“My business coach charges $5,000/hour. And to tell you the truth… it’s a great deal. Good coaching literally makes you money.” - some guy called Rich on Twitter.

Whenever I see someone posting something like Rich here, I check if they sell coaching themselves… and they always do.

Of course Rich is a business coach himself.

You see this on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, blogs. Everywhere.

It’s always the same thing.

The real estate guy screams: “hiring VA’s is lifechanging! You only pay them $5/hour and they are like 100x more productive than your lazy American workers!”

Now what Mr. Real Estate forgets to mention is that owns a significant percentage of the company he recommends to source Phillipino workers.

When someone pulls up that Warren Buffet quote “Investing in yourself is the best thing you can do”, you just know they are about to sell you a course.

The guy preaching the life-changing magic of writing online is of course selling a $3k cohort-based course on writing online.

---

Don’t get me wrong. There is absolutely nothing wrong with selling courses or promoting your own stuff.

But acting as if you are giving genuine advice when you are actually just trying to promote your offer is just dishonest.

And it also explains why there is so much crappy advice out there.

No, hiring $5/hour VAs is not life-changing. There are huge cultural differences and at large, the labor market is pretty efficient. You get exactly what you pay for.

No, a coach will not solve all your problems. Usually the only real solution is to increase the intensity, whether it’s in the gym or in business. And there’s no one who can do that for you.

No, you don’t need to spend $3k on a writing course to start writing online. You can, you know, just start. And in fact, most people shouldn’t waste time writing. They should be building something, do something interesting instead. Writing will be easy once you have something to write about and don’t just try to write for the sake of writing.

---

Now there are still people giving genuine advice out there. But it’s becoming so damn hard to find them.

People who treat content as the top of their funnel tend to be 10x louder than those sharing genuine advice just for the sake of it.

They will happily pay for retweets, likes, and fake engagement. They will make sure their message is reposted every few months to maximize reach. They have absolutely no problem repeating the same talking points over and over again because they are making money every single time they do it.

Now unfortunately I don’t have a good solution. It seems inevitable.

The best we can do is to raise awareness.

Most of the “advice” out there is no different than a barber telling you you need a haircut.

Tell your friends, tell your mom.

Scream it from the rooftops whenever you someone trying to pull this off.

“If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb