By: Duff

Alex Fayle | Someday Syndrome 4 months ago on Wordpress

Given that this is exactly what I sell, you bet I’d say yes…

Well actually I wouldn’t say yes because I don’t need to buy happiness – but I certainly hope others do!

Alex Fayle | Someday Syndrome´s last blog ..Controlling Creativity: Timeblocking My Way to Success

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Mark V. McDonnell 4 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

Folks (Charlie and commenters, the lot of you!), I love you dearly, I really do. Your hearts and minds are amazing, fertile, rich. I envy your energy and drive toward the truth.

But God, I’m so overwhelmed by this conversation, and so many others of its kind in the blogosphere. It seems so overheated. My weary ears can no longer distinguish discernment from hairsplitting.

I alternate between phases where I follow you on Twitter or my feedreader, then unfollow in sheer exhaustion or stupefaction. Then somebody references you in a way that piques me again, and the cycle resumes…

Social Media Burnout would be my self-diagnosis, but I’d bet it’s a second-order effect

I pray this doesn’t come off as trolling. I fear it may. ... See all content Hide content

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Jason 4 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

@ Tim,

You make an excellent point, especially about people not giving value to free stuff. Also, before we go any further, I’d point out that you are infinitely more qualified than I to speak on actually creating and releasing a free ebook since you’ve done it and I haven’t.

I was simplifying and giving the best case in my example, but my point was that the reaction we were seeing when Charlie first asked the question was that a lot of people would not spend $47 on the book because of subjectivity and the fact the definition of “happiness” is different for everyone. My thought was to overcome those objections by giving it to them, then when the process actually worked for them, they’d become your tribe. With the key to happiness, the value would be high because it works. Unfortunately, when we go down a level, simplifying doesn’t work because it doesn’t take into account the fact that people may not do the worksheets, may not follow the instructions, and may not actually find happiness. It flat out may not work for them, possibly because it was free and “it couldn’t possibly work because it didn’t cost anything”.

By charging what you did you created value with people, and you managed to get MUCH more qualified sales leads. People who are excited about it, fired-up about doing the worksheets, and overall responding well. So it was in fact, much more valuable to sell it than to give it away. Honestly, I hadn’t even considered that. So now I wonder, is it an issue of subject? Would you have better luck building a following and getting speaking gigs at “Bass Pro Shops” by giving away something more tangible, like “The guaranteed 10 steps to learn fly fishing”?

@ Charlie,

Sure, the amount of individuals seeking happiness is going to be much larger than the amount of people actively searching for a 98% efficient solar power system. I think instead of saying my point was about market, I should have said it was about sellability. You could sell your solar power system to an energy management company TODAY for millions, whereas we’ve seen skepticism in people spending 47 bucks for the secret to happiness. That’s the difference I was speaking about. “Creating a process that led to global human happiness would probably change the world more than a clean energy technology” ONLY if you could get people to use it. ... See all content Hide content

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A Change of Heart to Keep My Promises — Pattern Interrupt 4 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

[...] to inadvertently walk anyone else into.  It’s a hole that some well-meaning bloggers use to “sell” happiness (something I’m not trying to do here).  It’s a hole I have to fill before I help people [...]

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Mahala Mazerov 4 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

Wow. The intensity of this discussion shows me once again that I am living a different reality. Everything we do, or very close to everything, is motivated by our wish to be happy. Food – we could live on rice and a few legumes. Shelter – how many rooms can we be in at one time? The clothes, cars, and vacations we choose, even programs to help us be successful in business come down to our wish for happiness.

But if I know steps and practices to help someone develop steadfast inner happiness, what? I’m not supposed to provide that? I’m to think people are starving for this and therefore may not use discernment as to whether it can really help, so I should not even offer it? Or, I may offer it, but it has to be free or so low cost that I cannot even sustain myself well enough to keep it going?

