Here is what to know to not get scammed by business programs.
Or probably just generally a lot of bad life advice.
(1) If it sounds easy, it’s probably worthless.
Sales, marketing and copywriting are SKILLS. If you don’t respect them as skills, you deserve everything you get.
A lot of predatory, scammy business programs thrive on pretending that business isn’t overwhelmingly a game of skills.
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Assume that, if it sounds like any idiot could do it and benefit from it, it probably is targeted to idiots.
And idiots don’t win at business.
(2) There are things that save time. But there are no real shortcuts.
You don’t need to invent calculus from scratch. It has already been invented, so all you need to do is go take a class on it. But, to pass the class, you’re going to need to do a lot of hard math problems where you get a lot of it wrong and study your mistakes.
apparently these gentlemen are competing for the position of “inventor of Calculus”
Likewise; you do not need to figure out the principles of copywriting from scratch. Not only have they already been figured out, you can actually just google them all online and learn for free.
However, to truly learn the skill of copywriting to the point where you can embody it comfortably in a way that feels like you as opposed to robotically following a theory or formula, use them flexibly, and create predictable results… you’re going to have to put in the work.
Uncomfortable work that requires experimentation, failure, and iteration.
And it will take you time.
Same is true of any skill.
And see what I said above about business. Business is overwhelmingly a game of skill, and if you don’t believe me, well, good luck. Can I also sell you a bridge?
A lot of people confuse “learning that saves time” with “magical shortcut.”
Often because learning is fraudulently advertised as magical shortcut. (If that is not explicitly said, it is implied.)
There are no magical shortcuts. There are no exceptions.
(3) Beware promises of simplicity and certainty.
In fact, the harder they push on the promises of simplicity and certainty, the more skeptical you should be. Because this probably means they probably don’t have much else to stand on.
Nothing is as seductive to the undiscerning customer as being told, “All you have to do is follow the exact steps I took to replicate the results I got.” Because this delivers two things that the primal brain desperately crave: simplicity and certainty.
Which leads us to why so many people feel bamboozled once they’ve bought business solutions. Because once you get into the weeds of things — of anything in life — nothing is actually simple, and nothing is certain.
It leaves you unprepared for the nuanced, multilayered work it takes to actually move your projects forward.
I’m not saying things can’t be simple. Actually, some of the best solutions are. I try to simplify my own frameworks and teachings as much as I can.
And I’m not saying that there aren’t things that don’t genuinely + significantly boost your odds of success. I don’t sell anything where I don’t have deep certainty that it is some of the best value that money can buy in the market.
But, in learning about a new program or product, watch how they address nuances.
The less nuance you can find, the less substance there will be.
I find that, in the typical business program, there is almost none of either.
Just endless echoes of regurgitated bro marketing.
(3) Stop seeking high reward with low input.
I see ad copy like this that makes me laugh and cry at the same time: “Even if you’re a total nobody with no special skills, no knowledge and no network, you could be quitting your job and earning six figures with content creation in 3 months.”
Oh really.
You do not have something that is highly valuable to others, and you want others to value you highly?
You are not willing to put in the work to develop a statistically exceptional skill set, but you want statistically exceptional pay?
In Korea, we call this a “thief’s mindset.” A thief feels entitled to something that they did not earn.
And when you have a thief’s mindset (seeking ‘get rich quick’ schemes, wanting big rewards with little effort, in other words), you are the easiest target for a fraudulent online business coach.
Do not be easily seduced to claim rewards that clearly don’t make sense in terms of how real world economics works.
Getting rich is not ever quick. (Believe me, the truly rich people of the world keep it that way.)
Getting 1% results does not ever come without top 1 percentile input (of some combination of talent, work ethic, privilege, luck, etc.)
Of course, there are exceptions. And they are as unlikely as winning the lottery.
And fraudsters get rich every single day, flattering people into thinking, “today is your lucky day. After all, don’t you deserve it?”
I started taking piano lessons around the time I embarked on my sabbatical. I stopped studying piano at 13 years of age and going back to it as an adult is something I always wanted to do, and now that I had all this time, I figured it was the perfect time.
And piano lessons taught me something fascinating.
I’m a hard worker. When the teacher tells me to work on a new technique or changing a bad habit, I take that seriously and practice with focus and dedication. (Something I never did as a kid, much to my mom’s chagrin.)
