Welcome to the third and last part of the “is the self-development industry a scam”. Be sure to check out the first (you can read it here) and second post (you can read it here) before you read this one. In the previous post, we ended by giving you a sneak peek of what you can expect in this post. So as promised, today we’ll cover:
- Talking about people who claim it’s all about the journey.
- The one time I got in a small Twitter beef with an online guru.
- Psychedelics: good or bad.
- How do you actually change your life?
It’s all about the self-development journey bro.
I always love it when people come at me with this phrase. It’s all about the journey… Isn’t that just a fancy way of saying ‘live life’? Isn’t living life the purpose of life in the first place? That makes it so interesting to me. You sell a program that will improve people’s lives and after that, you sell them another program to keep accompanying them on the journey. Why? Because there are always new layers to be discovered or more things to work on.
What most people fail to realize is that this “journey” aka your life is your responsibility. It requires you to take ownership of your life, something most people shy away from. You rather pay a lot of money to be told what to do than actually doing what you have to do.
Why? Because you want to have someone to blame when things go your way. And the last person you want to blame, is YOU.
It’s ok to have coaches and mentors but in the end, part of being an adult is taking your life into your own hands.
The tweet and the self-development guru.
I once tweeted that most self-love coaches don’t love themselves and this is a reply I got from a self-help/self-love coach.
“it’s about sharing and being vulnerable about the growth and evolution that is the human experience to connect instead of avoiding their truths and pointing fingers at other people”.
That tweet wasn’t aimed at anyone in particular. It was just a reflection on what I’d seen throughout a couple of months. The person who replied took it personally and tried to call me out. It was weird since I didn’t know how a general statement suddenly turned into pointing fingers? That is only possible if you take it personally but you can’t say that of course so you generalize it to make the other person (me in this case) feel bad.
To this day on I still don’t know what it means. It’s a vague description as far as I can tell. What I also do know is that connecting with that coach costs you a lot of money. I don’t see anything wrong with sharing your experiences to help others. There’s also nothing wrong with monetizing your knowledge but pretending to be knowledgeable about a certain matter to make easy money is a scam.
Scamming people has also never been easier, you put whatever you want in your social media bio and people might buy into it.
Why?
Because they have the critical thinking skills of a peanut.
How does the old phrase go again? It must be true if it’s on the internet. This still makes me laugh to this day.
In the end, they just want to make money of miserable people. Which are an easy target.
The psychedelic- and self-development experience.
Over the years, I’ve heard a lot about psychedelics and how they are a gateway to the soul or something like that. The one that has been mentioned the most is ayahuasca. It has been used in South- America for ages and has been commercialized around the world. I’ve had multiple occasions where I had the opportunity to do it. At first, I said no because I didn’t like the idea of it, after a while I got curious but suddenly I came to a rather disturbing realization after meeting multiple people who’d done the ceremony one or multiple times.
They had all these amazing insights but……… NOTHING CHANGED! That made me decide to just not do it. I doubt that a plant that makes you see things, that are not there, will give you life-changing insights. It even sounds pretty dangerous to me if you’re not mentally stable. Some people think some of the things they saw were actually real.
A plant won’t heal your trauma. A plant won’t talk to you and give you amazing insights. What it might do is bring out what’s already there. It might just show you how big of a mess your life is while you’re tripping balls in the jungle. After that, you can either take action and do something with it or do nothing with it and keep going to the jungle to see mystic animals and other things that you would never see if you weren’t high.
So how does one change his life?
You can only change your life by understanding “cause and effect”. Every action has a reaction, even inaction has a reaction to it. Understanding that you are the cause of almost everything that happens to you gives you tremendous power over your life. Taking accountability or ownership of your actions/inactions will change your life forever if you can draw the correct lessons. Being accountable, logical, and using reason will make you progress beyond all your obstacles in life but will also improve your overall life quality.
Not being able to do that will turn your life into a living hell because taking yourself out of the equation (not being accountable) will make seem everything in life random but also out of your control. You can’t change things that are out of your control so inevitably you can’t change your life.
The fact that your life sucks is your fault and no one else’s. Even if you’re stuck in a bad environment, you’re the one deciding to stay there and no one else. Someone had to tell you at one point. It’s the slap in the face that most people need but never get.
You just got it.
Now shut up and go to work.
Or read ‘the guide to self – delvelopment you’ll ever need’ before you go to work.
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Till next time
Alex