In my reality I’ve lived with a brain injury for over 20 years, lost everything and in the long slow healing found what was most important. Love and compassion. My life has so many limits, but I am one of the deeply happiest people I know. Am I going to offer that to others? With joy! Am I going to sell it at some exorbitant price and do yellow-highlighter shouting marketing, no. But there’s going to be a price. And the ones who truly want to do the work and receive the benefits will be happy to pay me.

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Sarah 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

I’m actually a little more resistant to the idea of selling wisdom or enlightenment than happiness, perhaps because I’ve encountered more instances of those things that seemed false to me.

The real answer to whether I’d buy it is that I probably wouldn’t buy it right now, because I’ve just found your blog. But if, after six months, I was still reading your blog and finding what you have to say valuable, I’d probably add it to my list. Unless it was a video thing. I’m not a video kind of person.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with selling a process you’ve developed if you believe that it works. If it were me, I’d want to lead my friends through it first so I could feel really sure that it worked (which would then let me confidently mention it to people and all that), but if you have something figured out, great ... See all content Hide content

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Charlotte 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

@Charlie

Interesting points! Thanks for the clarification. I’ll have to sit down and have a long think about that one.

Charlotte´s last blog ..Why I’m Not Buying Any More Info Products. (or: How Merlin Mann changed my game.)

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Charlie 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

@Duff: One of my biggest learning points here recently is precisely how irrational the buying process can be – and how difficult it can be when you, as a seller, approach the process differently than your consumers do.

What’s particularly hard is that we can’t translate value for other people, especially when dollars have no inherent worth. I generally try to translate the dollars into something more meaningful, more for me than for my buyers. What’s $10 worth to someone? I don’t know. Does this product deliver more value than a couple of beers? Absolutely. I’ll grant that in that last question, I am making an assumption about the value of beer, so I’m fully open for criticism there.

Another contextual thing to consider is that, while I agree that the quality of many ebooks can be suspect, there are also a lot of ebooks being written in which it’s not clear what it means to be an expert. What does it take to be an expert at NLP, for instance? What does it take to be an expert at blogging, Social Media, Rails development, productivity, or business strategy?

I don’t have answers here – just a lot of curious questions. After spending 10 years becoming an “expert” at philosophy (which is what the granting of a Ph.D. really means), I can see that that model has its uses, but it’s severely bankrupt in many areas and doesn’t address the world most people live in.

It seems that many of your ideas are strongly influenced by volume sales and perhaps a conflation of profit and revenue. There are entire organizations that are vehicles for volume sales in many of the industries you cite as examples, and, when you have an entire organization of people driving sales in the thousands, that sets up different economic realities than when you’re a solopreneur or small creative time who both has to produce and distribute a product. I’ll touch on this more really soon.

Fundamentally, there is much to worry about with some of the gurus of internet marketing. There are also realities about the buying process that are also at play, and to pretend as if economic exchange were more rational is more naive than it is wise, ethical, or enlightened – yet this doesn’t justify abhorrent ethical practices. I guess that’s why this discussion is so interesting…

It just occurred to me: effective civil rights movements often press hot buttons and manipulate people’s emotions in order to get them to act. Think of how much King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” used pathos to really integrate the logos and ethos of his argument. Also consider the way in which Eric uses rhetoric to get people to really think about what’s going on. I’m not saying this to excuse deception, overpromising/underdelivering, and some of the obscene psychological priming tactics used by some of the people you’re speaking of.

@Charlotte: You’re absolutely right that conflations abound, but I didn’t necessarily mean hard in the suffering way. I probably meant it closer to what you mean it to be, in the sense that you mean when you say “working to create my business is hard.” One of the funny things about philosophical conversations is that it often makes words that seem easy to understand difficult – who knew how much could spin around a simple word like “hard”? :p

I don’t have a good answer for why everyone isn’t happy, healthy, and good, really. Part of the problem is the phenomenon by which we account for future consequences differently than we do for present consequences – for instance, I’d rather have fun now and work later, but “later,” I’ll still want the same thing. All sorts of issues of irrationality and delayed gratification come up from that alone.

