I got a dm last week that made me realize something.

Info marketers are brainwashing people.

They are brainwashing them into thinking buying courses and finding mentors is the first step in building a successful business.

This couldn't be farther from the truth. Searching for a mentor is just straight up procrastination. And I’d even make the case that buying courses hurts your chances of being successful.

This is because by buying a course, you’re attempting to take a shortcut. But there are rarely shortcuts in business. And when there are, they have been arbitraged out of existence before they make it to your favorite gurus course. Thus, you end up paying for surface level information(that you could have easily found for free) while robbing yourself of learning from first principles.

When you buy someone's winning lotto ticket, you shouldn’t be surprised that they already cashed it in.

Does this mean you should never pay to learn things?

Absolutely not.

By selling a course, the creator is signaling that it's higher leverage for them to sell knowledge than to apply it for themselves. In some cases this makes sense. In other it makes it painfully obvious that the seller is a grifter.

A great example of this is any trading course. If these finance course creators really knew how to beat the market, they would be running hedge funds & making 10s of millions per year. Not selling $97 courses and paid groups to morons on the internet.

Yes, if you have ever purchased a trading course you are a CERTIFIED MORON. But don’t worry, all is not lost, there is still time to secure generational wealth for your unborn children

A great counter-example is courses that teach you highly specific technical skills like software development. A great software developer can make upwards of $250K per year. But if they can sell a $100 course to 5,000 people a year they could make more. This math checks out. Selling a course could be higher leverage for them in the right circumstances. Although, most of the time, you can still find the same information they are selling for free.

The only course I’ve ever paid for (besides the money I wasted going to a 4 year university) was Codecademy.com’s pro membership for like $15/mo.

At this point, the knowledge I paid for probably represents less than 1% of what I know. Everything else has come from free information available to anyone with an internet connection.

I decided to create a database of all my favorite learning resources (see below)

If they’re selling you some get rich quick scheme—whether it’s crypto or whether it’s an online business or seminar—they’re just making money off you. That’s their get rich quick scheme. It’s not necessarily going to work for you. ~Naval

The 80/20 The 4-hour work week Deep work How to get rich Pieter Levels

Books

• The 4-hour work week
• Deep work
• The Lean startup
• Atomic Habits
• Zero to One
• The mom test
• Skin in the game
• Built to sell
• Ultra learning

Books can be downloaded for free from library genesis although I do not endorse doing so.

Podcasts + Some of my favorite episodes

• How I built this
  • Burton Snowboards Jake Carpenter
• In The Pit with Cody Schneider
  • Zero to $20,000 MRR in 4 months with only influencer marketing
• Lenny's podcast
  • How Hubspot built a $30B Company | Dharmesh Shah
• The SaaS podcast
• My First Million
  • Pieter Levels: Making 2.7M a year with no employees
• The Tim Ferris show
  • Jason Fried - How to live life on your own terms
• Founders Journal
  • Growing Morning Brew from 0 to 10,000 subscribers
• Naval
  • How to get rich

Blogs

• Big Desk Energy
  • Allways be shipping
• Nathan Barry
  • [Growing ConvertKit to $30,000 in Monthly Recurring Revenue](https://nathanbarry.com/30k/7
• [Paul Graham Essays](https://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
• Wallst playboys originals (they are now Bowtied Bull and their content isn't as good. maybe someone bought the brand)
• Lempire blog
• 37 Signals

Twitter Accounts

• David Park
  • How to go from 0 to $5M ARR profitably
• Naval
  • How to get rich without getting lucky
• Balaji
• Andrew Wilkinson
• Steph Smith
• Cody Schneider
• Pat Walls
• Pieter Levels
• Syed Balkhi