on the whole the hustle grind thing is an unsustainably way to live both in business and for a life, and a philosophy targeted at a specific sort of person who is going to idolize and ferociously consume it.
these people, by and large, are great targets because they’re not actually clever or positioned enough to win at doing it, so like a diet designed to keep you hungry and fat there’s a feedback loop of self-flagellation of wanting something, seeing no results, wanting it more, and so on.
and who wins when you can rile a bunch of people up to consume it? the people making the paid courses, and the people make the ‘free’ ones (which get monetized through youtube ads etc.). this is great because now those people can point at their lambos in their garage and the whole loop “proves” itself to “work”.
this by itself is not a pyramid shape - it’s really mostly producers and consumers in a typical arrangement. this could just as easily be artists and fans or parasocial streamer personalities or anything else.
there’s a minor pyramidal component when you get into “I will teach you how to make courses so you can teach them to teach courses so we all get rich” and that grift starts to become sort of triangular because it explicitly wants to spread downward with recruitment over product and, like true pyramid schemes, you run out of new fools to rope in eventually down the line.
but. I don’t know what the numbers look like, but that’s a very small corner of overall entrepreneurship. it probably just happens to come up the most because those very vocal people are making their money by being incredibly vocal. that’s their entire business model.
meanwhile, mr. local garbage collection empire or mrs. insurance business that serves the entire city also makes more money than you could possibly imagine, also works 10 hours a week and doesn’t even know what youtube is. their source of revenue is providing a real product at scale and not recruiting 20-somes into ineffectively running in circles “working” 18 hours a day, keeping them juuuust tired enough to not realize that maybe spending $5k on an ebook package is a terrible deal.
there’s a lot to unpack here.
on the whole the hustle grind thing is an unsustainably way to live both in business and for a life, and a philosophy targeted at a specific sort of person who is going to idolize and ferociously consume it.
these people, by and large, are great targets because they’re not actually clever or positioned enough to win at doing it, so like a diet designed to keep you hungry and fat there’s a feedback loop of self-flagellation of wanting something, seeing no results, wanting it more, and so on.
and who wins when you can rile a bunch of people up to consume it? the people making the paid courses, and the people make the ‘free’ ones (which get monetized through youtube ads etc.). this is great because now those people can point at their lambos in their garage and the whole loop “proves” itself to “work”.
this by itself is not a pyramid shape - it’s really mostly producers and consumers in a typical arrangement. this could just as easily be artists and fans or parasocial streamer personalities or anything else.
there’s a minor pyramidal component when you get into “I will teach you how to make courses so you can teach them to teach courses so we all get rich” and that grift starts to become sort of triangular because it explicitly wants to spread downward with recruitment over product and, like true pyramid schemes, you run out of new fools to rope in eventually down the line.
but. I don’t know what the numbers look like, but that’s a very small corner of overall entrepreneurship. it probably just happens to come up the most because those very vocal people are making their money by being incredibly vocal. that’s their entire business model.
meanwhile, mr. local garbage collection empire or mrs. insurance business that serves the entire city also makes more money than you could possibly imagine, also works 10 hours a week and doesn’t even know what youtube is. their source of revenue is providing a real product at scale and not recruiting 20-somes into ineffectively
running in circles“working” 18 hours a day, keeping them juuuust tired enough to not realize that maybe spending $5k on an ebook package is a terrible deal.