Some housekeeping
We're moving to a weekly dispatch cadence.
You’ve read the manifesto. You’ve seen a chapter preview, even if it wasn’t explicitly advertised as one, and there’s no guarantee that it won’t end up on the cutting room floor.
The plan is to ship the Sovereignty Stack book this year, so you’ll be hearing from us a lot more often over the coming months.
To prepare you for that, some housekeeping is in order.
What’s this newsletter?
First of all, it’s a forcing function and commitment to structuring our ideas and ongoing learnings about global citizenship into a format that’s useful and can be operationalised by people around the world.
Secondly, this newsletter is a way for us to ruthlessly curate the ideas that go into the final1 corpus. We’ve been thinking about this stuff for years at this point, and there’s an entire galaxy of things we’d like to explore. But for the reader, we reckon it’s more efficient to hone in on the concepts, and topics that actually move the needle, solve specific problems and deliver immediately actionable insights. We’ll need your help to do this. More on that in a bit.
Who are we?
Adim is a software engineer passionate about music, coffee, and creating software that solves problems. He’s based in Poland, but travels quite a bit. More about him at www.adimofunne.com
Bankole (that’s me) is a retired blogger and media entrepreneur turned camera-man. I did the digital nomad thing for a while, but in the past couple years I’ve grown land legs to focus on my creative projects, and I’m now based in the UK. More about me at www.bankole.co
We’re both Nigerian, and have known each other for a decade now. The idea to write this book came to us when we realised that the global mobility tips and hacks we’d been trading over Whatsapp for years were actually complex, proactive life design strategy, with timescales and tactics and that are fundamentally different from the kind you consider when you’re planning your garden-variety Barbados staycation. This is serious stuff that has longterm personal, financial, and professional ramifications.
Lots of successful people practice effective global citizenship intuitively, mostly in their heads, without the need for a defined framework or spreadsheets2, since it’s a muscle they’ve typically grown up exercising. But for us to share what we’re learning and doing with other people — especially those like us who weren’t born with considerable passport privilege — it’s necessary to distill it into theory, frameworks, and yes…spreadsheets.
What to expect over the next couple months
Weekly posts with global citizenship musings and thought experiments.
Book status updates.
From time to time we’ll share what we’re reading from our constantly growing research archive, trends we’re watching, and tools we’re using. The spreadsheets are coming.
Sometimes we might reference current events, or even drop the occasional hot take. But as this is not a “news” newsletter, we generally won’t be optimising for recency. If anything, we’ll be jumping all over the gamut of human history in our research time machine.
Help us write a useful book
At some point we’ll start posting chapter previews for people who elect to join our beta-reader cohorts, so keep an eye out for those.
For everyone else, we’ll be hosting themed info sessions to take questions and share any insights we might have into specific aspects of your global citizenship journey.
I think that's enough throat-clearing. If you have any questions, thoughts or suggestions, I’d love to hear them! Just hit reply or leave a comment.
And of course if you think there’s someone else that might be interested in the resource we’re developing here, by all means forward it to them.
We’ll see you next week.
Bankole.
Final here doesn’t mean mean “set-in-concrete-forever-final”, since we expect to revise and update our global citizenship thesis and tooling on an ongoing basis.
At a certain point in any attempt at proactive life design, even at the most minimum levels of sophistication, spreadsheets are guaranteed to happen. But people with means are often able to outsource those details to specialists like lawyers, accountants and tax consultants.