If they want your Credit Card number, IT’S NOT FREE.

If someone is trying to sell you something they are not “giving back”.

Right on! Thanks for the link to Marshall Goldsmith’s site. VERY useful. A goldmine of information.

Omar

Marketing snake-oil self-help is no different from marketing New Improved toothpaste (‘now with FlavaBleach endorphins!’), or political initiatives (‘call Sen. Flatfoot and tell him to stop electrocuting our war heroes’), or cosmetics preying on the insecurity of 13-year-old girls (with a little help from the magazine industry).

I mentioned the MLM bit because, well, IT WORKS. (Best Marketing Phrase Ever: “…the success you deserve”.) We’re all above-average drivers; we all had that One Great Idea long before we saw Ron Popeil flogging it late-night; we all just KNOW if we could just unlock that ONE secret, take the right seminar, find the magic formula — we too would unlock our hidden potential, learn the secrets of the experts, overcome self-defeating behaviors — and make a zillion dollars in foreclosed real estate (or ForEx, or commodities, or anything that uses ‘leverage’)…

I’m gonna coin (pun intended) a phrase here: “Opportunity Alchemy”. (Stever – you’re free to use it (or laugh at me).)

Instead of transmutation of lead into gold, the philosophers’ stone, or the fountain of youth — people are now buying into magical shortcuts to “get rich”, or “empower themselves”, or “overcome the negative thinking that’s blocking you from achieving success!” (Which, of course, they deserve.)

I’m a big believer in Stever’s methods — particularly “the Work”, so don’t get me wrong: people DO get stuck in bad patterns, and can benefit enormously from solid, real coaching — I did.

But – success doesn’t come from a tape, or from the worksheets in a notebook you got at a $250 seminar at the Courtyard Marriot in Fresno. (Success, in this case, comes ONLY from SELLING those tapes and seminars.)

Just as with any important human endeavor — successful relationships, raising a child, conflict resolution, achieving artistic or scientific brilliance — there are insights, there are learnable behaviors and practices, there are skills — but there are no magic tricks.

If you could spend $250 on a seminar that’d teach you how to make $150,000 in 2 months — why is the guy who’s leading the seminar wasting his time collecting your $250, instead of ‘multiplying his money’?

He knows these secrets, right? But it’s evident that he finds it more profitable to teach get-rich-quick seminars.

Final comment: Warren Buffett, arguably at least one of the most successful investors in history, takes pains to explain, for free, to the world at large, everything he knows and is doing. He’s like the Linux of get-rich gurus: he publishes his source code. (Small irony, there, given that he pals around and plays bridge with Bill Gates.) He doesn’t do seminars, or charge for his “secrets”, and regularly makes the point that anyone can do exactly what he does, if they have the discipline to follow it.

Most still want to hunt for that shortcut.

Most people are only selling good copywriting it seems.