Thirsty Millionaire Advice

Every time I log on to LinkedIn, I end up getting a feed full of garbage. It's usually the same kind of person, with the same kind of title, with the same kind of social media tactics.

For shorthand, I'll call them "Wantrepreneur Influencers."

If you want to find one in the wild, read this ChatGPT-generated post and then look for a lookalike in your feed:

I'm extra sour on it because I went through this era and ending up hating who I became. Look at my garbage here, and here, and here.

There's a specific playbook to being a Wantrepreneur Influencer and there's a cottage industry of coaches for wannabe Wantrepreneur Influencers:

• ​Taki Moore's Million Dollar Coach Program​
• ​Pedro Adao, The Challenge Guy​
• ​Like every website built with ClickFunnels​

I could go on and on as to why this business strategy is seductive (selling dreams is easy), how the grifting makes money (big-name gurus are multi-level marketing schemes), and who the target market tends to be (middle-to-lower class knowledge workers who seek status), but instead, let me point at what this marketing-and-hustle-culture content is truly harming.

It's killing coaching.

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My first job out of college was tutoring, AKA coaching, inner-city charter school students. I had five 6th graders that I met with for at least two hours a day every day practicing math, English, and other skills with the goal of preparing them for success in college and beyond. Add that up; 10+ hours of coaching every day for over 180 school days.

When a student gets this level of personalized attention, it works: many 6th graders came into my school reading at a 3rd grade level and transformed into 7th grade readers after one year.

That coaching worked. Not universally, and not without issues, but broadly speaking, it worked.

That kind of coaching is intensive, personalized, success is not guaranteed, and depends heavily on clear benchmarks and goals. It's also decidedly unsexy: do ten math problems, have someone walk you through your three mistakes, do ten more math problems, repeat repeat repeat repeat...

The outcomes, though, are VERY sexy.

And sex sells.

When I read a LinkedIn post selling the sexy success you could achieve if you follow their 800 character piece of carefully curated advice-that-isn't-really-that-helpful-but-follow-to-keep-the-drip-coming, it cheapens the work that I and my fellow tutors put in helping bridge the achievement gap.

The irony is that I was a part of both those machines- the tutoring in 2009 that was effective and morally good and the marketing in 2020 that was effective yet morally ambiguous.

I have gazed into the void and it has gazed back into me. It says, "Make sure to subscribe."

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These thoughts are top of mind for me thanks to many conversations in the past two weeks- shoutout to Ali, Alycia, Devon, Alanna, Harvey, Nicole, and many others.

Coaching can work, but not everyone who coaches and not everyone who gets coached can make it work. Practice isn't glamorous and anyone telling you it's easy is selling you snake oil.

Take it from a recovering snake oil salesman, there's a real value in having someone peer over your shoulder and point out the mistakes you missed. There's a real value in having to explain yourself to someone else and then realizing something new mid-sentence. There's a real value in being held accountable to a goal, whether you set it yourself or its set for you.

This is probably not news to you.

The secret to success is that it's not a secret. Be careful of paying your time and money to learn that lesson.

Anywho, here's a free blog post about three more ways Wantrepreneur Influencers pry money from your hands.

3 Reasons Why I Hate Your Favorite Business Guru

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A TL;DR from the CRO

It's easy to reach a million in revenue, just build an Instagram following of 2M followers and dropship branded apparel- DM me and I'll show you how.

-Roman Noodles, Chief Ruff Officer

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TL;DRs From Around the Internetverse

• ​The chimps you hang with will be the kind of chimp you will become Roberto Ferraro
• ​"Science-based recommendations" is clickbait for bad science The Learning Pirate
• ​Every single machine learning, AI, and data company in one interactive graphic Firstmark
• ​Stop meeting. Just. Stop. Anne Helen Peterson

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My cactus is starting to bloom.

Terrariums are yet another dumb hobby of mind. You can see in that picture some of the stones that have been coming out of my other dumb hobby, rock tumbling.

I was accumulating so many of those shiny-ish rocks that I needed to put them somewhere and Pinterest told me that terrariums are IN.

It was unexpectedly cathartic to put on a podcast, shovel some dirt and rocks into a container, delicately tweeze spiky plants into place, and rearrange tumbled stones thirty times before stepping back and saying to myself,

"...nice."

The experience felt a lot better than 20 minutes of scrolling on LinkedIn.

Now I've got a few of these glass bowls full of low-maintenance plants and my dumb rocks and what a delight: a peek of pink!

Spring is here, suckas.

Breaking out the pastel-colored sweaters,

Dan from Learn to Scale​

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​PS. How it feels trying to find good content on social media nowadays​