Another problem is that we haven’t really learned good decision procedures that factor in incomplete information, so we either delay decision-making or make the wrong ones based off of the more secure wrong information.

Yet another is that we’re often torn between different aspects of ourselves – sometimes we do what we know is wrong because it feels better, and other times we don’t do what would be right because our mental faculties fool us into thinking that emotive consequences should be undervalued.

Add in various social structures that script certain behaviors and realities and you get a whole grab bag of “hard.”

My point is not that things are easy, but just that how difficult things are have very little to do with their value, just as something’s scarcity says little about how intrinsically valuable it is. Diamonds – the paradigm of hardness – are only valuable in as much as we make them valuable, despite the fact that they’re both hard and rare. :p

@MrTeacup: Your points are really philosophical, whether you intend them to be or not. You’re coming in with a pretty sophisticated social critique, and I want to be clear that I appreciate it.

What you call someone being a “living, breathing advertisement,” I call leadership and integrity. I do expect someone to do as they say, at least most of the time – we all slip up occasionally. If James Arthur Ray really believes in what he’s doing, he’s a man of integrity and leadership who’s (perhaps) horribly misguided. (I say perhaps because I know him only through the sweat lodge incidents and that I haven’t read all the details about what happened, so I’m suspending judgment on his character.)

I don’t find it particularly interesting that personal dev people end up as coaches and speakers, really, for the same reasons that it’s not particularly interesting that deeply religious people become priests, rabbis, pastors, or religious leaders, and for the same reasons that people who are good at sports & helping other get better at sports become coaches.

Now, whether they’re good at delivering is an entirely different question, and I think there are plenty of people who are helping people become more happy, wise, and enlightened who are unfortunately overshadowed by the James Arthur Rays of the world. This is not particularly interesting either – big, bad examples stick out more to us than small, good examples, which is why there’s more bad news being broadcasted than good.

@Tim: It was really insensitive of me to not make it clear that this discussion was not prompted by your product, but it’s because I largely didn’t think of it. I liked your point about the iPhone, which really buttressed some of my thinking about trying to translate value into cost.

And, defending Duff: I’m glad he’s on 24/7. Evil men toil while good people sleep.

@Jason: I think Tim raises a good point, so I’ll address another: the market for people who want to be happy is probably larger than those who care about super-efficient solar technology, so surely your point is not about the size of the market. Creating a process that led to global human happiness would probably change the world more than a clean energy technology, as well.

And if it’s about their willingness to pay for the product, then it’s pressing right into the center of this discussion. ... See all content Hide content

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Claudia 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

Charlie, to answer your questions, being rich/successful at business DO change perception because they deal with a desperate pain people have right now: “I HAVE to have more money to [fill the blank], therefore I need to learn how to get rich”. You can find lots of buyers for this.

Same with any other acute pain.

Happiness is something that is nice to have, but I don’t have to deal with it today. So marketing how to be happy following certain steps is a lot harder. It’s like selling enlightment, finding your purpose, etc. If I don’t get enlightened or find my purpose, what’s the big deal?

You can however, sell the experience of “happy” and that’s something being done quite successfully. There are “Rich, happy and hot” workshops, there’s Tim’s book on How to be Rich and Happy, there’s the Happy for no Reason book and workshops, and Richard Holden’s Happiness Project which has been a phenomenon in UK with a whole empire built around it.

Given the right audience, you can sell whatever you want at whatever price. At the end of the day, we all want our problems to be solved. What real pain are we trying to get rid of when we think of happiness? That’s a question I ask myself all the time.

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Haider 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

Hi Charlie,

Some excellent questions!

I’m looking forward to reading the comments, as well. But for now I’ll answer your questions, in case I get overwhelmed by the wonderful points your other readers have shared.

