If you want to change the world, start with yourself.
By James Anthony
American Thinker
June 22, 2026
In " 6 Hacks to a Better Government," I described the best actions that individuals can take to increase everybody's freedom.
Governments are big, urgent problems. But even after all the takings for government spending and regulation compliance, we the people still control close to 50 percent of GDP, together with the vast majority of our many other unmeasured actions.
Below, I describe the best actions that parents can get started for us and that we can keep doing ourselves to build value and wealth.
I skip over many great actions. It helps greatly to avoid addictives, build a strong marriage, raise children, make good social choices, build new skills at work to avoid doom-loop drifting to boredom and poor performance, and make good financial choices.
I focus on the choices that are the most elemental. Get these actions right, and we can do exceedingly well at other great actions.
To make best use of our scarce time on Earth, it's best to establish good habits and to get increasingly good at creating value. We are built to create. Each of us is an entrepreneur, building value as we choose how we spend our time away from work, how we work, and how we shop. Everybody creates value.
1. Learn Christianity
Christianity provides unmatched support for building healthy relationships, increasing freedom, and succeeding at entrepreneurship.
Several books offer starting points or re-entry points as early as in young adulthood. C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity in particular introduces a mature Christian's understanding of faith. Charles Murray's Taking Religion Seriously passes along ideas, together with leads, on why Christianity is for smart people, too.
From there, Christian faith is very well supported. Study Bibles and many other materials help us develop individual understanding and faith. Local churches help us connect with others, who help further.
2. Homeschool
Schooling is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build expertise in the challenging, progressively built up, highly valuable general skills of reading, writing, and problem-solving. Reading can bring in crucial information on nearly all skills (even skills dominated by physical movement).
Note that prerequisites matter a lot. To take Christianity to heart, we must appreciate that we are sinful. To understand history, we must understand religion, genuine Austrian economics, business, science and technology, further human behavior, and historians' biases. To write, we must have something to say. To solve real-world problems, we learn to solve minimally simplified problems.
Expertise is developed fastest and farthest by deliberately practicing the most difficult tasks we are ready for. Learning must not be limited by age group. Learning must be customized to our current skill level in each area at all times. Learning is increased by interested, skilled trainers for as long as we can benefit from them.
Until government-free schools exist again on a large scale and develop to their full potential, homeschooling does the most that schooling can do for most of us to build up our ability to add value.
3. Learn how to find existing knowledge and proven components
We build up a base of existing knowledge. Skilled trainers help us do deliberate practice. As our skill builds up, higher-skilled trainers become harder to find, and we increasingly become self-guided.
Initially, we need to read entire books. Next, we need to read entire technical papers. (Everybody needs to do this, in medicine at minimum.) Soon, we increasingly just sample key sections. In time, we skim even more quickly to get overviews, and often just remember enough to retrieve this information later if it might help then.
The more we build up our knowledge, the more we increase our absorptive capacity, and therefore the better we get at seeking and finding additional existing knowledge and proven components. These are the raw materials we use to create new thinking and new products.
4. Write or build
Writing makes our thinking solid and shareable. Building makes our design ideas complete and producible. Writing and building initially yield prototypes, which is a necessary leap down the path toward creating production products. Prototyping and creating production products are the actions that transform our preparation and effort into value.
5. Consider used products, older models, and inexpensive services
When we shop, if we allocate a small amount of our time to consider what features we value, to locate helpful knowledge, and to choose actions that approach optimal, we can earn excellent returns on our time. The more costly a product is, the greater the returns from this due diligence.
Even housing is just a place where we spend some time resting and entertaining. A car or truck is just a tool we use a few minutes a day. No matter the product, when we compare how much we value the product to how much we value the alternative uses of our time, we nearly always find that nearly any old product will do just fine at providing the narrow utility we want to get from that product.
Typically, older products will satisfy our overall desires the best. Compared to new construction, existing homes usually can be bought at discounts. Compared to new cars and trucks, used cars and trucks with low mileage and long remaining service lives can be bought at serious discounts. Older models of computers and phones were the newest models very recently, and they will get kept and will work very well for many years.
Introductory rates, such as for cellular service, home internet service, and streaming services will end fairly soon. What matters are the rates that come after.
6. Save
When we spend less now, we can be freer now, or we can spend more later, or we can be even freer later. The less we spend now or later, the more we can spend soon enough, or the freer we can be all along.
Learn what works, and build better. Make your time provide what you value. Help yourself create more.
This article was originally published on American Thinker and was reprinted with the author's permission.