The Genius Within
False Sales Techniques and Illuminating the Impossible
I have always been a sucker sales gimmicks on the internet.
It started early in life before the internet even existed but since then, my addiction to quick sales schemes has been in hyperdrive.
It’s not that I don’t understand that I am being sold an elaborate lie, otherwise known as horse-shit. I know it very well, its just that I enjoy the process of buying the next amazing course that will take my skills to next level guru.
The first course I can ever remember purchasing was on “Kriya Yoga”, a esoteric practice from the Indian Tradition. I had found it advertised in a magazine. Now, finally, I could become a powerful yogi! The only problem was I needed to send them a cheque, I don’t remember the amount now, but I needed it to be drawn in USD, as the product was being shipped from the USA. I had access to only a GPB account in England and didn’t have the foggiest how to proceed as a budding teen. I think I spent a whole summer salivating and opining over it before I finally got it done. I then had to wait a couple of months more for the delivery to come. These were the gold old days. The anticipation was tangible, the excitement feverish, and when the product finally arrived, it didn’t take long for me to figure out I had bought a dud.
Today the whole process can take less than a minute.
Thus began my career in buying every over sold course in the market. Be guitar, music theory, strength training (muscles are import to a young man), NLP, computer programing, language learning, Magick or some other promise. The authors of these courses make the wildest claims. They use beautiful graphics, well timed testimonials, scientific studies, videos, pressure tactics, like continuous emails with special offers and other techniques to get you over that line.
Credit cards were a barrier but now with PayPal, Apple Pay and other fintech alternatives, you don’t even need to get out your wallet and fill in the 20 odd digits required to complete the form.
I have no doubt some of these providers are sincere, perhaps a majority but in the cut throat world out there, aggressive sales is the only game in town if you want to be successful…
I on the other hand am a willing sucker. I know it’s BS but I enjoy the process. It’s kind of like buying a coke (drinking it or snorting it) or having a cigarette. You know it does nothing beneficial for you, but you do have a brief moment of satisfaction and the addictive urge is hard to quit. Once you pop, you just can’t stop.
I have one further motive. I am student of pedagogical means. I love the subject of ‘learning to learn’, memory techniques and on how skills are transferred person to person. I love looking a different language learning techniques and the enormously creative ways learning can happen.
Yet there seems to be a barrier.
Imagine you can run the 100m in 15 seconds. Reasonable but nothing extreme. The best in the world clock in at about 10 seconds at their peak, having all the right genes and years of training.
Imagine further still that using some course you purchased, you manage to go from 15 to 12 seconds. That’s an enormous win, it really is, but the amount of work you put in would have to be commensurate and you could have probably found the same information on YouTube for free. Yet buying the course for a couple of hundred dollars, wrapped in a shiny package with some dude or attractive dudette giving you a motivational speech is what you want to do.
There’s just something so satisfying about shiny packets, and stuff coming through the mail.
There is a barrier to how fast you can go (10s ) and how much you can learn. It’s not even that clear what you’ll have achieved by the end of it.
What I have found is that learning is actually easy, it isn’t that hard to learn the Guitar or French for example.
What’s hard is actually doing it, day after day, after the sales pitch.
That’s the excruciatingly hard part.
When you find that French TV is just as boring as the English one, that the Frogs are just as dull as their cousins across the pond. The only difference being that now you have the understanding of the deaf and blind when they speak. And their grammar is even more screwed up than English. Or more importantly, the language is not very useful outside France or North Africa. Places that you hardly visit.
Same goes for guitar. You find your fingers really don’t want to do what you ask of them. That playing Mary had a Little Lamb and a 3 Chord Song simplification of Nirvana is duller than tap water. That reading music and hieroglyphics are synonymous and probably invented by the same twat a few centuries ago. That playing a Spotify playlist round the camp fire is more fun for your friends than the song you worked on for a month.
And if you can play really well, it’s great as a party trick, or perhaps for busking on a street corner. Congrats! Have you seen how most musicians live?
You finally learn, that there is no real shortcut. But often you Cut Short and starting again is often starting from the beginning.
Yet there also seems to be a genius within.
And we can tap into it. Some call it Flow. Other call it Getting in the Zone. I call it Love. When everything falls away, the struggles evaporate and massive strides are made in whatever is your endeavor.
It is something that is fun, playing that 3 chord song into the night or to your kids in the park can be thrilling.
And ultimately, if you’ve got some cash to burn, burning it on 6000 books and a few hundred courses isn’t such a bad investment. (better than the coke). A private library is very satisfying. There is something about it the internet cannot provide.
You find that a lot of genius is in the eye of the beholder. Celebrity is very different from genius. Society has propped up many Celebrity Genius’, however that’s not where genius really lies.
It lies in every heart. And it is about getting to the heart of the matter. It’s when the obstacle disappears because you have become one with it. You subsume it as supposed to eradicating it.
It’s as Sherlock Holmes said,
“When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
So genius is grappling with all that is impossible. Going down those myriad streets with dead ends until you find a path through, even if that means falling for another shiny object.
And that’s,