How to (NOT) Waste Money on Personal Development
Applied Neuroscience Strategist, K-Selected Biohacker, Tantric husband, Promethean peaceful parent, Adventuring philosopher, Raconteur, and Author. He spent +14 years researching the intersection of human performance enhancement and advanced personal growth in his obsessive quest to find real-life "NZT-48."
The story of how I met the disciple of the most hated man in the world is illustrative of how to (NOT) spend money on personal development...
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I had just arrived in an exotic, new (to me) city.
I knew nobody there. I started by requesting to join the local Real Social Dynamics' wingman Facebook group. As I've explained elsewhere, my lifehack for forming intimate relationships fast is devoting my socializing time to high-affinity groups with deeply shared values; RSD-trained pickup artists are actually one of the best such groups. In the Facebook group, a cool-looking local guy had posted that he was offering free introductory pickup artist boot camps, which is infield dating coaching. I've never taken a boot camp, but have always been interested. If I had several thousand dollars just burning a hole in my pocket, I would do a boot camp.
He had posted a couple of indicators that he knew what he was doing, and it was a novel application of the freemium model, so I thought, why not? What do I have to lose?
I contacted him and made what I thought was a generous offer of buying him dinner, and then we could go out at night and do the free coaching.
If he turned out to be an effective coach, I might purchase one of his coaching packages. If he sucked, then at least I would have explored the city a bit and had a stimulating conversation over a succulent meal.
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I met him, and he had gravitas, swagger, and style.
He spoke three languages fluently. I picked his brain about the nuances of seducing the sexy local girls. We talked about meditation, fitness, Entrepreneurship, Biohacking, supplements, and Colombia. Overall, a pretty cool guy.
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Interestingly, he had worked directly with, at the time, the official most hated man in the world. Weirdly, the most hated man in the world was not some tyrannical dictator or murderous narco boss, but was a douchebaggey pickup artist guru that had pissed off a bunch of feminists and the politically correct mainstream media. My new friend had coached with him and had the photos to prove it. He emphasized how much of an influence this guy was on him.
I was a bit disappointed when he announced a change of plans that we were NOT going to be doing the free boot camp that night. He was instead going to pick up a girl whom he knew that night and sleep with her. He offered to drop me off where I was staying. We took his car, which was a pretty nice car in that country. We did indeed pick up a cute girl from a decrepit old Soviet-style apartment building who giggled at my poor attempts at their language.
The next day, we met up to discuss smart drugs, which he was interested in (who isn't!), and hung out in his nice apartment. Then he pitched me; he had a weekend boot camp program that was $600. We would...
Do coaching at nightlife spots.
Talk to girls during the daytime.
And... He even guaranteed I would get laid on the boot camp! Guaranteed!
I didn't go for it for a few reasons...
$600 was a lot of money in that country. It seemed pretty steep for a weekend of coaching. Yes, world-class dating coaches, like the "most hated man in the world," charge thousands of dollars for a weekend, but they have tons of credibility and evidence for their coaching expertise. He had almost none.
He didn't get into a lot of specifics about what the coaching would entail, other than that I would definitely get laid. His pitch was long on benefits but very short on features.
But more importantly, he was dishonest; he didn't do the free boot camp we discussed.
How was I to know that he wasn't going to just take my money and pay a local working girl to sleep with me?
I'll add that this guy followed A LOT of popular personal development and entrepreneurship content, and it showed: he threw around a lot of the platitudes and parlance that are common here in the online personal development/Biohacking sphere.
He had a pretty good hook: offering the free boot camp, then showing me the nice car, the pretty girl, and the nice apartment.I can see how, through a different cultural filter, he might think it was acceptable to bait-switch me like that, but I didn't want to pay $600 to sleep with a hooker even if it was packaged with some great coaching!Not to mention, in that country, I could sleep with about ten hookers for $600. It just wasn't a good deal!