But here’s the thing… practicing hard was not enough.
And super annoyingly, practicing too hard had the opposite effect that I wanted.
It seemed like, past a certain point, practicing with all my might made me sound WORSE.
Why did more effort not yield better results? I’d sometimes cry after lessons. Not because my teacher made me feel bad but because I was so frustrated to not be able to break through.
And here’s the really weird thing.
Sometimes, I’d get so frustrated that I’d throw up my hands and abandon practice for a while, right? I’d say “fuck piano!” and just skip practice.
Then lesson time would roll around again, and I’d feel nervous that my teacher would admonish me. (Although she’s really nice and would never be mean to me… good asian child “get an A from teacher” syndrome never goes away!)
And you know what would happen?
After days of zero practice, I’d suddenly, mysteriously sound soooo much better than I did at my hardest working moments. And the techniques that I was tearing my hair out over would… roll off my fingers effortlessly.
What the actual fuck? This happened again and again.
And finally my teacher explained it to me:
When we’re too obsessed with getting something right, all the tension and effortfulness actually twists up our brains, and therefore muscles. And we end up sounding even worse than our baseline.
Giving our brains and muscles time to rest, and “forgetting about it” for a little while… allows our unconscious mind to actually integrate what we are learning.
And here’s an even crazier thing. I’d often tense up in front of my teacher when playing a difficult part because I wanted to “get it right”, and I’d sound terrible. I needed to relax to sound better, but no matter how many times she told me to relax, I couldn’t get myself to.
And we’d discover together that the only way I could get myself to relax enough… was to pretend that I’m drunk. (Yes, this is a real piano strategy I’d cultivated for myself.)
If I pretended I was drunk and sloppy and I’m just playing like whateverrrrr wheeeee… somehow, magically — or infuriatingly — I’d suddenly sound 100 times better. What the hell?
This taught me a crucial lesson.
Getting far, far away from the zone of “i’m putting in my 100% because I really this”…
… and saying instead “fuck it” and “i don’t care if it all goes to hell” and literally just abandoning it all for a while…
… made all these unconscious connections happen automatically that massively sped up my learning and added so much beauty and depth to my performance.
And this is exactly what I’ve done with my work for the past half year.
It’s not just that I am more relaxed and refreshed now. It’s like…. It feels like my mind got a whole OPERATING SYSTEM UPGRADE.
Like going from iOS 2 to iOS 20.
After 6-7 months of NOT even thinking about work, so many thorny creative + business problems that I’d been trying to solve for years… magically solved.
Brilliant next-level ideas… downloaded.
My ability to SEE things… massively upgraded. it’s like I moved up from the top of my neighborhood hill to the peak of Mt. Everest.
This is the power of unconscious processing that happens when you give yourself some “fuck it” space.
To be sure, I don’t have a full picture of how this is true yet.
Because I’m not fully out of my sabbatical period.
But I feel it.
I am already starting to feel glimpses and trickles of it.
The trick is, when the time comes to “abandon practice,” that you have to FULLY let go.
When I say “fuck it,” I mean “FUCK IT.”
And this is not to be confused with being generally indifferent, or avoiding challenges.
The two ends of the paradox are: give it your all, and then let go just as completely
Do your drills, and then forget about it and go take a long nap.
I want to be clear: being able to take months off from work is a great luxury and privilege. I feel enormously lucky and grateful to have had it, and am well aware that not every deserving person gets it.
But I share this because I see so many people not even allowing themselves small amounts of rest and unplugging.
Or feeling terrified that, once they let go of the tight grip on their work, it’s all gonna come tumbling down. Or, even if they do take a break, feeling paranoid about “losing momentum” the entire time and not fully being able to let their minds rest.
I get it. it took ME time and practice to TRUST the rest, too.
I’m still working on it, actually. (It’s hard to 100% decondition a mind that’s been programmed by capitalism for decades!)
But hopefully this message serves as an extra reminder that — if you are resonating with this — it is safe for you to soften into your next operating system upgrade.
And know that you can trust the infinite wisdom and massive operating power of your unconscious mind.
Whether it’s 6 months of 6 weeks or even just 6 minutes…
No one taught me how important my Asian ancestral heritage was in helping me be good at business.
I had to figure it out on my own. And here’s what I figured out.
I am thankful for my Confucian heritage.
