Self-Improvement Industry - Buying Transformation Instead of Building It
The Product: Courses you’ll never finish. Books with one idea stretched to 300 pages. Apps tracking habits you’ll abandon by February. They’re not selling improvement - they’re selling the FEELING of improving. The dopamine hit of purchase replacing the grind of practice.
Reading about discipline instead of being disciplined. Watching morning routines instead of fixing your own.
The Players: Gurus monetizing their one success into lifelong careers. “I did X, now pay $997 for my course on doing X.” What got them rich? Selling courses to you.
Skufs collecting frameworks like Pokémon cards. Notion templates, bullet journals, productivity systems. The optimization becomes the substitute for actual work.
Tony Robbins charging $5,000 to walk on coals. Some podcast bro with a Patreon. Scale changes, game doesn’t.
The Genius: Industry needs you stuck in preparation phase forever. Actually succeeding means you stop buying. Fixed people don’t subscribe. Completely broken people can’t afford to.
Sweet spot: earning enough to pay, damaged enough to keep paying.
Algorithms feed endless “optimization” content. YouTube monetizing motivation. Amazon selling journals. Entire economy built on aspirational skufs who never start.
The Real Cost: That entrepreneur “researching” for 3 years. That writer with 47 courses and zero manuscripts. That Udemy library collecting dust - those are months of actual practice you traded for comfortable someday.
How many courses have you bought versus skills you’ve actually built?