Courses are a waste of time (if you don't do this)

Lessons from wasting $2000.

Between the end of 2023 and 2024, I spent about $2000 on courses and communities for content creators. For me, it's a lot.

I’m extremely frugal. I live in Italy, not a wealthy country. I’ve been publishing since 2010 in Italian and already found success with content.

But when I started experimenting with English, I noticed some things worked differently. And I wanted to avoid the drag of starting from scratch.

Spoiler alert: 95% of that money was wasted. But neither the remaining 5% had an ROI that justified the expense.

Besides those paid courses, I never stopped relentlessly studying success stories. Nothing gave me the magic bullet to “skyrocket” my growth.

This intensive and long deep dive reinforced an insight I've developed over the years: high achievers rarely know how to help you achieve the same success.

What?!?

This may sound absurd, and even contradictory. After all, I spent my hard-earned money on courses from top Medium authors and other famous creators like Justin Welsh (by the way, Justin’s course was one of the most useful). I must have believed they could help me.

We all buy from them for the same reason. We see an unmissable opportunity to learn the exact recipe for replicating their success.

And participating in those courses is exciting. The superstar teachers assertively lay down their strategy. Outcomes seem guaranteed. Students feed off each other's enthusiasm.

But after the course ends, you find out that almost no one can replicate the teacher’s results. Maybe 1% succeed. Probably those that didn’t need the course in the first place.

Why?

First of all, success results from multiple factors. It’s not just “write a lot”, “find your niche”, or “think about your audience”. And when you talk about the unicorns, the people with 7-figure revenues and audiences, the weight of external, uncontrollable factors is huge.

For example, my first blog arguably was, for some years, the most famous photography blog in Italy. The content was good, and I did my best with SEO. But, in hindsight, I discovered I entered the market at the right time: competitors were weak, and growing solely through SEO was easier. If I had to start now, I would certainly struggle more to dominate Google than I did 14 years ago.

Successful creators just can’t measure the impact of external factors on their success. The honest ones can just tell you “do exactly as I did and hope for the best”.

Then there's the factor of time. Everything changes frantically online. When creators reach very large numbers, they become self-fulfilling prophecy. They earn Midas touch.

The struggle is in the beginning. And they rarely can help you with that. What they did two or more years ago is now obsolete.

Finally, there’s the influence of niches. Some of them are gigantic. Going viral isn’t easy, but more probable. So is earning a lot. Think of anything regarding making money, self-improvement, or hot tech trends like AI.

Other niches have low hard ceilings. You need to deflate your expectations in all areas: maximum followers, maximum earnings, growth speed.

I bumped into this realization when I co-founded a business to help Italians create online businesses. Believe it or not, it’s a small niche. A fraction of the photography niche I was used to. I never got the same traction as my first site.

So, are all courses worthless?

No, I don't want to be a defeatist. There are many courses from which I've learned a lot.

So, avoid:

• Overly broad courses, like the ones teaching you how to run a business. It's impossible to cover the entire subject deeply enough to provide you with specific knowledge that will yield results.

• Courses on very timely topics. For instance, a course on how to grow on any platform would need a complete overhaul every year, which usually doesn't happen.

Instead, look for courses teaching specific skills. The ones the creator proved to have.

For example, I took Lawrence Yeo’s course on philosophical essays. It's a genre he mastered that I'm not familiar with. I took it to broaden my toolkit and challenge myself with a new genre.

And above all, prefer courses offering direct access to the teacher, be it via 1:1 calls, group calls, or communities.

Is it just me?

I’m a devoted self-learner. So maybe most courses just aren’t made for me.

Did you have a different experience than mine?

Let me know what you think.