The Art of Change

I think it's common to human nature to arrive at a point in life where you need a change. Whether you need to change your job, or your vehicles, or just generally some way that you are doing some thing. Change is inevitable, they say. But often times we face a challenge in life that we might demand a change to be made. What is the proper way to go about making this change?

I want to outline one principle of how to potentially effect change, especially in situations where change seems impossible! This principle is something that I have considered and even employed in the past, but I hadn't come across the same idea so much out in the wild. I don't have a good name for it, but it may be called something like bottom-up leadership. In Ron Paul's book The School Revolution, several times he mentions the maxim that persuasion is better than coercion. He then gives an example of how to do this; to provide better alternatives and options, persuasively.

Dr. Paul gives two examples, which I'll paraphrase here.

The USPS

In his book The School Revolution, Paul points out a key development that ultimately made the United States Parcel Service (USPS) not as critical as it once was. That is, Email. With email being widely available it doesn't make as much sense to send a letter through the actual mail anymore. It can be fun for pen pals, or to send a pre-printed wedding announcement. But ultimately, sending information through the mail is the slow way to do things now-a-days. But at one point in US history, the USPS was thought of as a critical piece that would never go away. Today, the only things that come in my mailbox are basically junk and unwanted advertising. Every so often we'll get a personal letting, or a bill, but these things can be just as easily sent via email or some other messenger.

Also, for actual packages and items, there is FedEx and UPS. There competitors came into place and over time have essentially caused the USPS to be largely unnecessary for most citizens. What was once the only way, now is just one of the ways, and not even the preferable way in most cases.

So the change from a government mail system to a range of options and competitors came not through legislation from the top. Rather, it came from lots of little and better options from all over. As these options became more usable and reliable, they bubbled up to the top and caused the change.

Schooling

Paul proposes in his book that schooling be changed from this large federally funded system, and into a locally funded or even homeschool situation, where parents have more control over the structure and content of the curriculum, and ultimately students receive a better education. He argues that the funding is one of the key elements. Since public school districts are receiving so much funding, it'll be almost impossible to cause sweeping reform. So we should take this same principle of change: lots of small options popping up that give a better experience than the default. Just like email, UPS, and FedEx, did to the USPS mail system.

Paul also argues that with the rise of technology that online education will become much more varied and cheaper. I did just a small amount of searching, and I found that a coveted school here in Utah now has an online version, and it does look affordable. So as he predicted, so has it been. But the furthering of his prediction is that the public school system will essentially become obsolete, if I understood right. And this may still be, yet I think we have more time for this to playout to see what will be.

But, consider this example; when the COVID-19 pandemic began it's psychological rampage, the public schools shut their doors, and virtually overnight the students went to online school through the public school system. Fortunately I had prepared for this to happen and I acquired some used computers and setup a station for the children to do their schooling. But that's the whole point. We went from in-person to online just in a snap of a finger. I think we ultimately found that in-person is better for human beings. But we also learned that public schooling is not the only option and path forward.

Web Hosting

Of course I would be off based if I didn't mention web hosting here. I have seen companies using public cloud providers for their web hosting when this was largely unnecessary, both computationally speaking and financially speaking.

I propose a change in web hosting. Leave the public cloud, and find a local or small business web hosting company, and migrate your data there. Stop the centralization of web hosting to these big players.

That is not to say that I am not impressed with many of the technical feats that AWS, Google, and Microsoft have all accomplished. Even Oracle, with their plan to continue to build datacenters. But those few names I mentioned, are and have been the big names in public cloud. There is other options! More affordable options! Options that are less complex, and require less to administer, such as Vultr and Digital Ocean.

Also, there are plenty of server administrator who enjoy trying new techniques, and would love a chance to host customer's applications. There are businesses who can offer a tailored experience for less than the big players. These small providers want to provide a better service, because they enjoy doing so.

Conclusion

So the principle of change is this: you may not be able to affect change immediately at the top level, but you may be able to affect change from the bottom level by providing a variety of better options. It takes time. It takes effort and dedication. But it is done by persuasion, not coercion.

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