Why Is The Self-Improvement Industry So Full Of Scammers?
Takeaway Points:
Often, the most popular “self-help” books and theories are too general and vague to be really meaningful besides getting people to feel good about themselves. This is done on purpose - the more general the advice is, the more people can buy the product.
The self-improvement industry usually ignores many environmental, social, political, genetic, and other factors that contribute to a person’s ability to make improvements.
The fitness industry is incorporated into a lot of the self-improvement industry because people assume that people who “look good” are happy. It’s especially easy for influencers on social media to have people believe their success because we only see pictures and snippets they want us to see, not the full story.
The self-improvement industry and the fitness industry often rely on sexual desire, novelty, and money in order to sell people on their methods. Using their “new” approaches, they tell you that you can make you look more like them or make you more money, which the industries use as a synonym for happiness. These methods aren’t new, just forgotten, and often don’t deliver as promised.
Success and improvement at anything is a time consuming, high effort challenge that can’t be conquored with a book, supplements, or any single thing.
Why is the self-improvement industry so full of scammers?
It’s a hard question to answer. When I first fell in love with the concept of self-improvement, as a teenager, it helped to lift me out of depression and gave me the tools to manage my anxiety issues. Since then, it’s been a major guiding principle in my life: it’s why I’ve taken risks, why I’ve made successes, and ultimately why my career has succeeded to the extent that it has.
At the same time, while my interest in self-improvement as a personal discipline has been immensely personally satisfying, almost NONE of the things that I would qualify as “self-improvement” have really lined up very much with what’s going on in what we could call the wider self-improvement “industry”.
I want to dig now into a few topics that I think lie at the core of the issue, and which are precisely why this industry is, at the end of the day, as weird as it is.
Most Of The Literature On The Topic Is Feel-Good Encouragement
I’ve read almost everything there is to read on the topic of self-improvement, and with very few exceptions, most of it is very fluffy, feel-good stuff intended to make its reader feel more enthusiastic about themselves.
This applies to, in my opinion, a lot of the classic books, like:
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Think And Grow Rich
How To Win Friends And Influence People
The 48 Laws of Power
And so on. While these books are ostensibly about various rules and methods for being more successful, often their actual content in terms of hard advice is very bland stuff. I honestly can’t remember most of the stuff in most of those books, even though I’ve read them all, simply because so much of it boils down to simple truisms that anyone can understand and that seem apparent and obvious to lots of people.
That’s because, I think, the purpose of most of these books isn’t to be a kind of training or technical manual for success - a prospect that would be intensely boring and not very commercially successful. Instead, these books are successful precisely because they boil down complex topics into simple, feel-good soundbites for everyone. The purpose of these books is not so much to actually make anyone’s lives better, but to be generally applicable to as many people as possible in order to find an audience.
This isn’t a problem that is unique to the self-help industry, either - in any industry, there’s a complex balance to strike between “crowd pleasers which will be widely successful but not terribly helpful” and “genuinely helpful but more specific efforts which will be less successful by nature of their appealing to a much smaller audience”.
Likewise, a powerlifting program designed to be widely applicable to as many people as possible, will be widely popular but not great at generating world-class lifters. A philosophy 101 textbook that covers the topic broadly but with little depth will be a lot more appealing and probably sell better, but won’t have anywhere near the insight as a dense primary text that no one wants to buy or read. In short, that’s just the name of the game.
Self-help books are generally about how anyone can succeed using the principles contained therein - ignoring, of course, that such principles are generally shallow, surface level interpretations of difficult realities.
In particular, I always hated those books, even though I was probably a perfect example of their target audience, because I simply didn’t have the fundamental level of fear that they seem to attribute to their readers. These books tend to assume that the thing holding people back from success is themselves, that they don’t know their own worth or how to actualize their desires, and so on - I had precisely the opposite problem!
I was constantly convinced that I knew all the answers, and was confused as to why the outside world didn’t seem to reflect my intentions. I was constantly trying to figure out why I wasn’t succeeding yet, when the answer was simply that I hadn’t yet put in the time or waited long enough for the results of my efforts to become apparent. In short, I didn’t need to be convinced to continue on my path - I just wanted help along the way, and these books didn’t really have much to give.
These books are, I think, a great entry point into self-improvement. They are good at hyping people up, convincing them that they can dream bigger, and that they can accomplish more if they legitimately put their effort to something. But at the same time, I don’t think that they’re typically very good at actually giving people the tools or strategies to succeed.
This is in part because success is always incredibly individual. Each person’s circumstances, challenges, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and even their goals are very different. So trying to give them self-improvement advice is bound to be incredibly general and not particularly personally useful. It can teach you the right mindset, but not give you the right tools - the tools are something that you have to figure out for yourself, in your own way. At the end of the day, success is on your own terms, and it means figuring out for yourself what you want to accomplish it, how you can do it differently than anyone else, and so on.