It instilled in me one of the most defining values I hold, which has been passed down in my family: education is the most valuable asset in the world. More than any material possession. Without it having to lead to any capitalism-friendly “outcome.” Enriching one’s mind is its own reward, and the most valuable one.
This kept me focused on learning business for the way it sharpened my mind, without being anxious for material “returns”. This non-transactional relationship I had with business is exactly what kept me in it long enough for me to get really good at it.
I am thankful for my Taoist heritage.
It taught me that no one thing is separate from the ecology surrounding it. That you are not separate from me. That there is only Oneness.
That cultural knowing is exactly what planted the firm attitude in me that my thriving is vitally interlinked with yours, that I cannot use, manipulate, and extract from you to get ahead. When I cheat you to get what I want, I only end up cheating myself.
The Taoism baked into my culture also taught me this. When there is an up, there is a down, and when there is expansion, there is contraction.
Don’t get too excited on a good day, and don’t be too depressed on a bad day. Proverbs of this nature are passed down and repeated in my family.
This is exactly what gave me the steadfastness to keep going long enough to see my efforts bear full fruition in the long term.
I’m thankful for my animinist/shamanic heritage.
One of the teachings I’m known for is the idea of “the spirit of your business.” I believe your business literally has its own spirit. So does your social media account. So does your phone. So does your email.
I’m often asked where I got this idea from. And while certain sources gave me inspiration for articulating it out loud, it was always obvious to me because of the animism that is part of our traditional culture.
Western culture sees certain things as living (birds, trees, humans), and other things as inert (mountains, seas, the soil).
Animism recognizes everything as alive and conscious — each different thing in its own way.
This way of seeing everything in my business ecosystem — even things that are dead or inert according to Western culture — as ALIVE, CONSCIOUS, and being in a LIVING RELATIONSHIP — has been key to my creativity and genius-level intuition about making strategic moves for my business.
The ideology around ancestral veneration that is central to my culture (which is half-Confucian and half-animist/shamanic, I think)… also turned out to be critical for my business success.
Koreans believe that our lives are closely interlinked to our ancestors.’ We are also taught that everything good that happens to us is NOT only due to our own merit, but due to our ancestors’ benevolent deeds.
Almost like I’m receiving delayed good karma for what my ancestors did.
For example, my mom tells me the story of her grandmother, who would always welcome into her home travelers who needed a place to rest.
She would feed them the best food, give them a warm place to sleep, and send them on their way with more provisions.
And she would tell my mom: “I do this for you. All the good I do will come back to you. So, when you grow up, you must remember to be kind to everyone, and help as many people as you can.”
The recognition of interrelationship across time and space is baked into our worldview.
Do you know what this means?
It means that, from day 1, I knew that my business would fail if it didn’t benefit others before it benefited me.
Generosity and benevolence had to be the primary values through which I filtered all of my business decisions.
This was not only the way I created success for myself (it all flows back to me, always), but the way I create good fortune for my descendants.
Actually, I’ve oriented my business to community care in much more radical ways since I became a mother.
Because now I think acutely about my son’s well being, and I want him to have a good future.
The best way for me to invest in his future well-being is taking care of the community around me now.
Yes, we were a colonized and impoverished and war-torn people, living to this day with a legacy of trauma.
But.
I’m not prosperous in spite of being Korean.
I’m prosperous because I am Korean.
(Please, substitute “Korean” with whatever you are.)
What about you?
If you’re from a non-dominant culture, in what ways has your heritage made you stronger, better, more prosperous?
I would 100% be living with my parents if I weren’t married.
Whole-ass adults living with their parents is still the default in cultures outside of pathologically individualism-obsessed America.
Living alone is also just not financially feasible in many parts of the world where living spaces are much more cramped and expensive.
Fuck anyone who shames you about it. Literally tell them “why yes, I live with my parents. I’ve been lucky enough to escape dystopian individualism.”
If given a choice again between living alone (ew, I hate being lonely), living with roommates (ugh), and living with people who gave birth to me and love me (and getting to save on rent!), it’s a no-brainer choice.
Warm bodies of family members nearby is a good thing for humans and that doesn’t change because you’re a grown-up.
Big big caveat: I’m not talking about if you actually enjoy living alone, or don’t have a good relationship with your parents.
Like if you have crappy parents and want to be away from them, or you are truly living your best life on your own — Woohoo! I celebrate you and your badass independence!
