Observation

His Million-Dollar Advice Fit on One Page

A man writes a book called How to Make a Million Dollars and charges a dollar for it. You order it. It shows up. You open it, and it is one page long. It says: write a book, sell it to a million suckers.

That is the whole book, and the joke works because the book is not lying to you. The advice really did make him a million dollars. It just made it from you.

I think about that every time somebody sells their advice for thirty dollars. Read what you paid for closely and a lot of the time the advice turns out to be: go find some people who will give you thirty dollars. The thing being sold is the thing being done to you, right there in the open, and you paid for the demonstration.

There is real help in this world and some of it costs money and is worth every dime of it. So the tell is not the price. The tell is whether there is anything inside it that would still be useful if nobody ever paid a nickel for it. Take the money out, and if the advice disappears with it, it was never advice. It was a sales pitch wearing a book jacket.

That is a good part of why nothing here costs anything. I would rather you judge it on whether it helped you, because that is the only thing I can honestly ask you to judge it on.

I said what I said.

Mark HopeLife Coaching