Investing in yourself
I find it interesting the choice of words that many people use when they are selling you on something. For example one of the things I often hear when people talk about having you purchase an educational product is the term “investing“. This often goes something like “how much are you willing to invest on yourself?” Or they may say something to the effect of “now isn’t X amount of dollars a small investment to make in yourself?“
The question is not so much a question of if a certain amount is worth investing in yourself or that the education that they are providing isn’t valuable to some extent, but rather the question really should be more along the lines of “is this something that you need at this time in your life and is it something that you will actually apply in your life?”
The world is full of information products and a lot of them are geared toward some kind of education. If you purchase an information product but will never actually apply it in your life then it’s not worth any amount of money no matter how good it is. The whole point of an educational product is to help you grow and improve and apply the knowledge you received from that education. If you don’t then you’re wasting your time and money.
It is certainly tempting to purchase every educational product and thinking that you’re going to apply it and you’re going to make sure that that becomes an integral part of your life. You really do want the changes that they promise, but the challenge really becomes more one of focus and application then it does of the promise of the product itself
If we were to be more judicious in our consideration of education and educational products we would have a lot more improvement and less scattered or haphazard attempts at personal development and that industry would be held in much higher regard.
That doesn’t mean that the producers are entirely at fault either, but rather there are two sides to the coin and that we as customers need to recognize the fact that we’re gonna keep getting sold these kinds of products until we learn to control our constant desire for self improvement on a general scale and instead become very focused on the specific improvements we want to make instead of looking at the next shiny training course and promises we find appealing.
Photo by Michael Longmire on Unsplash
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