I would really have to know how you define “happiness”, “wisdom”, etc.

It’s like the words “justice” or “freedom.” They mean different things to different people. I wouldn’t go running after every person who uses these words.

Some people define happiness as following what your heart tells you to do. I think that’s a bit vague, and we don’t always know what’s truly compatible with our needs as human beings. We might desire something now only to realize that our desire was drawing us towards something that’s ultimately damaging for us. Therefore, a product on how to follow our hearts is something I wouldn’t be interested in, even if it promises happiness.

I think anyone who knows a thing or two about human nature and what leads to human happiness deserves to be rewarded (i.e. paid) for sharing this knowledge, so I think it’s sensible to charge for such knowledge, whether it be for happiness or for enlightenment (they are both learnable).

A series of modules might work better than to sell the whole process for $47 dollars. That way people would at least notice the change the process is bringing into their lives, and can choose to continue along with it or not.

These are my thoughts on the subject. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some comments to read! ... See all content Hide content

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Tim Brownson 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

@ Jason – Let me say something if I may because you raise a good point.

With my first e-book I di exactly that. It cost me about $500 and I even spent money on an ad on Zen Habits. I had about 1,000 downloads in a short period of time.

The net result? A waste of time because people give little or no value to ‘free stuff’ People were downloading it purely because it was free, a bit like you see kids collecting flyers at motor shows and then throwing them away a few days later.

I would wager hardly anybody did the exercises and I got almost zero feedback.

Since How To Be Rich and Happy was launched we have had LOTS of feedback and questions about the exercises. We have people committed to doing what needs to be done to get the results they want.

We could have sold at $10 and probably sold more than 5 x as many, but I’m not interested in people buying it if they aren’t going to use it properly. Not interested at all.

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Tim Brownson 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

I have just re-read that and I sound a mixture of defensive and whiny.

So just to lighten things up a bit because that wasn’t intended:

There’s a knock at the door and a young boy shouts;

“Daddy, daddy, there’s a man at the door with a bill”

“Don’t be silly son, it must be a duck with a hat on”

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Mark Silver 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

@Duff- Question- did you return the ebooks you bought and didn’t like and get a refund?

There’s a few different issues, and they’re getting mixed up together which can cause some confusion. And, unfortunately, they are all subjective.

The first one has to do with quality- Quality is such a question of perspective. Yes, there are certain standards for editing/spelling/grammer/design . But, I know my expectations are completely different depending on my relationship to the seller.

If I buy a book from a store, I expect certain things. I also have pretty much zero relationship to the author or publisher-I might have a relationship with the bookstore, if it’s small enough.

In buying an ebook, the chances are high that I have a relationship with the seller- I’ve read their stuff for awhile for free, the author is directly responsive to me. That changes my expectations entirely- then my expectations are much more on whether I receive help from them or not, than whether the production quality is high. I like both, but I have a lot of forgiveness in me for the production quality.

The second issue is price. Clearly if you don’t think something is worth that much money, you shouldn’t pay it. There are books I’ve paid $12 for and regretted. There are information products I’ve paid 10-20x that for and been happy about. There is no absolute line you can draw about pricing, so it’s a hard conversation to have. Someone thinks $10 is expensive, someone else doesn’t. Sometimes it has to do with how much money someone has- sometimes it doesn’t.

A third issue has to do with sophisticated/manipulative marketing tactics. I totally agree with you that there are people out there who are using these kinds of things to push information products. The vast majority of info products I’ve come across are not like that. It’s more like a raw foodie who made up an ebook and is offering it to her email list. Or someone who helps people in intimate relationships communicate who has a workbook. Some copywriting is involved, but there’s no sophisticated psychological campaign.

Were you manipulated by pushy marketing to buy those 10-20 ebooks you didn’t like?

