Selling Liberty: Communicating Freedom in an Unfree World
Inside each of us is a salesperson capable of selling our ideas, but how do we set them free?
Chapters
Selling Liberty, an Introduction (Public Post)
10 Steps to Having a Better Conversation (Public Post)
How to Make an Impact (Members Only)
Controlling the Dialogue (Members Only)
The Traits of Salespeople (Members Only)
The Skills of Success (Members Only)
How to Win and Lose a Debate (Members Only)
How to Tune Your Marketing (Members Only)
Moving the Overton Window (Members Only)
As further chapters are released, the links in this article’s table of contents will be updated. Consider becoming a paid subscriber on Substack or Patreon to get access to them all before the next printing of the book is public!
Selling Liberty, an Introduction
In my journey with the Libertarian Party, a few things have become abundantly clear. One of the most obvious is the passion of our activists and volunteers. These are people dedicated beyond reasonable expectations towards realizing a world made freer by their efforts. Never before have I encountered an organization whose members were so willing to entertain personal and financial sacrifice as such a normal requisite of their commitment to a political cause. I’ve seen petitioners standing for hours in the rain fighting for ballot access. I have seen people use all of their workplace sick time to attend political rallies and protests. I have seen people travel hundreds of miles at a moment’s notice to help a candidate in another state deliver materials. I have seen people willingly uproot their entire lives and families to move to New Hampshire in the hopes of helping the Free State Project build a functional Libertarian Diaspora in the North East.
And through all of this, I have also seen a persistent trend of failure in these, our most honestly dedicated volunteers. When it comes to spreading the message of Liberty beyond our echo chamber, beyond the ears already willing to hear what we have to say - we don’t stand up to the measure of the game. At every Libertarian convention, I attend I do my best to meet as many new people as possible, and while a few have definitely stood out above the rest as having an innate ability to communicate, most have not. I see a trend among those I meet in Libertarian circles. And the trend ties very closely to career and education.
Our movement is inherently intellectual. Liberty is a philosophy grounded in intellect and logic, rather than emotion and empathy. Those that appear to be naturally attracted to our philosophical underpinnings are typically closely aligned to particular career fields. More often than not when I meet new people at Libertarian conventions and events and ask them what they do, the majority will tell me they are software engineers, or researchers, or have several advanced degrees in economics or other technical fields. What lacks is activists whose field of expertise is marketing, sales, teaching, or other fields that require empathy, and constant personal interaction. While we have many people who know the ins and outs of liberty and our philosophy, we have very few people who can sell that message to those who wouldn’t have arrived at the logical conclusions on their own. And that is a problem that we can fix.
Now, this observation is not universal, but it is also not unique. Routinely we hear pundits and detractors refer to libertarians as a bunch of autistic folks stuck behind their keyboards. The obvious invalidity of the insult aside, why is this perception what is so inherently assumed about us? Well, all those amazing activists I mentioned who do great and beautiful things, go unnoticed because most of them are not salespeople. They don’t leave lingering perceptions in the minds of those they speak to. They generally present their arguments and strongly lay out our platform and goals, get their signatures and move on. Have they been effective? Yes. Have they been memorable? No.
Unlike most Libertarian activists, my background is actually in sales. I have made my living talking to people, and leaving a good enough impression that not only do they remember me, but call me back and trust me enough to actually buy my product. The mindset, the skills, and the communication style I have learned from a career in sales have led me to a different kind of success within the libertarian party. When petitioning for Ballot Access for Gary Johnson, I was averaging several Hundred signatures a day higher than any of my colleagues in New England. When tabling at events, I have had greater success getting people to actually stick around and have a conversation rather than simply taking literature and moving on. When it comes to the effort of herding cats that is leading a libertarian organization, I found myself serving as a Regional Representative to the libertarian National Committee a mere two years after first joining the party. Is my experience truly unique? Is it a natural gift? Not at all.
I found myself working in sales quite by accident, as I’m sure many people do. I was unhappy with a job I had that was in the field of my education and built on my experience in the United States Army, and when I was offered a Job in a sales position, I jumped at it without doing my full due diligence as an escape from what I considered mundane. Now, taking that job turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes, and best moves I ever made in my life. The company I went to work for was nothing more than an outside sales organization selling poorly priced Life Insurance products and structured as a multi-level marketing scheme- but what I learned and carried away changed my life forever.
I grew up as the picture of introversion, highly intelligent, bored with school yet still managed straight A’s in honors classes, and skated through college without even trying. By the time I joined the Army, I was the personal picture of what I described as our communications problems. I was on track to being an engineer and relied on my smarts to get me through Life. That wasn’t going to fly when trying to sell people something they didn’t need and didn’t want, and working purely on commission. I had to adapt, I had to change the way I spoke, the way I listened, and the way I communicated on every level. Years later, here I am making a living by teaching others how to do what I was forced into by bad luck and impulse.
The point I’m getting across here is that inside us all is a salesman, and I’m not talking about a fancy snake oil salesman who uses flash and glamour to con people into buying what he has. Inside all of us there is a true honest salesman, who believes in what they are doing, and truly wants to help people understand what they are selling. The first step to realizing your inner selling power is to realize how much of it you’ve already been using in your everyday life and career. Ask yourself, as a software engineer, how often is it that you have to justify to someone else why you chose a particular solution to a problem when there was more than one option - you sold it. In any field of work, you will eventually have to justify the reasons behind your actions, and that is when your most basic sales skills instinctively come into play.
What aim to do isn’t teach anyone how to reinvent the wheel, and surely I don’t want to change your personality or what makes you unique. What I will express here are simply some fundamental principles and skills I have learned and taught over the years, that can help to improve how we have conversations, how we debate, how we argue, how we listen, and how we sell. These are not skills that only have use in sales either, in fact, some of them can universally apply to our everyday conversations.
There are only a few main topics that we will cover. If you can master even only one of these topics, you should see an improvement in your communications with political adversaries, friends, and family alike. In the following chapters, I’m going to teach you the Rules for having a better Conversation, how to Make an Impact, Some tricks to Controlling The Dialogue, How to Win and Lose a Debate, the Traits of Salespeople, The Skills of Success, and the importance of tuning your marketing.
As we progress through this book, pay attention and take notes. Make notes in the margins, earmark pages that pique your interest, and most importantly, put what you learn into practice. And when we’re done, be prepared to have better conversations, better presentations, and better results in your daily interactions.
As further chapters are released, the links in this article’s table of contents will be updated. Consider becoming a paid subscriber on Substack or Patreon to get access to them all before the next printing of the book is public!
Selling Liberty: Communicating Freedom in an Unfree World
For more tips on how to effectively sell your ideas of Liberty to others, head on over to Amazon today to pick up a copy of “Selling Liberty: Communicating Freedom in an Unfree World”
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