Los millonarios que necesitan tu dinero

Gurus don’t sell courses, mentorships or information. They sell the future.

And not just any future: they rent you, with epic music and installments, the version of yourself that shows up when real life already has you fed up.

That version wakes up without an alarm, works two hours, flies first class and receives passive income with a punctuality no delivery guy ever had. It answers to nobody and looks at its old boss with that mix of pity and superiority that’s embarrassing to admit, but that more than one of us has fantasized about.

That guy is you.

Not the real one.

The version they sell.

And the trap isn’t that they show you that version. The trap is that they make you believe the only distance between who you are and who you could be is a three-hundred-dollar payment.

Look, I know that mirror. I’ve looked into it.

There was a time —don’t ask me how long, because I’m embarrassed to confess it— when I also stood in front of that mirror. It wasn’t at a sales presentation. It was somewhere worse: in a conversation with myself at three in the morning, with a cold bank account and a tight chest.

I thought: "If I could just find the shortcut. If someone who already made it showed me how. If only there were a method."

And that’s exactly what the gurus are hoping you’ll think. They don’t come looking for you when you’re doing well. They come looking for you when you’re tired, frustrated, with the feeling that you work like a mule and progress is a joke someone has been playing on you for years.

That’s when they show up.

Not as salespeople. As saviors.

—I was where you are right now —they say, and they say it with shining eyes, as if they were about to cry with emotion remembering their suffering past—. I know exactly how you feel. And that’s why I know there’s a way out.

And you believe them.

Not because you’re naive. You believe them because they’re saying what you need to hear. They validate your pain, blame the system and then announce that they found the crack. What a hell of a coincidence: they also sell the key.

The Basic Promise

Pay attention to a hundred of these characters —and believe me, I did, for your sake and to my despair— and you’ll find the same promise with a different haircut. They change the vocabulary and the jacket; the skeleton stays the same.

First, they tell you who you were.

—You worked fourteen hours, you never saw your kids, your boss treated you like a piece of furniture, your weekends were for catching up on the sleep you didn’t get during the week.

(Sounds familiar, right? Sounds like most of the people you know.)

Then they tell you who they are now.

—Today I earn what I always dreamed of, I work when I want, from wherever I want, I spend time with my family, I answer to nobody and my biggest problem is deciding which country to spend the summer in.

(And you think: "How did he get from there to there?" And that’s exactly the question they want you to ask.)

Then comes the bridge.

—And if I could, you can too. Because I’m not smarter than you. I don’t have special talents. I wasn’t born into a rich family. I just found the right method. And today I want to share it with you.

That’s the moment you should get up and close the laptop. But you don’t. Because the promise is so clear, so simple, so perfectly designed to hit every one of your sore spots that closing the page would feel like betraying your own chance at happiness.

And that’s what’s perverse about this model.

They don’t sell you a product: they sell you an identity, and on top of that they charge you up front.

They tell you: "You’re not the nine-to-five type. You’re an entrepreneur. You’re free. You’re one of the people who make decisions. You’re one of the people who take risks."

And by telling you who you are, they’re also telling you who you’re not. You’re not a coward. You’re not a conformist. You’re not one of those who stay stuck in the trap. And if you buy, you confirm you are who you say you are. If you don’t buy... well, maybe you don’t have what it takes. Maybe you don’t want to change enough. Maybe you’d rather keep complaining.

See the trap?

It’s binary. You buy = you’re brave. You don’t buy = you’re a coward. And since nobody wants to be a coward —much less admit it—, the brain does what it always does when it’s given a binary choice that threatens its identity: it chooses the one that makes it feel better about itself.

And it pays.

I saw it happen with a friend. I’m going to change her name because otherwise she’ll kill me.

Marcela. Thirty-eight years old. Two kids. She worked in an office where they paid her less than she deserved and demanded more than was humanly possible. One day she calls me, all excited.

—Yenny, I found a course that’s going to change my life.

—What course? —I said, while I was putting together an anniversary gift basket and trying not to spill the wine on the folders.

—One by a girl who became a millionaire in six months selling digital products. She says you don’t need experience, or capital, or anything. You just follow her method step by step.

—And how much does it cost?

—Twelve hundred dollars. But she says it’s worth five thousand. And that it’s the last time she’s going to offer it at this price.

—Marcela, are you calling me so I’ll tell you to buy it or so I’ll tell you not to buy it?

Silence.

—So you’ll tell me to buy it.

—Then I’m not going to tell you that.

—You bitch.

—Love you.

Marcela bought the course.

I’m not going to tell you the ending yet because you can already imagine it. But what I want you to see is what happened before the purchase. What happened in Marcela’s head when she saw that offer.

Marcela wasn’t buying a digital-products course.

Marcela was buying the version of herself that didn’t work in that office. The Marcela who didn’t come home exhausted. The Marcela who could take her kids to the park on a Tuesday at three in the afternoon. The Marcela who answered "I’m an entrepreneur" when people asked what she did for a living.

The course was the vehicle. But the destination was the identity.

And that’s what makes it so hard to say the course didn’t work. Because if the course didn’t work, then the identity failed too. Then maybe you’re not an entrepreneur. Maybe you’re what you always were: a tired employee who got her hopes up.

And that hurts more than the twelve hundred dollars.

The Invisible Producer

There’s something here that took me a while to understand, and when I finally got it I felt the way you do when you discover the magician has no powers: just tricks.

Gurus don’t invent the promise.

The promise already exists in your head before they show up. The desire for financial freedom, to be your own boss, to answer to nobody, for money to work for you... none of that was created by the gurus. Culture created it. Exhaustion created it. The experience of spending your whole life feeling like you work to make someone else rich created it.

Gurus don’t manufacture the desire: they detect it, put lights on it and then sell it back to you at a launch price.

It’s as if I, who read tarot, came along and told you: "I see in your cards that you’re going through a time of uncertainty." Is there anyone in the world who isn’t going through a time of uncertainty? Of course not. But when someone tells you that while looking you in the eye —or looking into the camera— with the confidence of someone revealing a hidden truth, you feel they read your soul.

They didn’t read your soul.

They read the script.

The script we all carry: the one about wanting something more, something better, something different from what we have. And these guys are actors who memorized that script better than anyone.

The Million-Dollar Question —Literally

Why does the same promise work over and over with a different face?

Because desire never runs out.

You can fool a person once. Twice. But the market of people who want to believe there’s a shortcut is infinite. Every day there are new eighteen-year-olds entering the working world and discovering that working is horrible. Every day there are new thirty-five-year-olds looking at their paycheck and coming up short. Every day there are new fifty-year-olds who feel time slipped away and they still haven’t achieved what they wanted.

Desire renews itself. The audience replenishes itself. And the promise, while staying the same, sounds new every time because the face delivering it is new.

It’s like boyfriends. Every one of them tells you "you’re different from the others" and you believe him, even though you know he said it to three women before you. But it sounds new. It sounds like yours. It sounds real.

The charlatan’s promise works the same way.

—My method is different —they say.

It isn’t.

—I’m not like the others —they say.

They are.

—I’m going to show you what nobody wants to tell you —they say.

What nobody wants to tell you is that there is no method. There’s work, there’s luck, there’s context, there’s ability, there’s opportunity. And none of that is sold in a three-hundred-dollar course with lifetime access.

But "work hard, cross your fingers and it’s still not guaranteed" isn’t a slogan that sells. So they wrap it in something else.

They wrap the product in the version of you that you want to be. The box says «potential»; inside, it could be anything.