The Fitness Industry Is Entangled With The Self-Improvement Industries
Another evident problem, at least to me, is that the self-improvement industry is intensely entwined with a certain flashy aesthetic: the aesthetic of fast cars, hot women, big muscles, nice clothes, expensive possessions, and so on.
The fitness industry has always been a bit weird in that way. It’s a somewhat natural jump for a lot of people - they get into fitness as a way of improving their bodies and their relationship with their bodies, and the jump to a more generalized concept of self-improvement isn’t a far away concept in most people’s minds. It’s exactly how I ended up in the fitness industry, after all.
But the reality, of course, is that this isn’t really healthy. Being jacked doesn’t make you instantly make more money, gain a ton of followers on instagram, or anything along those lines. We tend to see our social media feed flooded with those highly viral influencers who seem to have it all - and we wonder why we can’t be like that.
The reality, of course, is that we don’t tend to look much further than “skin deep” when it comes to these images. Influencers are often guilty of renting expensive cars and houses for photoshoots to give their followers the sense that they’re more wealthy than they actually are. Photoshop makes it easy, at least with still images, to improve a physique instantly and with minimal effort, so long as it’s done right. Even then, we don’t know how much effort went into the physique behind the camera - whether the person trained for 10 years to achieve their current physique, whether they just happened to have really good genetics, whether they’re willing to take steroids, and so on.
It’s hard to ignore those images, because our brains don’t really want to think very hard about anything. We are constantly dealing with all kinds of demands and stressors in our daily lives, and doing the deep research to discover that X instagram influencer you follow is secretly a scammer, is not something that comes naturally or easily to people. In a certain sense, we want to be fooled.
The end result of the social-media-ification of everything, is that privileged folks with way more money, time, or genetic luck that you can convince you that they have some secret for self-improvement, when the reality is that they simply live in very different circumstances where those things come more easily to them. Since your feed is populated with only the most viral and visible posts from around the world, it’s easy to ignore or miss the silent majority of folks who don’t have it easy like that, and are instead working away in anonymity to figure out self-improvement on their own.
Self-Improvement Is Often Synonymous With “Making More Money”
What even IS self-improvement, at the end of the day?
The reality, of course, is that it’s highly variable depending on who you ask. When I was a teenager, my general concept meant that it should mean that I put 100% effort into everything I do, and try to be the best possible version of myself. But you can see that even that, while it’s a solid guiding principle, is very vague. I was a teenager, and my self-concept was constantly changing. Over the years since then, I’ve gone through multiple careers, multiple major senses of myself, and my concept of the best possible version of myself has changed hundreds of times.
For most people, it means that they want to eliminate the biggest problems that they experience in their lives: they want to be free from major problems that they experience, they want better luck with sexual partners, they want money, or they want success and status.
Many of these things aren’t really things that you can easily obtain. It’s not as simple as “wanting it more” or “having the right mindset”. Often, the process of convincing someone that they can accomplish everything that they want, is about trying to pretend that preexisting differences in privilege don’t actually exist.
While everyone can always be “better” in some sense than they are currently, that doesn’t mean that every person who wants to can be a world class performer. By definition, some people will rise to the top and some people will sink to the bottom, no matter their mindset, level of effort, or intention.
For most people, a lot of their problems go away if they’re making more money. More money means that they can spend more on removing those barriers to their success, achieve their accomplishments more easily, and earn or purchase the respect they desire.
The end result is that a lot of “self-improvement” content isn’t about being a better person, so much as it’s about making more money. Self-improvement often becomes about better spending and saving habits, methods for increasing your productivity in order to perform better at work (and thus earn more money), methods for starting a business or otherwise developing a side hustle to make more money, and so on.
While personal finance is a meaningful skill, I should think that it goes without saying that a richer person is not necessarily a more morally good person - and in many cases, the opposite is pretty clearly true. While many people do need to have more money in order to live their ideal lives, that only holds true up to a certain point - and beyond that, it probably becomes immoral to continue accumulating and hoarding wealth. But self-improvement doesn’t teach people that they should earn just enough to defuse their day to day money problems - it teaches them that the sky is the limit, whether it comes to money or fitness or anything else.
Suckers Will Spend More Money If They Think It Will Pay Back
“If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker.”
The reality is that a lot of the self-improvement industry is openly populated with scammers looking to make money off of any sucker willing to pay. Influencers create the impression of having all the answers, pulling people in by showing off what they have - then, they attempt to monetize that relationship by selling products and services, some of which may be helpful and many of which probably won’t.
I’ve written previously about following the money. At the end of the day, no one who actually knows what they’re doing, is doing labor for free. I’m writing this blog post because I make a living finding clients who trust me to manage their fitness programs for them, and by demonstrating my knowledge I convince people that I’m worth hiring. Likewise, plenty of people on instagram or other social networks are just messing around, and some of them get a ton of followers purely by accident, but the reality is that most of the people out there are actively managing their brand in an attempt to make money. That means that, at the end of the day, the main reason that they keep putting all the work into managing a major account, is because it’s paying them enough money to consider it worth the effort.
