Courses are a Scam…Right?
The Amplified Impact Podcast
January 9th, 2023
Today, I’m tackling a hot topic: digital courses.
Recently, there’s been a lot of chatter and criticism around them, labeling them as scams or grifts.
I’m here to break down why these courses get a bad rap, drawing comparisons to traditional education and exploring why successful individuals might choose teaching over doing.
Are digital courses truly worth it? Why charge for knowledge?
Let’s unpack these notions and challenge some stereotypes.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“If he’s charging you, yeah, pay. Pay for his time, pay for his experience and his wisdom. It is worth it.”
– Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Yo, what’s up, guys? Welcome back to the podcast. It’s time to get on a little bit of a soapbox, because just about a week ago, my budy Michael Girdley, who has a very large following on twitter, he got a lot of flak from some trolls because he decided to do the most unforgivable of things, and that was to create a course based on of the things that he had learned over his decades of entrepreneurship experience. He decided to create a course. And that immediately means that you are a grifter and that you are trying to cheat people, that you don’t know what you’re talking about. And I wanted to do this podcast today because there’s just so. I’m not saying everybody feels this way, but a lot of people feel like that digital courses are almost always a grift, that they’re a scam, that the person doing it, like, if they really had this knowledge that could make you so much money, why would they teach somebody else how to do it and increase the competition that they have? Or why wouldn’t they just be better served to go and do the thing rather than teach the thing? And you hear this argument so much from a generally, it’s from people who aren’t very successful in life who would actually be best served by the information in those courses. Those are the ones who typically say, like, oh, this is a grift. This is a scam.
And truly, there are a lot of people out there who have no experience, who have put together a course that is not worth its salt. And that’s prevalent. That’s prevalent. But the truth is, none of us bats an eye at the fact that we have 28 year olds fresh out of college who have no real world experience going into our high schools and then teaching things to our youth. Like, I’m going to teach these kids economics, though I’ve never lived in the real world or with a real job doing anything even remotely close to economics. I just went to college and I took maybe a class or two on how to teach and how to manage a classroom. And now I’m being expected to teach our most precious resource, which is our future, our future generations, this information. And yet we’re okay with that.
We’re okay with the fact that our teachers who are in our school systems probably are not the best at the thing that they do, at what they’re teaching. They’re probably just not right. They’re probably generalists, and they know enough about the thing to be able to teach it. But as a result, the thing that they’re teaching isn’t very valuable because it can be acquired. It’s just being taught secondhand out of a book or they watched a video, and so they don’t understand it at a very deep, fundamental level, like the person who has been living and breathing maybe economic cycles for the last 15 years, like if that is their livelihood, in the case of Girdley, where it’s like, I would much rather learn from that guy because he’s applied it, the knowledge in the real world, and he’s vetted it through the filter of his own experiences. And yet we’ll hear that. And the counterargument might be, well, teachers don’t do it for the money. And to that I say they do.
Teachers do do it for the money. Most teachers wouldn’t go in and teach if they weren’t getting paid. The problem is they’re just not getting paid very much. And that’s a different conversation entirely. Like, are they getting paid enough? I don’t want to chime in on that conversation, but generally, the reason that they’re not getting paid a lot is because the knowledge that they’re teaching isn’t very valuable. And again, high school economics, just if it’s being taught from somebody who has no real world experience with the information, then it’s just regurgitated, which can be learned out of a book. And so as a result, this is not very valuable. And as a consequence, they don’t get paid very much.
Now, the question then, regardless of how you feel about teachers and how much they get paid and how valuable the information that they have is, you have to accept that there are very successful people out there who have some killer skills and experiences that you would love to tap into their brains with. Right? Like, whenever Warren Buffett goes on a podcast, we all tune in and listen because it’s like, I want to learn from that guy. He’s got a very different experience than your high school finance teacher. Right? So then the rebuttal then people will have is, okay, well, if this thing that you’re teaching is so lucrative, why wouldn’t you just keep doing it? And there’s actually a couple of different reasons for this. And I know this from firsthand experience because I have a couple of courses. I don’t necessarily teach people how to go make money. I haven’t done a course on that yet. But we’re working on a community where that will be one of the aspects of it.
I think to maximize your return on life, you have to learn how to win the money game. And that’s one aspect of it. But the truth is, for a lot of people, a lot of successful entrepreneurs, who decide to go and create a course, money isn’t the primary motivating factor, right? Beyond a certain point, the utility of money decreases. And so another 100,200, a million dollars, it’s like, is that fundamentally going to change the quality of their life? No. So maybe they want to go and make an impact or to start to share with what they’ve learned. And there’s other metrics by which they might measure. Is this a worthwhile endeavor? But I think the most worthwhile aspect of teaching is that teaching is actually a form of learning. My favorite learning framework is learn, do, teach, which is first you learn it, then you do it, then you teach somebody else how to do it.
And quite often, I’m not really forced to reflect on what I actually feel or think or do around a skill or a topic until I’m trying to teach it to somebody else. And I realize, oh, crap, this is why I do it this way and this way and this way. Until you actually try to teach it to somebody, you don’t really understand what you know about it. And for me, the learning what you actually know on a topic by trying to teach it to somebody else, it’s actually quite exciting, and it’s, I think, the highest level of mastery, it’s the level that we all try to ascend to. Does that mean that person shouldn’t be teaching? No, I think that’s exactly the person that you want to be learning from is the person who has done the thing, and now they’re trying to explain it to you why it is effective. The third reason that somebody might teach rather than do the skill is that teaching is highly scalable. For instance, if I have a skill that makes me a million dollars a year, then every year I make a million dollars. If I came to you and I said, hey, I can teach you a skill that will make you a million dollars every single year.
