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Comment by personjerry | Hacker News Reader

I hate these "business coaching" people. They sell themselves across all channels like spammers, with bait like "You can make a million dollars like I did!" They link everything back to their YouTube or book or whatever, providing no real content. They only make money by hooking people in, so they're effectively MLMs minus the bureaucracy and actual product. The unfortunate new "entrepreneurs" are now short a few grand that they paid for the "lessons", and if they try themselves they're unlikely to succeed. And there's a ton of these "marketing entrepreneurs" out there, just search "how to make a million dollars" on YouTube.

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This was my biggest complaint about Four Hour Work Week. Although a really useful book, it seems like examples include a lot more hooking people into subscriptions or videos or digital content that really go back to “single site/channel, force subscriptions, exploit subscription, profit.”

This is not really FHWW’s fault as there are many genuine businesses referenced in the book and after publishing, but the pattern is similar to what you describe.

Huh? I find Tim's content to be refreshingly innovative. He probably wasn't rich rich before 4HWW, but if what he claims in the book is true, he had a fully-remote mostly automated business and he could spend his time travelling the world - definitely a lifestyle I would enjoy. His next book introduced e.g. the "slow carb" diet, which is a very sensible realistic diet (kind-of generic low carb with a bit of paleo mixed in). I haven't read his newest book but judging by his podcast (he interviews a lot of extremely successful people), it's very likely it has a few valuable insights.

Sure, he's optimising for marketing; can't blame him for that. But IMO it's definitely backed by actual content.

Not just four hour work week - almost all of Tim Ferris's content rubs me this way. I think he's good at writing books that will sell - not necessarily books that contain a lot of meaningful information; the latter being more boring and not nearly as sexy. It's enough fact to keep you going, but a noticeable thread of bullshit throughout.

Um, they are obviously in the self-help book genre. Being irritated by the self-promotion and shallow insights of a self-help author is like saying you are irritated by the local pastor because he is so preachy in the sunday mass and talks of religion all that time :)

Well, if you want to help abolish something bad, you got to be irritated by it first, not just take it's badness for granted because "self-help will be self-help".

Indeed. It's possible, there are businesses out there doing it and it's the dream (who wouldn't want that kind of amazing work/life balance?). But the overwhelming majority of businesses just don't work that way.

Ferris is a marketing man and he's good at that (proof: You bought his book, and even read it. QED)

They prey on the "I want to be a millionaire CEO but don't have any real skills and don't know what I actually want to do with my life" crowd. Usually the message is that you can get there without doing any actual real work (kind of says all you need to know about their target audience). I wonder how many truly successful businesses actually started from that point?

The "entrepreneurs" I know had business that grew organically out of fulfilling a genuine need that either they had or that they could satisfy for someone else with their skillset and knowledge. Saying they got where they are by accident is probably a bit too dismissive but I don't think any of them set out with the end goal in mind - it just happened organically. I include myself in that of course.

>Usually the message is that you can get there without doing any actual real work (kind of says all you need to know about their target audience).

The more advanced such snake-oil salesmen have added elements of "of course you also need to put in the effort", or even directly promote "struggle-porn" [1] -- while everything else you wrote about them remains true.

[1] https://medium.com/@nateliason/no-more-struggle-porn-202153a...

Interesting article. There was a discussion of it recently on here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18269846.

I remember reading "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" and getting inspired by the author's success with his described approach to entrepreneurship and real estate.

I also remember when I found out he wasn't actually very successful until he started selling self-help advice stuff like "Rich Dad, Poor Dad."

As they say, during a gold rush the safest way to get rich is to sell picks and shovels. Why go through the risk of running an actual real estate business when you can convince suckers to pay upfront for advice, I guess.

Many of these people are essentially selling hope. No shortage of paying customers there.

explains why the church business has never gone bankrupt. no matter how big or small it is. They always expanding.

