Top 7 Tired Tropes Of The Predatory Self-Help Industry, Ranked
Ranking all the ways the self-help industry is filled with unethical, godless charlatans.
In reverse order:
7. It’s Easy to Make Money With Enough Hustle
This tired trope is nonsensical: something isn’t easy if you have to hustle, and it’s elitist AF. If you’re the first kid in your family to go to college, you hustled your ass off. If you come from a long line of Biffs and Chads who got into Harvard because your name is Biff or Chad — you didn’t hustle, and you’ll still probably make more money than the other kid.
Yes, you should work hard — not just to make money, but because hard work is satisfying, at least if you grew up marinating in the American ideals of a bonkers work ethic, being scrappy, imaginative, and competitive. All these things are cool. But you know what else is cool? The Italian riposo (otherwise known as a siesta), when the afternoon grinds to a halt so you can eat pasta and take a nap.
Both are great. But if you don’t want to hustle, the self-help industry will tell you that something is fundamentally wrong with you — the first way so-called self-help experts get you into a headlock. Once they convince you that you’re doing it…
