This week, I couldn’t help noticing how saturated YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram is with useless drivel masquerading as helpful content.
This one video went viral about “how I cold approached 100 women without any experience.” While this type of content seems informative and entertaining, it’s not going to help you much at all. The guy has no experience, skills, coaching, or reference point. While it may inspire some, which can be helpful, I knew it wouldn’t be worth my time today.
Nowadays, there’s plenty of dating coaches giving their advice to a camera, selling their services, and not often really backing up what they say with much evidence. (Though some do have evidence and testimonials; I have to give credit where its due.)
Because so much of this stuff is shoved in your face through your social media feed, it’s easy to get sucked into going down rabbit holes and wasting a bunch of time thinking you’re learning or getting better when you’re not. Jubilee is a YouTube channel notorious for their off the wall social experiments with eye-catching titles to farm views. Man dates ten women and the women decide his best date. 5 women rate themselves according to attractiveness. The streamer Kai Cenat hires a date in Japan and then has ten women on his stream rate his friends’ Instagrams.
While this content may be entertaining to a lot of people, it’s not really helping you out much. It’s easy to convince yourself that it’s “helpful” in some ways because maybe you can learn something about someone’s charisma, how women interact, or mistakes that people make so you don’t make them. But it’s really just the blind leading the blind when it comes to personal development. If you’re a beginner, you don’t know what’s good or bad. It’s hard to point out what’s working and what’s not properly. You’ll likely identify the wrong things and miss things you’re blind to. It’s ineffective and mostly just wasting your time for entertainment. Too much of it can rot your brain.
In the last couple years, I’ve had coaches that have helped me in communication, interactions, and presentation for my career as well as for dating. One pattern I’ve found that I want to highlight is a blind spot I never knew I had about my lack of enthusiasm, expressiveness, and vocal variety. I was undoubtedly surprised that I wasn’t at least average in this area. Apparently, I came off bland, monotone, lacking in volume, passive, and with no edge. I had no idea!! And part of me didn’t believe it.
But this feedback kept coming up. I was told that my perceived 10 out of 10 on my expressiveness and loudness meter was really a 5 out of 10. I was told that I could ramp it up, be way more aggressive, go 100 times over the top, and it would still be less than some other people’s ability. Is that true in all instances? No, I couldn’t believe it. They haven’t known me as much as I’ve known me, so I still believe there are some situations when I’m really passionate about a topic or I was over aggressive or expressive and it was a lot. But when you keep seeing a pattern with your feedback, you have to let go of your blind spot, acknowledge it, become aware, and fix it if you want to improve.
I bring this up because that’s the value of a coach. When you’re wasting your time trying to figure out how to improve on your own with free social media content, you end up just spending a lot of time entertaining yourself but not improving much. You’re like a blind man being lead around by another blind man. I never would’ve noticed this blind spot without coaching.
Learn more about my story and growth with a coach with this video interview.
And frankly, I think a lot of people never level up in certain areas because they’re too cheap to invest in a coach or they’re too comfortable that there’s no pain or desire to grow. So, they stay unaware and blind to what they’re doing wrong. That’s probably why some of our parents are so out of touch when it comes to dating advice; because they were able to do decent but not great, in spite of their blind spots, so they never became aware of their blind spots. I’m going to be doing a lot of recurring drills to practice my expressiveness. I hope you do something about your life in a productive, intelligent way!