> Church of England weekly attendance falls below 1m for first time.

> Sunday attendance also drops to 760,000 as decline continues in face of growing secularism, diversity and ageing congregation

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/12/church-of-engl...

> Religious affiliation, church attendance, and belief in God have all fallen in the US. None of these declines is happening fast, but the signs are now unmistakable. To take religious belief as an example, only 45 percent of young adults aged 18-30 have no doubt about God’s existence, compared with 68 percent of people aged 65 and over.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2016/09/05/religion-is-in-d...

>Church of England weekly attendance falls below 1m for first time

Well, the Church of England was as close you could get to atheism while still being in a religion.

Churches (in America) are like lotteries and other fantasy businesses. When they get boring, churches go out of business and they get replaced by other churches that promise a chance at a better prize. There are parts of USA where many old church buildings are for sale and can be had for a song.

Churches go bankrupt all the time?

There are three vacant churches for sale on my morning bike route alone

Plenty of churches are growing. Plenty are closing doors.

Now replace "church" with "business".

This is how things work.

I think we're only seeing your comment as a dig at religion for dig's sake.

Those self-help/get rich quick people serve the same role as the churches, but without the spirituality and community (or any self-humbling).

Generally agreed, but there often is some semblance of community in those get-rich-quick schemes, MLMs in particular. You have people coming to the scheme's local branch meetings like they'd be attending church service, and they're all full of enthusiasm that's feeding off each other - creating a ridiculous cult-like happy death spiral.

Source: 3 people I know are, or were in the past, involved in various MLMs and invited me - including to one of their "internal" meetings, which I attended out of curiosity, and where I observed the most striking cult behaviour I ever experienced.

I mean, a lot of individual churches have closed or shutdown in recent years, especially so in some part of the US and Europe.

It's a free market. Someone has to teach this stuff, why not these guys. If their advice is useful - great, if it's a scam - they'll get sued or go out of business.

Maybe we're talking about different people though, but Alex Becker and Jeff Walker, for example, were extremely helpful to me personally.

I have nothing to say about the author of the article though, personally I didn't learn much from it. But as long as I can use my own brain and judge advice on it's own merit, I'd rather have a bunch of people trying to teach this stuff than not.

No one is going to sue anyone for selling scammy so-called self-help techniques.

Which is a shame, because this stuff is actually another example of something that should be a serious crime - knowingly misleading the public.

There's no actual teaching involved. A lot of marketing is manipulative, but when your primary product is manipulation, you're over the ethical line.

Lol, if you'll make "knowingly misleading the public" a crime you will have to outlaw all of the religions, most of the politicians, celebrities, commercials, news companies, blogs, businesses, people with social media accounts...

And "teaching" is in the eye of the beholder isn't it. If I think I've learned something interesting/useful - there's no problem, otherwise I can just return the product I've bought.

> Lol, if you'll make "knowingly misleading the public" a crime you will have to outlaw all of the religions, most of the politicians, celebrities, commercials

Yes please, to all! Particularly advertising, as these days it grew to be a cancer on human society.

> news companies, blogs, businesses, people with social media accounts...

Those could be run without lying to people.

Now I realize that regulating this is impossible (who watches the watchers, and all that) and trying would invite horrible consequences, but I wish we could at least change the social perception of lying to people. At individual level misleading others isn't going to earn you many friends, but when scaled up, it suddenly becomes a respectable occupation. This is one of the weirdest things about humans that I know.

There are a number of lawsuits. This is one.

https://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-scam-lawsuit-bowser-washing...

They provide inspiration and hope. Sometimes that's just what you need.

...to take the wrong course instead of actively work on what you should be working on.

Often false hope is worse than no hope.

I like "coaching" programs that promise to teach real-world skills. I enrolled in a SEO coaching program that probably made me back the money within a month.

Can’t agree more. Things on sale are a course, some digital tools, and a book. One of Forbes' topics is marketing.

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