It seems in some way that we’re just discussing ideas for the sake of ideas- I’m not sure where we can possibly go with this. Are you suggesting that because there are many ebooks out there that you found disappointing that self-employed folks shouldn’t produce any more ebooks? Are you saying that they should voluntarily limit themselves to a price that means they have to sell so many of them that they have to start resorting to more sophisticated marketing techniques, rather than just connecting with a few handfuls of people who sincerely like them?

I get your frustration. I agree that there is a lot of self-published stuff whose quality is iffy. I agree that there are individuals who charge prices that I’m not willing to pay. I’m just not sure where you’re going with it.

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MrTeacup 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

@Charlie, I’m not really making a philosophical point — at least, not about the real nature of happiness, wisdom, etc. My point is mainly an observation about the culture of personal development – that it represents notions of the Good as universal metaphysical givens, ignoring and even obfuscating the way that those concepts are culturally conditioned, how we are socialized into worldviews in which those concepts make sense.

Several critical points come out of that: personal development culture is primarily concerned with constructing and performing an identity that is understood as happy/wise/spiritual/whatever. Look at James Arthur Ray’s recent sweat lodge: he demanded certain performances from participants — that powering through pain, discomfort and even vomiting demonstrated one’s spiritual attainment — with deadly results. Going beyond a critique of authority, we should notice how authority fundamentally is the authority to demand certain (often moral) performances from us.

Isn’t it interesting that so many people who do personal development end up as coaches and motivational speakers themselves? There may be many reasons for this, but it seems that in this culture, the highest rank you can achieve in personal development is being acknowledged as a teacher. And if we expect a teacher to fully embody the concepts he or she teaches, aren’t they under intense pressure to perform? Every movement, glance and word must sustain the fantasy that they and their students have constructed, and under the watchful gaze of their customers, doesn’t this make their very identity and personality into a living, breathing advertisement? No wonder that so many “enlightened” people, by trying to achieve ultimate authenticity, come off as fake.

All of this is distinct from the question of whether happiness/wisdom/enlightenment exists and whether it is achievable. I think those things do exist — but there has been no greater forcing in preventing people from accessing them than the personal development and spiritual subcultures.

MrTeacup´s last blog ..mrteacup: How the Kindle got it’s name: "Jeff Bezos wanted to talk about the future of reading in a small, not braggadocio way" http://bit.ly/2Q8vmp... See all content Hide content

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Duff 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

@Mark

While I appreciate and agree with some of your arguments, they all fall on the side of the publisher, which I find imbalanced.

Customers also have families to feed. There are ethics not only between publisher and author to examine, but between publisher and consumer.

I also think there are questions of quality in an industry. I’ve purchased probably 10 or 20 absolutely horrible eBooks, which is at least half of the total information products I’ve purchased as a consumer, compared to probably only 3 or 4 physical books that I wanted to throw in the trash (and I’ve purchased hundreds of physical books in my lifetime). The electronic “publishing” industry has created a mass of crap, largely because information marketers encourage non-experts to write books quickly and publish them without edits for high prices with pushy marketing. This includes Project Mojave and other more “conscious” information marketing programs. Could an eBook theoretically be worth $47 and high-quality? Sure—but I haven’t seen one, and I’ve seen 100’s if not 1000’s of the former.

In addition, in the music industry we also have people arguing similar things, except that nobody—not one single band I’ve ever come across—is trying to sell an album for $47. In many cases, independent albums are selling for $10 or less.

The industry is inflated, largely due to hype marketing and promises of wealth and “the long tail.” It seems clear to me that the long tail is mostly a myth, and that on the web as off, there are a handful of “mavens” dominating the market and getting rich, while the rest of us buy into the idea that one day we can too, perpetuating the ponzi scheme of the promises of wealth which distracts from the structural inequities that keep many people impoverished.