As you can see from the story above I'm skeptical about spending money on the types of offerings that are so common in the personal development world...
- Coaching packages
- Weekend retreats
- Seminars
- Mastermind groups
- Social dynamics boot camps
- "Infoproducts" - those downloadable PDFs and video courses on how to make money online, pick up chicks, or whatever
The past decade of my personal development have been quite fruitful.
- I make pretty good money doing what I love.
- I have financial freedom.
- I have an abundance of relationships.
- I make friends pretty easily. I stay in touch with old friends. I enjoy time spent with family. I'm loved in every way.
- I've lived abroad as a digital nomad and expat for a decade now. Tasting and savoring myriad cultures. My world is borderless.
- I'm in brilliant health: at 40 years old, I look about 28 and have boundless energy to take on life.
- I've been happily married for seven years to a beautiful Bulgarian woman, and last year we welcomed a beautiful baby boy into our household (fatherhood has surprised me; it's easier than I expected it to be, and it's made me happier than I expected).
I bet I'm within the top 10% or 5% of the happiest people in my demographic because I live consistently with the three values I hold most dear: freedom, adventure, and novelty. I've grown up to be what I always wanted to be: an adventuring philosopher.
So it's pretty fair to say that the time and resources I've spent on personal development have yielded a successful result.
$5000 wasted
There's a lady I've known for a long while who recently wasted $5,000 on a coaching package.
John C. Maxwell offers this super-premium, intensive seminar weekend, life coach certification, and follow-up package where they coach your leadership skills for five grand. I suspect it's one of those things where they life coach you to be a life coach.
I saw this lady the last time I was home in Denver, Colorado. We'll chat online from time to time about health and fitness, so I was pretty shocked to see her casually eating potato chips and a large Pepsi. I don't want to be too judgmental, but anyone who casually consumes that sort of food is just really not taking their personal development seriously.
That kind of food puts your biology on a blood sugar roller coaster to hell. There's just no way you're going to be consistently productive, creative, or happy if you regularly snack on that sort of poison.
She's also one of these nice ladies who's always stopping to help other people. She has a hard time prioritizing her own projects.
Unsurprisingly, my most recent communications confirmed that a few years later, she had indeed done nothing with her John C. Maxwell training.
So that's how to NOT spend money on personal development.
How to spend money on personal development
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As a principal, when it comes to personal development, spend money on things that yield a return on investment in multiple ways, as opposed to making a bet on something that is just going to benefit a single domain.
Smart drugs
I think that Nootropics are the best gateway drug to personal development.
If you have a "Blue Pilled" friend or loved one whose life is just a downward spiral of mediocrity, what I would NOT recommend is giving them a Tony Robbins book or telling them to download the Headspace app.
I would give them smart drugs. Smart drugs will give them a winner's mind for a few hours; they will be focused, disciplined, productive, and happy, and once the exotic molecules leave their system, they'll want more of that. They'll come back for more smart drugs, and then they may start to wonder what else they can do to empower their mind:
- They'll start exercising more consistently.
- They'll take up meditation, brain training, or another mindfulness practice.
- They'll start to read more books and watch less television or shallow YouTube videos.
- They may even go to therapy.
Smart drugs have disparate effects on our neurobiology that work in ways obvious and not so obvious to empower our lives...
- They make us more focused and less susceptible to distractions.
- They improve our discipline so we will do more of what we know we should be doing.
- They improve our stress response so that stressors, internal and external, have a whole lot less of a capacity to hamstring our happiness and productivity.
- They make extracting semantic information from our long-term memory less like searching for a book in a library and more like doing a Google Search.
I could make a very long list of benefits of Nootropics (or a giant infographic!), but anyone who has tried them will quickly discover that they do positively affect a multiplicity of measures of performance.
I think well-researched smart drugs are one of the best ways to NOT waste money on personal development.
High-quality food
We are what we eat. On a profound level, the quantity and quality of the food we consume limit or empower our capacity to reach our goals.
