Perhaps the line between empowering guru and charlatan isn’t as clear as we think? We needn’t look any further than the hucksters of dream jobs that typically involve being your own boss and working from home. They float on the fringes of our ship-wrecked careers selling what else? Life boats.
Their sales pitch is success. After-all, look at what they accomplished! Here’s the problem. Sellers of quit-you-day-job, become famous, be your own boss type courses are smart enough not to make promises that legally make them liable. They make NO gaurantees that following in their footsteps take you to the same destination. They rely on our frustration with current circumstances and need for relief to drive our decision to purchase.
Then, after we’ve bought, we instantly become to them a liability. For most unethical gurus, teaching us is merely an item on a to-do list that needs to get done. Unless we can be sold something more, every minute spent on us is seen as a necessary expense.
Good Intentions – Poor Vision
One can’t broadly implicate all marketers of ineffective advice as wolves-in-yuppies-clothing. In many cases, they may truly believe in the knowledge they impart. After all, look what they accomplished!
Unfortunately, they may have one or more blind spots that cloud their decision-making. One blind spot may be the fact that lucky circumstances played a role in their success. Another could be that the marketplace that made them successful has changed to being less favorable to people following in their footsteps. A more concerning blind spot would be a success guru’s lack of awareness that their own achievements are tenous and based on short-game thinking. This refers to a hyper focus on short-term success over long-term goodwill, Seth Godin (an example of an ethical purveyor of advice), summed it up well in his blog.
A guru can have one or more blind spots and still have the best of intentions. Although they truly want to help us, they are, at times, misguided in their execution of that help.
Our Responsiblity as Advice Seekers
This is where we, as advice seekers, can benefit from caveat emptor or buyer beware approach. Wouldn’t most people be gainfully working for themselves if a single book or online course was all it took? This problem isn’t limited to infomercials or the online marketers either. Universities accross the country, from the local strip mall to the Ivy League offer courses in fields where success is statistically unlikely.
Perhaps, in some cases, the way training courses are marketed is all that needs to change. A more honest approach may be to promote some careers as side gigs or even hobbies. Do we want a world where the value of knowledge is measured only by return on investment? Shrinivas Rao recently conducted an interesting interview with William Deresiewicz on the Unmistakable Creative podcast on this very topic. A class on septic tank clean-up may impart skills that are quite marketable. Why can’t it exist side-by-side in a college course catalog with Selfie Photography 101?
Let’s not fail to ask ourselves, why we’re looking for advice in the first place.
Beyond the solving the problems of our current situation, what are we really looking for? An escape from stress? A feeling of legitimacy? To feel happy again? If so, click here to take my miracle course! (Just kidding! I had to do it.)
Seriously, what we really are seeking may be found in another source. That could be advice from a therapist or coach. By all means, we can quit the day job if we want. It may help first just to see if that’s the real source of our problems.
For me, no quick decision to quit my sales job was needed. What I found a couple years ago was that my perspective needed adjusting. As a result, I was able to grow from needing a quick career escape to patiently planning a career migration. No, things haven’t all gone perfectly for me since then. However, I can confidently say I feel much happier about myself and my work than had I not made the change.
As for anyone selling advice, yes there will the charlatans selling us inflated and false hopes. Reading uplifting stories sometimes focuses us too much on results. See my last post on measurement for more thoughts on this. We buy their courses because want the same happy ending they had. I’d like to see the tellers of miracle, David-and-Goliath-like, success stories give more consideration to how realistic and repeatable their success actually is.
Therefore, we can all benefit from tempering our expectations of the people we pay to teach us and question any story sounds too Cinderella-like to be true. We can choose instead, to keep our day jobs, for now, and measure success in joy not dollars.
Sincerely,
Meaning2work