Get rich quick!

That was the first internet spam. A pyramid scheme that promises that will get its participants rich quickly. The reality is that very few things in life can be achieved quickly; life itself is about dying slowly. So how do we achieve anything quickly?

There are very few things we can achieve quickly. I chuckle whenever I see someone promises a quick fix scheme: follow these 5 rules to success, the 3 important steps to get rich, or turn it around, don't make these 10 critical mistakes... The list goes on. But if we were to sit down and reflect on our experiences, both mistakes and successes, we will soon discover what will work for or cost us. Of course, life coaches, productivity advisers, consultants, and a whole long list of societal parasites, or as many would know them as hustlers would name the previous statement as the 80-20 rule. The truth is that, as intelligent individuals, we should critically analyze sales pitch, marketing tactics, and simplify them; i.e., cut through the bullshit.

Take a recent video of David D (DD) that talks about time management. He goes on and on about time management, that these tips will vastly improve our physical health, mental stamina, etc., and basically, they are things that most parents taught their kids. Get up earlier than one starts to work; drink plenty of water, eat a healthy breakfast, exercise, meditate, work for as long as one can without interruption, and of course, take a nap when one is tired.

All those tips come from a program called Guru Mastermind. Now, seriously, do we really need to pay a hack working out of his apartment to tell us what we already know?! Funny how a similar story about Tony Robbins (TR) came up; I was talking with this one girl and she was going on and on about how she's a fan of TR. Being a girl, someone paid for her to attend a TR seminar. She's pretty (and) intelligent (I know, a surprising combination eh!); she basically distilled all of TR's advice down to one thing: think about what you want to do with your life, go do it, don't sit around and make excuses. The genius of TR and DD lies not in what they know how to improve our lives, the human condition, but in their ability to market themselves. They are much better at selling themselves, make them seem more impressive than they really are, and people, one by one, fall for their hustling skills.

Mainstream society likes to call that marketing techniques. I'll probably need to pay $40k / year for an MBA so I too can make up some more silly phrases, hustle the right group of people, and dupe the rest into parting their hard earned cash into my hands. So before you throw your money into any scheme that promises a quick fix, an immediate result, or something so fantastic that it's too good to be true, it probably is. If people are more critical instead of simply accepting whatever someone is trying to hustle, examine who and what would benefit from that action, and whether there's even any truth or validity to that claim, we would be richer by not getting hustled. A side effect is that, hopefully, we will have less hustlers to deal with for the rest of the society. But then, fortunately, there's a sucker being born every few seconds. So at the very least, don't become one of them.