IF IT SOUNDS like I’m disparaging Belgray, let me hasten to say that any negative tone here is not directed at her but rather due to concerns about the long-term effects when people are incentivized to “retire” their services because salesmanship is viewed as more valuable than craftsmanship.
When someone like Belgray writes an article with a title “I made $1 million last year by creating online copywriting courses. Here’s my advice on how to monetize your talents,” she’s not teaching anyone anything. It’s just another form of self-promotion. She somewhat cleverly framed it as advice for people who want to make a million dollars a year, and maintained that facade throughout, but the piece’s only real goal was to advertise her courses to a wider audience through a third-party platform so the salesmanship appeared less blatant.
The dominant message to anyone reading the article is: You can make more from promoting than practicing. And while that has worked for Belgray, she also spent twenty-three years writing promotional copy for companies prior to launching her first course. She had developed some degree of expertise.
Many of the people reading her article, however, haven’t put in that kind of time or developed any subject-matter expertise. Nonetheless, they get the message that putting in time as a practitioner isn’t really worth it, and thereby seek to skip straight to the passive-income-through-courses stage of their careers.
The priority then shifts to the skills of showmanship, salesmanship, and self-promotion. And as people spend more time developing their skills as promoters, for the sake of chasing a million dollars, they commit less time to the skills they wanted to develop in the first place. This is the first major drawback, and it happens in many fields.
Say you dream of becoming a musician, but because you don’t feel like your skills are at the right level or you haven’t found the perfect bandmates, you decide to start a YouTube channel. You think your content will be instructive, you’ll build an audience who might later come to your shows, and you’ll earn some income that will afford you more time to play.
This sounds good in theory, but soon the hours you would have devoted to practicing music go to researching the best camera and lighting to use, studying other people’s channels to see how their posts are structured, and learning how to edit videos.
These pursuits are all fine, if you love producing and editing videos, but the time you would’ve devoted to your musicianship shrinks in the process.
Another drawback is that the more time you devote to promotional activity, the more habitual it becomes, until those tactics create a kind of muscle memory that inhibits your ability to express yourself in other ways.
For instance, Belgray recently published a book of coming-of-age stories, which was well-received by many and has several great moments. This random, three-star Amazon review, however, felt accurate:
“Laura Belgray is a truly great email writer, and I was really hoping this book would live up to her emails. There are some funny bits, but overall it felt like a disjointed overshare. I wanted to be able to enthusiastically recommend the book, but in the end I just can’t do it.”
Through this review and others like it, we see that Belgray built an audience of fans, but they were fans of her emails and courses, not necessarily longer-form writing. So when she attempted to transition into an area she has less experience with, she was not only dealing with the challenge of producing something outside her expertise but also trying to appeal to an audience that unironically hoped her book could “live up to” emails.
The equivalent experience for our YouTube musician might be an album review that reads: “I was a little disappointed she didn’t stop in the middle of songs to offer hacks for playing the mixolydian scale.”
This drawback has expanded exponentially, and we’ve ended up with people selling courses that teach nothing beyond how to sell courses. The promoters grow like the brooms and buckets in Fantasia. And the longer this pattern endures, the less people there will be with any tangible skills or subject-matter expertise.
This hurts individuals because they grow into adults incapable of producing anything other than an infomercial, as well as our economy because collectively we end up with a skills and knowledge deficit in all the areas that people have turned away from to chase the idea of an easier payday.