Duff´s last blog ..The Dark Side of The Secret: Reading James Arthur Ray’s Sweat Lodge Disaster through a Magickal Lens ... See all content Hide content

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Qrystal 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

My first thought: I wouldn’t buy happiness, because it can’t be purchased.

But if you’re selling a process, a path I can walk and see for myself what it can do, I’d be intrigued… but I still wouldn’t buy, but only because I don’t consider myself to be in the market for happiness, as I already feel happy (acknowledging my state as a work-in-progress , anyways).

I wouldn’t think you’re a shmuck for trying to sell such a thing, though. If you’ve found something that really provides value for people seeking happiness, and you have invested a decent amount of time and energy into preparing it, you are perfectly entitled to charge money for it.

All those other words to replace ‘happy’ though? They reek of schmuck to me, which similar to the scent of shady car-salesman.

Do you really have to promise what the end product is, in order to sell something? Why not just sell the thing, the process, instead of some elusive potential endstate that might be different for everyone who uses it? Sell me a car, not a pussymagnet.

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Mark Silver 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

@Duff- One side note about the $47 ebook being a $15 book with a $32 markup. You didn’t make any judgment about that that I could read, but in case there was, I’d love to just take a moment and defend the price on ebooks. You probably already know all of this.

The publishing industry financial setup is outdated. Someone invest years or decades or training and work into their speciality . They write a book. The lion’s share of the money from those book sales done through a traditional publisher goes to everyone *but* the writer. And a large part of the responsibility for the marketing lays squarely on the shoulders of the writer. It’s an unethical setup.

I have long supported small business owners and the self-employed to create info products instead of trying to get published for these reasons:

1. You have control over your work.

2. The timeline to publishing is much shorter- you don’t have to wait 18 months until it comes out, which can make a huge difference to someone just starting out and needing to feed their family.

3. The majority of the money stays with the author.

4. For very small businesses who typically reach dozens, hundreds, and on the high side a few thousand people, you don’t have to sell very many to pay for groceries. Someone selling a $47 ebook, if they can sell 10 or 20 a month, that can be a significant amount of cash in pocket.

It’s true that often small business owners don’t invest in getting a lot of editing or design done, and that can be a problem. But, it’s a correctible one. With an ebook, you can sell 20 of them, pay someone to edit it, and then reissue it to everyone who bought it.

Just my two cents on the topic.

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Mark Silver 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

Hey Charlie, I was so swamped yesterday I couldn’t jump in until now.

Here’s my take on it: you can’t sell happiness or those other qualities. You can’t. I’ve explained what I’ve to be true in an article you’ve read: How Spiritual Teachers Make A Living. From my perspective, the steps you would need to take to become happy have to do with mainly internal work/spiritual practice and such, and I’m not personally into selling that stuff, unless it has a very clear context.

For instance, there are some spiritual exercises and practices included in many of our programs, but they are very clearly in the context of doing the internal work needed to be effective, and they are always based contextually in other specialized knowledge around marketing, sales, writing, something practical.

I think one has to be very careful in our culture around selling anything remotely spiritual. Our culture has what I call “spiritual anorexia.” There is real hunger and thirst for connection to the deeper things in life, and yet much of that hunger or thirst is somewhat unconscious, displaced or conflated with materialistic goals.

Selling anything that touches on those qualities means that you are basically selling food to people with eating disorders. Strong marketing copy and understanding the psychology of selling, coupled with the irrationality of an audience that has a complicated, confused or unconscious relationship to the heart can lead to some pretty unhealthy dynamics.

Yes, people have individual responsibility. And if you have a starving person in front of you, and the choice between giving them healthy food or a candy bar or even poisoned food, the person serving it up has a larger sense of responsibility because of the power dynamic.

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actionjack5 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Twitter

Would You Buy Happiness? http://bit.ly/2lLs3l

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Terry 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

It’s all in the mind. Only you are the master of your life.

