“Courses are a Scam” is Broke People Cope

I came across an interesting tweet by Daniel Fazio (also known as the Cold Email Wizard):

“Courses are a scam” is a common trope that you will hear from people online, and some people will go as far as using “course seller” as an insult.

Almost all of these people are broke and make a meaningless $250k a year or less.

As someone who has spent over $100k on courses and coaching and other “scams” over my 10+ years of being in online business, I can tell you that the right guidance from someone who has EXPERIENCE is worth its weight in GOLD.

Yes, GOLD.

The SLOWEST way to get anywhere is to try to figure out every little thing by yourself. It also has the LOWEST probability of success.

This is something that broke people never seem to understand.

Let’s say you want to play good Tennis or Squash.

You can show up on the court and play with no coach, and get pretty ok at it. If you are naturally talented, you can even be good.

But if you have a coach who:

• Teaches you the right footwork
• The right way to grip the racket
• Drills into you good swing technique
• Understands your strengths and hones them (e.g. if you are tall, you can learn to conserve energy by taking longer steps and stretching for the ball instead of running to get close to it)
• Understands your weaknesses and helps you work on them (e.g. if you are heavy and have a stamina issue, you will be given a diet to lose excess body fat)

You will get there 100x faster. You will play better in 1 year than the self-learners play in 10 years.

This is why all rich people who are mindful of their children’s welfare pay for private tutoring from professionals in their field.

Modern parents really need to read Plutarch’s essay on The Education of Children because his 2000 year old words are timeless wisdom:

Rich people and those who are getting rich pay for private coaching and courses from people they know have knowledge they could use, and they even pay just to meet the right person.

Of course, you have to be careful on the internet…

Because there are TONS of people who pretend to be experts but don’t actually have the goods. There is no substance and many of these guys are just outright lying.

You need to verify that the person has experience with whatever they are talking about, which means you need to look at:

• Their own results/experience
• Reviews for their coaching and courses
• Testimonials from other PAYING customers (not merely from their friends)
• Money back guarantees
• Etc.

When broke people hear the term “course”, they think of guys like Tai Lopez and people selling get rich quick schemes, but really what they are saying is “I have very poor judgement”.

Most people would agree that most school teachers are not great. Most school teachers don’t even know that much about the subject that they are teaching (beyond what’s in the curriculum).

Does that mean education is a scam and that children should not be sent to school?

No, it just means that you need to personally VET who you let teach your children.

Education is invaluable even if most teachers are not good at teaching (God knows I wouldn’t be anywhere in life if I didn’t get an education).

BUSINESS ADVICE: If you can VET the person for legitimacy, acquire their knowledge.

Let’s say you want to start a digital marketing agency.

And you come across someone who runs a digital marketing agency.

And they have a course or coaching program to help other people start digital marketing agencies.

And you can see reviews from their students making money by starting a digital marketing agency.

Getting their course or coaching is a NO BRAINER.

I wouldn’t even think twice about it.

Even if it costs $10k (and yes, I have paid this kind of money to learn from experts many times e.g. for sales training when I was getting on sales calls that were lined up from cold emails).

Because guess what? If you start a digital marketing agency with zero experience, you are most likely not going to succeed.

You will waste hours and hours of your time to figure out the basics from sources like YouTube and have no one to guide you with the execution.

On the other hand, with an experienced person guiding you, you are much more likely to succeed.

You avoid all the traps newbies fall into and you have someone you can talk to when you need help.

You get to learn their business and do it for yourself.

Broke people do not think like this.

What broke people do is that they keep deluding themselves about what they “want to do” and never take any starting steps to begin with.

They are so allergic to investing money in their ideas that they will literally waste years and years procrastinating but will not spend $500 to build a test landing page, put up an affiliate link or two, and run some ads.

God forbid their $500 get “wasted”.

Because they value what they will learn from that “failure” at $0… because they are dumb as fuck.

Let me give you a personal example of the value of the RIGHT ADVICE:

Many years ago, I created a product (not an LMM product), and I quickly whipped up a sales page for it.

Quickly is relative because back in those days AI didn’t exist, and it took a few days (now you can do it in 30 minutes almost for free).

This product was making about $1000 a month and had a 0.5% conversion rate. I knew if I could make $1000 a month, I can make much more.

I had my copywriter work on the page and she fixed a lot of things and it instantly 5Xd the conversion rate. It went from 0.5% to 2.5% in 1 day.

The product went from making $1000 a month to $5000 a month.

This is an extra $48,000 a year in my pocket.

Fun fact: Good copywriting is worth its weight in gold. It’s absolutely worth learning and learning well. This is one of the best courses to learn copywriting from.

The point is that most people would:

1. Never make the landing page to begin with, because why risk money on a domain and hosting
2. Never spend money on ads, because they are afraid of “losing it all” (which will probably happen the first few times you do it)
3. NEVER ever invest $5-10k on a good and proven copywriter, because it’s all obviously a “scam”

As a result they don’t get even the $1k, much less the extra $48k.

Funnily, they will spend $1000s on drinks, junk food, movies, video games, and other wastes of time every year.

Many will also go $100k+ into debt to learn from a college teacher with no actual real life experience (not to mention dump 4 years into it).

But hey at least they didn’t get “scammed”.

Losers.

– Harsh Strongman

P.S. Before someone accuses me of trying to manipulate them into buying my own products (there’s always someone like this), this whole writing stuff online is a hobby for me and despite that I’ve been a top seller on Gumroad for over 6 years now.

Getting you to buy a book from me is not going to turn me into a billionaire. If you thought this post was a veiled attempt to sell you something, you need to get your head out of your ass. You are not that important.