to come up with ideas for projects that excite you, Amy’s thoughts can help:

One day early in July I was on Twitter, when I noticed that someone I follow had retweeted something from an account called @TSElibot (after T.S. Eliot, the famous poet, playwright and literary critic). I was unaware of there being anything similar for Ayn Rand, and so I registered the account @AynRandBot.

It seems almost stupidly simple when Amy puts it like this. Notice that she didn’t sit around and try to come up with ideas in a vacuum. In fact, she probably wasn’t even looking for an idea. She just saw something interesting that someone else was doing, abstracted the basic principle (Twitter bot for an interesting thinker) and applied it in a new way to create a project around something she cares about.

My friend Chuck Grimmett has written on this well:

If you want to be creative and come up with ideas, the best thing you can do is engage the creative ideas that are already out there. Not because you want to copy or emulate them, but because creative ideas catalyze other creative ideas.

I think this is how most creative side projects are born today. The creator finds a concrete idea that they can remix with other ideas to create something of their own. As Austin Kleon writes,

Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas.

My highly popular Bitcoin Cash Resources page was born at of seeing tons of resource pages on Product Hunt and Jameson Lopp’s Bitcoin page. The currently defunct No Hipster Stocks came from seeing what they’ve done at Unsplash. DesignPickle came from abstracting the basic ideas that made WPCurve successful and applying them somewhere new.

If I were to put together an “ideation” workshop, I would have the attendees read some articles, review some websites, check out businesses, look at art online, and just spend a few hours browsing on their own and noting down what they saw. Then I would have then take the core principles behind each of the things they have noted down and find another thing to apply them to.

For example, if someone saw Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic project, the most obvious project idea related to that could be something like Daily Objectivist, or Daily Minimalist, or anything else that person cared about that could fit into some kind of daily “ideas” newsletter.

Or maybe they saw Shopenahaur’s Dialogue On the Absurdities of Religion. Now they’ve got a perfect template to use as a starting point to write a dialogue of their own.

The ideation process is that easy. You just do what Amy did when she saw T.S. Eliot Bot. And the wonderful thing you’ll start to notice when you think about projects like this is that you’ll never run out of ideas. You will see an idea in everything you do, everything you see, and every piece of content you consume. There will never be enough time in the day to take them all on, so just get started, make one and then make another, and please, when the ideas come, write them down before you forget.

To create, you must collect.

For fun, I’ve created @DeMontaigneBot and @MisesQuotes.

Congratulations Katie!

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I attended the wedding of my friend Katie Reed Corcos tonight in Palm Desert.

Katie and I first met a few years ago when a friend of ours introduced us because we both talked to him too much about Ayn Rand. We became friends immediately and though we don’t get to hang out enough, since I’ve known her we’ve hung out in New York City a number of times and taken a last minute trip to Iceland together. Quality over quantity.

She’s one of the most fun, interesting, and kind people I know and I couldn’t be happier for her.

This is a photo I took of her in New York when she wasn’t looking. It’s still one of my favorite shots I’ve ever gotten.

Congratulations Katie!

Speaking at FEECon 2018

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I’ll be speaking this June in Atlanta at FEECon 2018!

I’ve been friends with the people at the Foundation for Economic Education since I first discovered them in college and over the past few years have spoken at a number of their summer seminars, helped them improve some of their marketing, and did some photography for them one summer. And if you ever see the giant pencil in their offices, that was from me and the Praxis team.

FEE puts on some of the best events in the world on the philosophic ideas behind free markets and their practical application. I like to tell high schoolers I meet that if you’re interested in big ideas and becoming a better thinker and communicator, you should skip college and attend as many FEE events as you possibly can. I can guarantee there is nothing you will get in an undergraduate program on the whole that FEE does not do better, cheaper and faster.

This conference will be one such event that will far and away beat anything you’ve gotten run school. Topics for this year include education, business, technology, economics, politics and philosophy and the speaker lineup looks incredible. Register now if you’re interested and let me know via email or in the comments if you want to connect at the event.

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