In exchange, you will pay me $1 million. That would actually be a very good transaction for you if it was guaranteed, because you could use your earnings from that first year, a million dollars in that year to pay me back, and then every year after that, for the rest of your life, you get to make a million dollars. That would be a very, very good exchange. Now, if I could teach, say, twelve people that skill every year, then I make $12 million, right? Whereas if I’m just applying that skill, I maybe only make a million. And so it’s very scalable and it can be very lucrative to teach people rather than to do the thing. Because the truth is teaching is easier than the doing in a lot of cases. But not only that, there’s another aspect of this is that if I decided, instead of trying to teach you this skill, if instead I decided I’m going to hire people and I’m going to teach my employees those skills, well, now I will reap the million dollars of revenue that those employees can generate every single year. So instead of teaching twelve students how to make a million dollars, if I teach twelve employees and they’re all going to go make me 12 million this year and 12 million next year and 12 million the year after that.
So that is how you build scalable businesses. And that’s awesome. But here’s the truth, is that maybe the entrepreneur doesn’t want to do that. The person who’s teaching the thing doesn’t want to be accountable to holding their people to the system, the process and to the result. Maybe they don’t want to deal with the increasing complexity of communication that comes with having more people on the team. Maybe they’d rather just teach you how to do it and say, here you’re responsible now to actually go and do the work. I think there’s a lot to be said about that mental freedom to not have to worry about showing up every single day and holding people accountable to doing the work. And truthfully, there’s a lot of reality to the idea that what got you here won’t get you there.
So as an entrepreneur, you might have acquired this million dollar skill, but then to go to $12 million a year with employees, you have to learn a completely different skill set. So if the skill that got you here was, say, copywriting, now to get to 12 million, you need to learn how to hire and to train and to manage people. It’s a fundamentally different skill, and maybe you don’t want to learn that. Maybe it’s just not worth it to you, or maybe you have, here’s the other aspect of it. In the case of a Girdley, maybe you have built the system and you have built that machine, and now, because you’ve built it correctly, you are no longer required for the profitable operation of that machine. And so you’ve been able to pull yourself out of the day to day operations and your team keeps doing what they’re doing. And so now you’re over here just kind of like, what do I do with myself? I’m not necessary for the day to day operations, this machine is continuing to grow without me. I have this skill, this experience.
What can I do? Well, you could package it up and you could sell it. And at the end of the day, is that a good use of time? It’s pretty good. Based off of how scalable and easy it is to create a digital product, let’s say, and then distribute it, it can be very, very profitable and lucrative, and that can be a very good use of your time. But the rebuttal a lot of people have is, okay, well, if you’re doing so well and you’re making all this money, why do you need the charge for it? That’s like the final resistance of people who are against courses. And to that, there’s a couple of reasons. One, people don’t value free. You probably already have access to all the free knowledge you need to go and be wildly successful. There’s nothing that I can teach you that isn’t already out there on YouTube, on podcasts and books that you could get for free from the library.
It’s not a lack of information that’s holding people back. It’s a lack of application. And that application, that can be hard, because when you have all this information to sift through, you don’t always know which parts are the good parts. You don’t know which parts are specific and useful for your context. And so you can spend a lot of time and energy sifting through free stuff that is actually a waste of your time, and you have to learn that the hard way. Whereas when people put together these information products, ideally they save you time and energy. Now, again, there’s people who grift and there are bad courses. There’s bad scams out there for sure.
But in my experience, that actually happens far less than you think. The people who are falling prey to the grifts and those scammy courses are usually trying to get rich quick. They’re falling prey to some too good to be true pitch. And in which case, I think you are actually learning a very valuable lesson, which is there is no get rich quick scheme, but a lot of people will take those courses and they’ll come away having learned the wrong lesson. And that is courses are bad. And I just don’t agree with that. I’ve spent hundreds of thousands on courses. It is my favorite way to learn new skills, actually, because I can take them at my own speed.
It saves me so much time and so much energy. And are there going to be bad courses where you’re like, yeah, that wasn’t very good. Of course, that’s going to be the cost of the fact that there’s so many people putting out information. But honestly, the courses that have been good have been so much more roi positive that it’s okay to have had those bad courses in the mix. It just washes out. It’s not even a big deal. But one last thing on why should you charge for your courses? Like, if you’re making money and you’re doing really well in life, why would you charge money for this? It’s because you can. It’s because you can.
And at the end of the day, that doesn’t make you evil. It makes you a good business person. And that is generally the type of person that you would want to learn business from, right? Like the person who understands the value of what they’re doing, the economics of it, and that they’re not just giving away things for free. Because again, nobody values free, nobody trusts free. And so, I don’t know. That’s my rant. It’s maybe not a good one, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about because Michael got a lot of people just jumping on the bandwagon of hate. And it was really frustrating to see because I know him personally and I know he’s a great dude who puts out killer content, and he’s one of those people that you want to learn from.
And if he’s charging you, yeah, pay. Pay for his time, pay for his experience and his wisdom. It is worth it. So that’s going to do it for me, guys. I hope 2024 is a year filled with learning and growth for you. Whether you pay for it or you consume it for free, I don’t care. This podcast is free, and hopefully you’re learning something in the process. I know I am.
The teaching is part of my learning process, and it’s one of the things that I enjoy the most out of doing this. So thank you for giving me that opportunity. As always, I appreciate you being here. We’ll catch you in the next episode. But until then, stay hyper focus, my friend. Bye.
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