Terry´s last blog ..3 Ways To Make Peace With Money

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MyGratitudeLife 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Twitter

Would You Buy Happiness? http://bit.ly/2nzP2i

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alihale 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Twitter

Thought-provoking post by @CharlieGilkey here - and good discussion in comments! "Would You Buy Happiness?" http://bit.ly/cneyO

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uberVU - social comments 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

Social comments and analytics for this post…

This post was mentioned on Twitter by jonathanfields: RT @CharlieGilkey: Today’s short post: “Would You Buy Happiness?” http://bit.ly/etFvT I hope you’ll join the conversation!…

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Duff 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

It’s also worth noting that in The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky summarizes the findings of Positive Psychology research as claiming that happiness is only 40% in our control. So anything one buys that attempts to create happiness can only maximally affect 40% of the overall picture, and this would also have to somehow account for all the factors Lyubomirsky determines to be part of the 40%.

Duff´s last blog ..The Dark Side of The Secret: Reading James Arthur Ray’s Sweat Lodge Disaster through a Magickal Lens ... See all content Hide content

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Jason 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

Question 1: I don’t mind spending 47 bucks, but the fact that happiness is so personal and different for everybody, I would be hard pressed to buy anything that sold me the process to something so arbitrary and subjective. Actually never mind, I’d probably buy it just to see what the process is, and if it applies to me.

Change the word to “wisdom” or “enlightenment” and I’m actually probably less inclined to buy, because in these modern times, information is available around every corner. Niche experts are everywhere with every point-of-view, it seems you can find your “guru” if you look hard enough.

Question 2: I don’t have a problem with you selling it. If you have information that is worthwhile, I personally believe you should be paid for it. But, if your process really works, I believe that you could so greatly impact people in their lives by giving it away for free that there would be a far greater value in the “philanthropic” helping of the human race. ... See all content Hide content

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Mike Kirkeberg 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

Good Questions – I’ll take them backwards.

2. Would there be anything wrong with me selling the product

There wouldn’t be anything wrong with selling the product as far as I can see. The problem I think is that (and this is part of my next answer) that the words you use are difficult to define, even harder to understand, and I think different for everybody. It’s one of those ideas that you could say, jeez, if I could bottle this, I could make a million dollars.

1. Would you buy the product that walked through the process for $47?

That brings us to this problem. Happiness, enlightenment, wisdom, all that probably don’t result from the same process for everyone, and the guarantee would be a killer.

The other thing is, if you have to buy it, is it really any of those things?

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Duff 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

@MrTeaCup

I do think that much of the transcendent is merely performances we stage for other people, but I don’t think all of it is, nor do I think all inner experience should be reduced to social realities.

Duff´s last blog ..The Dark Side of The Secret: Reading James Arthur Ray’s Sweat Lodge Disaster through a Magickal Lens

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MrTeacup 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

What is, exactly, happiness, wisdom, enlightenment, or transcendence? And how do I know when I have it? What are we really talking about here? To me, these words are not inner qualities so much as performances we stage for other people. For example, wisdom is really just acting wise and being acknowledged as wise, whatever that means to your audience.

You might object, saying, “I don’t live my life for other people!” and that’s probably true. But, when we refer to a mature, independent person, we really mean someone who stages a performance for a virtual audience, not for other real flesh-and-blood people. This audience is posited, and we perform for them by looking in the mirror, trying to see how they see, judge or praise us.

Personal development (and institutions, organizations) claims it just wants to give us what we are looking for. But really, it tells us (through marketing) what we should be looking for – what our inner audience is expecting to see – and then sells us ways of performing correctly.

This is a fickle audience that can’t really ever be satisfied, and selling a process or practice that claims to be able to do this is fraud. What we need is not new demands and new ways to live up to those demands, but a way to accept that we will never achieve any ultimate human purpose.

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SuzanneBHarris 4 months, 2 weeks ago on Twitter

Reading: Would You Buy Happiness? http://bit.ly/1BK2Mi

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