Through this post, I am only attempting to explicitly address all the shaming around people who choose to live with parents for different reasons, especially when it really helps them to reduce their financial burden as an entrepreneur.
I also recognize that having parents you have a good relationship with, and having the choice of being able to live with them and have it be a positive experience and save on rent is a huge privilege. This is not true of everyone who has parents.
I recognize that some have the privilege due to sheer good luck, and others don’t due to no fault of their own. I’m saying: if you do have this unearned advantage, the least you could do is to not feel shame about it.
Generally, life is hard, and life is expensive — it seems like — pretty much everywhere nowadays. Everyone who is figuring out how to make life work for themselves in these crazy times is deserving of our respect and admiration.
I built a business that earned a cumulative revenue of nearly $15 million.
Here’s what I would do if I were starting over from scratch today, knowing everything I know now.
A lot of things on the Internet have changed since the days when I was “coming up.”
In those days, there was no TikTok. (not that I’ve ever been on TikTok anyway)
Instagram and Facebook hasn’t devoured by monetization monsters and ads yet. They were actually places where people just showed up to chill, where you could make friends and find community with relative ease.
But, actually, social media isn’t where I found my people originally.
I found it via blogging.
Yup, blogging. I started a little blog 15-ish years ago. It slowly amassed a small group of people who loved to read my writing and interact with my ideas. (Emphasis on small.)
These people became my Facebook friends. And many became my real life friends. They were many of my earliest supporters and paying clients. (For a tiny tiny business that barely earned a part time income, but was fun and meaningful nonetheless.)
Then it took about a decade after that for me to figure myself out. Gaining in self awareness. Learning how to like myself and believe in my own work enough to show up for my passions in a bigger way without needing external approval every step of the way.
Yes, I said one whole decade.
That’s not slow.
That the time it takes for sustainable internal shifts to happen.
Remember the very small group of original blog followers?
Let’s say there were 20.
Once I started showing up on social media like I mean it — that is, without self-censoring, without requiring for your approval — the 20 people who loved my brain turned into 30.
Then 30 turned into 50. Then 50 into 100. And so on.
This, too. Slowly.
At the same time, I was honing my business skills, little bit by a little bit. The basics of copy. Humane marketing. I checked out a million “experts” and learned from many of them, but the only person who taught me anything worth a damn, which has since become the soul and bones of my business, came from my teacher Fabeku Fatunmise, an ordained priest of the Yoruba tradition. (@ownerofcoralandbrass on IG, though he isn’t here much. He no longer teaches business, and hasn’t for a long time.) He is not just a business teacher for me. He is a soul teacher. And that’s the only kind of business teacher you should have. Don’t settle for anything less; so many of us have gotten used to such low standards nowadays.
So then the 100 of people who love my brain turned into 200 and 200 turned into a thousand and on and on. This coincided with my personal growth and taking bigger and bigger risks with my creativity.
The throughline of my business growth — and integrity — has been my writing. Still is. Always will be, most likely.
I am a writer. I write.
I am a multupassionate ADHD person.
My business has, correspondingly, morphed into new forms multuple times. Things I’ve done for money: coaching, hypnosis, art, classes… on becoming more of who you are, marketing, spirituality, creativity. I can’t stick with one thing, and never will, and that is part of my genius.
You can look forward to me continuing to evolve.
The only consistency in my work is my spirit and my indefatigable curiosity.
I never set out to be a big star, or to get rich.
I am endlessly grateful that I get to support my family with my creativity.
This is a tremendous blessing and privilege that no one is entitled to. There are countless millions of people in this world who are far more talented and hard-working than me who will never get to enjoy the same because they are facing too many systemic or cultural barriers.
So I practice gratitude instead of entitlement, and orient myself to the humility of knowing that the gift of “making a living with my passion” can be taken away from me anytime, and that’s okay.
So, let me come back to answering the actual question of, what I would do if I were starting my business from scratch today.
I would do what I have always done.
I would tend to my own spiritual wholeness first and foremost. I would doggedly follow the breadcrumbs of my curiosity. I would be in a passionate relationship with life and learning.
And I would write about it. Again and again. Because I am a writer and I write. Without the expectation that the world needs to validate me with others’ approval or reward me with “success.”
Incidentally, this is exactly what I am doing.
And if you’ve been a student of mine, you also know that this is what I have been teaching YOU the entire time.