The end result is that the relationship between the social media influencer and their audience isn’t exactly an innocent one. They’re trying to get as much money out of their audience as possible, and if they’re good at it, they’re making a lot of money doing so. Very often, YOU’RE the sucker - you’re being reeled in by someone’s posts, engaging with their content, becoming emotionally convinced by their display, and then ultimately dropping $30 on some fluff product or service that they offer down the line because you’ve become hopelessly drawn in.
It’s worse in the self-improvement industry, I think, because people are generally more willing to make a purchase if they consider it an investment in themselves and their future, even if that later turns out to be a lie. Pyramid schemes work by convincing people that they, too, can make a ton of money if they buy into the process - never mind that most of the money that the scheme makes, is by convincing those people to buy into the process in the first place, and most of the people who participate in the scheme will never earn their money back nor make a serious profit.
It’s easy to convince someone to spend money on something, if you also convince them that this investment will pay off in the long run. As a business owner, I have tons of small business expenses that have absolutely paid off in the long run - and of course, a lot which turned out to be a huge dud. My most expensive mistake cost me about $3000 (not to mention the opportunity cost of investing that money instead) - and ultimately, the main thing that it taught me was not to waste money on that sort of thing again.
At the end of the day, part of the reason that scammers are so prevalent in the self-improvement industry, is simply that it’s an industry which has a particular weak spot towards this kind of behavior. People always want to buy into the concept that if they spend a bit of cash, they will end up being a better person - and scammers will always show up whenever people are willing to spend cash on anything.
Sex And Novelty Sell
Another truth is that at the end of the day, people are herd creatures, and we tend to associate sex and novelty with excitement and value. Combine that with the fact that “there’s a sucker born every minute” and the reality is that over time, there will essentially always be a constantly renewing mass of willing people who haven’t quite internalized the fact that sex and novelty aren’t markers of quality.
The fitness industry works significantly on this fundamental principle. The fitness industry is absolutely packed with people who use their muscles, their leanness, and their perceived sexual desirability, to make a living. Style matters over substance. You’re more likely to believe the guy who’s super jacked who’s selling you his brand of supplements - even if he’s only jacked because he’s willing to take a ton of steroids and has good genetics, and the supplements have little to do with it.
Likewise, it’s often hard to differentiate yourself in the fitness industry if you aren’t super jacked or otherwise sexually desirable - and in this instance, novelty is often the way to go. The end result is that people are constantly trying to come up with new diet plans, new exercise programs, constant change without any necessary improvement. The goal is to find the thing that just happens to turn into the next big craze - because if you’re the creator of something new, even if it’s not necessarily better than what came before, you have the possibility of turning into a celebrity by extension.
The end result is that the fitness industry is constantly reinventing the wheel. Diets and training styles fall in and out of fashion. Everything that’s old is new again. A diet or training method which fell out of fashion two decades ago, is constantly being revived whenever it’s been thoroughly enough forgotten that a new spin can be put on it, and thus a new generation of suckers be sold on it.
The same happens in the self-improvement industry in a general sense. People are more likely to believe in flashy, new approaches, simply because they’re new - and as a result, people can easily get suckered in by style when they really want substance.
My Journey
At the end of the day, there’s a few “self-improvement” books which have actually been very meaningful to me - for example, James Clear’s Atomic Habits, or Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.
In general, I’ve found that books that seek to understand the human condition - rather than gesturing vaguely at some flawed concept of self-improvement - tend to be a lot more useful. Likewise, a lot of the things that have helped me the most on my own self-improvement path, are more detailed and niche books based on whatever topics or interests I’m currently pursuing.
I’ve gotten a lot more “self-improvement help” out of reading books about language learning, for example, than general self-improvement books, simply because language learning is one of the hobbies I’m interested in. I’ve learned a lot more about self-improvement from reading books about how the brain works, how to wisely invest money, how to improve my exercise programs, how to be a better blogger, and so on - because those are the things that, for me, make up my path to self-improvement. This won’t necessarily be the same for anybody else, and everyone has a different skillset or goalset in mind when they think about self-improvement.
There’s also a bias towards seeking quick results - everyone wants quick results, but true results are generally based on long, sustained periods of effort over time. The reality is that if you put your mind to something, and you regularly work towards it - you’re going to go a hell of a lot further, and learn a lot more lessons along the way, than if you simply read a few books and throw a ton of money at some self-improvement guru.
True success is made up of a lot of smaller factors - the desire to accomplish something, the enjoyment of the process to follow through, and the ability to learn from mistakes, iterate on your processes, and improve little by little over time. And unfortunately, most of these are very hard to teach, or to encapsulate in a book or series of online video courses.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.
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