I can combine all the greatest lifehacks I know of...
- I can be dosed on my Racetam-rich Nootropic stack, Adaptogenic tea, and a drop of Nicotine.
- I can be listening to my focus-promoting music.
- I can be on day 25 of no fap.
- I can have just finished my 20-minute meditation protocol.
...But if I eat two slices of pizza and drink a sugary, fizzy soda I'm still going to have a pretty mediocre day.
In one of Elliott Hulse's videos (I forget which one, there are SO many), he talks about how, as a younger man, he spent a lot of his money on his diet, eating high-quality organic food. An investment that has paid off in his life of gargantuan proportions.
If you listen to podcasts or read books by elite performers (athletic or otherwise), a commonality is that they seem to spend a lot of money on high-quality food. So don't feel guilty about spending a little more on...
- Ordering the grass-fed steak
- Lunch at a fancy vegan restaurant
- Toxin-free coffee
- Shopping at an organic grocery store
- A healthy food delivery service
- A bottle of delicious biodynamic wine
I'm not a diet guru, so I'm not going to tell you what exactly you want to drop your coin on. I'd encourage you to read some of the newer books on Ketogenic or Paleo diets.
Books
I've been a voracious consumer of new media content formats for a long time - I spent a good chunk of my very first paycheck ever on CD-ROM audiobooks and was printing out pickup artist PDF ebooks to read before I even hit puberty. But the truth is that reading the old-fashioned way (or on Kindle) is the most effective way to absorb knowledge.
I went through a phase where I stopped reading books and just listened to podcasts, YouTube lectures, documentary films, or downloaded torrents of info-product courses, and I stagnated in my career and personal life. When I canceled my Netflix membership and started buying books again and reading every day, my horizons did broaden, not overnight, but it did give me momentum. Books have an unequaled capacity to grow your wisdom and income.
Unlike blog articles, podcasts, and YouTube videos, books cost money, so you have that sunk cost motivational mechanism with what you glean from them. Check out some of the over 50 books I reviewed and summarized or you could read my books; one is for people with conspicuous physical imperfections and one is a dating guide for helping men navigate the minefield...
Buy the book before the course
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Self-qauntification
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Hormonal blood tests
Modern life conspires in a myriad of insidious ways to unbalance and deplete our hormones. To paraphrase something quite insightful Dave Asprey said about managing relationships...
If you're seeing a therapist for marital problems, you're really wasting money if you haven't first had a hormonal blood test done.
The same logic applies to most of our endeavors. Detrimental hormonal imbalance can really rob you of motivation, discipline, happiness, and energy. You can try all sorts of lifehacks and Biohacks to restore gusto and mojo, but if they don't address the hormonal issue, you're going to be held back.
A simple hormonal blood test that's likely not going to cost more than a hundred bucks will let you know if you have an issue that needs to be addressed.
Fitness
Exercise has numerous positives, ranging from balancing our hormones and relieving stress to neuroplasticity.
Unless your day job is being an acrobat or stripper, you're held back in every other domain of your personal development if you're not breaking a good sweat a couple of times a week. Spending money on a gym membership, personal training, classes, or fitness gear is not a 100% effective motivational mechanism as the fine purveyors of these things would like to have you believe, but it does improve the likelihood that you'll exercise more consistently.
"Networking"
Success rarely, if ever, occurs in isolation. As I explain in the Secret Society Infiltration Model:
The fundamental lifehack to networking more effectively is to focus your networking efforts on those who are within groups that you have a high affinity with. This means finding groups that have very strong shared values, interests or philosophies. So likely NOT those awkward mixer events of random strangers exchanging business cards in bars.
Effective networking a lot of times entails spending a bit of coin to ingratiate yourself with such a group, so...
- A donation to a political cause you believe in
- Supporting a charitable organization
- Tithing at church or supporting a religious community
- Paying membership dues to Toastmasters, a hobbyist group, or a fraternal order
...can often allow you to make friends with people above your pay grade!
