No, it's not okay to sell knowledge you don't really have

Sick of courses that don't actually deliver results? Well, here's how they happen.

One thing that's really been bothering me is the sheer volume of courses that aren't actually worth anything.

And I think deep down, I think the people who built the course knew they shouldn't have built a course.

But....

They were tempted.

Yes, tempted!

Tempted by the promise of that wonderful passive income. The laptop lifestyle. Sipping margarita's by the beach or whatever the else the "dream" is.

And you know who sold them on this dream? The same people selling courses on.... how to build and sell courses (of course).

I've written previously about not trusting everything you read. Those same principles apply to what sales people tell you.

Let's go back a step

When you work in sales, there are these things called "objections" - basically, the reasons why people object to buying from you.

As a sales person, one of the first things you need to get comfortable with is overcoming objections. If you don't, you just won't get sales.

For people who teach course creators, one of the biggest objections they come across is "I don't know enough to teach."

So what do they do?

They can't just accept it. If they do, they won't make as much money.

So instead.... they tell you that its completely okay that you don't know that much.

You don't need to know everything. You don't need to be a master.

You just need to know more than the people you're teaching.

Genius, right?

Wrong!

This is terrible advice.

See, as you start to learn more and more, you will quickly realise how little you actually know. And often, what you believed about a topic when you first started learning about it was actually completely wrong.

You often don't understand the reality of a topic. Or why a certain marketing approach works. Or how to deal with problems that come up.

That knowledge comes with time, experience, and a degree of mastery.

I've been consuming content, courses, books, videos, getting coaching (both personal/1 on 1, and group coaching), and participating in masterminds, for over a decade. I've got pretty great knowledge of design, development, marketing, and business. And I hardly know anything. I mean, I definitely know more than a bunch of people, but I know that there is a LOT that I still don't know about many of the topics I focus on.

So think about this: how effective do you think someone, who has just touched on the surface of a topic, would be at teaching that topic?

Hint: Just in case you're not sure, not very effective at all.

What happens next?

Well, you've got a course creator who can only have absolute newbies take their course, and probably doesn't have enough content to actually have anyone get a real result. How successful do you think they'll be?

You've got a bunch of newbies who have just gotten enough knowledge to learn how to Google about a topic (if they're lucky). How successful do you think they'll be?

The finally, you've got a course creator who's selling the dream of a certain lifestyle, to schmucks who are desperate to achieve something. Out of these groups, they're actually the guys who might achieve some sort of success. Of course, I really hope not because they're absolute scumbags.

Anyway, to round this out: when someone (who sells a course on how to build a course) tells you that it's okay for you not to know a lot about a topic when teaching it, ignore them. They want you to buy their course. They will profit, you will not.

Focus instead on learning more about your craft.

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