Selling Smoke?

Source

Looking at ads or YouTube videos or billboards or newspapers I invariably see something that states something like:

Connecting with your inner self, the path to riches
Teamwork make your job better and more efficient
Re-engineering for the future
Get rich in five steps

All of these are made up titles, but I believe you have to have seen things like this every day. Now most of these videos, cds, seminars, lectures have one thing in common, they make you see all the shortcomings in your life, in your attitude, in the way you face life, better said they make you look like a loser and the course giver as an intelligent all knowing person. This has always made me wonder if these people know so much and lead such a great life why are they still working on these courses?

And I think that mainly these courses are how they make a living, better said if they don't hustle their courses they don't get any money which of course makes me think that the value of these said courses must be very limited. And I think I have proof.

A few years back when I was employed, the company had these employee gatherings where you would come up with "brainstorms"now I had a co-worker and friend who liked to show off; so one time we knew the upcoming brainstorm was going to be about Team Work, and this guy just took a few hours of his time on the internet and came up with a great presentation, unfortunately the brain storm gatherings were cancelled for some reason or other so he made all that research for nothing, but I did see what he came up with.

So we move a little ahead in time, perhaps one year, Human Resources contracted some genius from El Salvador to give a seminar or workshop that was all about Team Work. Now this guy was charging $2,000.00 per seminar, and he gave ten of them here plus a couple in Guatemala, so just in Honduras he was paid $20,000.00 in one week. That is significantly more money than I was earning in a year, and I was working from 7-5 from Monday to Friday plus five hours on Saturday and at least one Sunday a month (No overtime because here we are on NeoLiberal time).

Well during the workshop he actually told us that he came up with the idea of giving seminars as a source of income one day when he was at a beach in El Salvador, unemployed and with no foreseeable way of being employed by anyone because his curriculum was no good mainly because he couldn't get along with his co-workers. Well he was reading one of those self help books you know like Rich Dad, Poor Dad or something like that and he saw the light; he was a good speaker he wasn't troubled by speaking to an audience so he figured that was his thing.

So he started selling himself as an expert on Team Work workshops and it worked, soon he had more work than he could handle so apparently he got his wife to take on some of the contracts. Now if you have read up to here you will have noticed that he wasn't employed because he failed to get along with others. How could this guy know anything about teamwork.

But that was the start of his seminar, after a couple of hours I noticed that all this guy was saying was nearly an exact copy of what my friend had researched about teamwork for our gatherings. So here we had somebody who was making a lot of money lecturing about something he was not good at and which material he most probably got out of the internet.

I was not too happy with this, you know I'm getting a lousy salary for some very hard work and this guy comes and makes in a week more than I do in a year and in reality he was a charlatan. And unfortunately even though it might not be true for all people I do think most people who sell these miracle ways to improve yourself, get rich, improve your life are actually selling smoke.