Coaching
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I would spend my personal development buck on these sorts of things first - habituate, quantify, and optimize in the areas above - before I moved on to spending money on...
- Coaching and mentorship packages
- Online courses
- Motivational summits, retreats, seminars, and conferences
- Mastermind groups
But I'd be remiss to not mention two personal growth traps...
The status signaling trap
Storytime: In my early 20s, the modicum of personal growth work I'd done resulted in me getting a job I was utterly unqualified for: Marketing director of an angel-investor-backed entertainment company. My hourly compensation jumped from embarrassingly low to $35/hour (this was nearly two decades ago - when that was decent money), so I bought this, the SEXIEST piece of furniture that I ever owned (and grew to HATE…)
Like so many male mammals, a young Jonathan Roseland was intent on converting his bedroom, in his tiny abode, into the ultimate seduction chamber…
I fell in love with this ridiculous style of mirrored, black-lacquer bed set. It was about 12 feet wide by eight feet tall with huge six-foot mirrors that reflected everything. It also had chrome dimmer lights and a secret compartment with a champagne case. They cost about $2000 brand new, but I managed to score an already loved one for just $300 off a very classy website called Craigslist.
To make it even more over the top, I purchased about 10 body-length mirrors, which I placed on the wall opposite the mirrored bed set, turning my bedroom into a funhouse of infinite reflections. To make my bedroom even more kaleidoscope-like, I mounted a $700 nightclub laser opposite the bed; the only thing I was missing was a dry ice machine!I did grow to hate my sexy bed set as I moved a lot, and every 6–12 months, we had to disassemble this ridiculous thing. This damned thing required at least three people to move it. Every time, its massive size, weight, or proportions managed to injure (just a little bit) someone whom I had convinced to help me move it. It broke down into about eight separate pieces that had to be put together like a jigsaw puzzle, requiring hours of tedious teamwork, yet I never managed to fit it together just perfectly, so it looked the way it was supposed to.
This was such a cantankerous thing to own that I grew to hate it more than the leaky, squeaky old Porsche I once had. I was truly relieved the day I sold it. Good riddance!
Of course, the reason I bought this stupid thing was that I thought it would bedazzle women, and I'd end up sleeping with more women or finally getting a hot girlfriend. And that sort of worked - I managed to seduce a grand total of three women there in my mirrored funhouse of a bedroom. The advice I would go back and give a younger me is that...
The quantity and quality of your sex life are way more about your habits and what you know than they are about what you have.
I was a "late-bloomer" who lost my virginity at 21 and was often frustrated by my inability to get or keep a girlfriend - sometimes not getting laid for years! The mirrored bed set is the most comedically ridiculous example of me trying to "buy" higher sexual market value, but there are others...
I bought two sports cars, a black Porsche 944 and a gorgeous red Lexus SC400. These did impress women, but they really did very little for my dating and sex life. They were a lot more trouble than they were worth (especially the Porsche!)
I started status signaling a little smarter with this gorgeous castle-in-the-sky condo, which I rented in downtown Denver (for the princely sum of $1700/monthly - even in 2011, that was a screaming good deal). It actually got me a girlfriend - who was 38 years old, smoked cigarettes, drank too much, had a bratty kid, and was going through a messy divorce - yeah, I had low standards.
The truth about status signaling
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The trauma resolution trap
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My personal development philosophy is biased toward habituation as opposed to transformation
There's this pervasive marketing message we hear constantly that something we spend money on...
- A high-energy event
- An exhaustive online course
- An intensive training boot camp
- A wuwu spiritual retreat
...will transform our mindset overnight or finally get some issues resolved for us. But it seems to me that, regardless of how inspired people get sporadically, there is a regression to the mean of the baseline quality of life that their habits and decisions afford them.
Leave a comment...
And let me know what personal development things you've spent money on that actually ROI'd for you?
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