As someone who has purchased low- to high-ticket courses, communities, and coaching in various personal development fields, including health, fitness, making money, YouTube advice, career, and dating advice, I want to share how I’ve observed most students behave.
I want to focus on dating advice, although the same trends play out in other fields, to a similar or less degree.
I noticed that many people, at least 20 to 80%, who invest in a four-figure or higher program tend to not absorb most of the advice in the program, especially the detailed nuanced advice, or make much progress and results. They’re usually lurkers in the program, not engaging much or at all on group calls or in the forums. They’re content with the program, don’t refund it, and move on with life. Some may express some negative comments if pressed, but generally, they are fine with the program and move on.
Their results are often their own doing. These programs usually have a lot of advice and details. There are nuances and key principles, but these people do not fully absorb them or take action on them. They didn’t put the work into fully learning and understanding the material and doing it. If they do, it’s a partial effort, understanding and completing only parts of the program.
One can not say the program and system itself was a scam or that the principles didn’t work when the student didn’t even complete the actions and when there’s various success stories. There are some who might use that reasoning to argue that none of this advice works to begin with and you can’t change or improve yourself in life, but these folks are cheapskates who couldn’t or wouldn’t buy the product anyways, so ignore them. To argue that the program can’t work for everyone is obvious; no program can have a 100% success rate or close to it. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work for many.
Then, there are the ones who succeed to some degree, from a moderate amount to a substantial amount. They’ve taken some of the advice, used it, saw results, and built off of that to fully understand the teachings and pick the coach’s brain. Their success builds momentum. Or they naturally had some advantages or skills, so the teachings quickly added to their results. Or they had a lot of motivation and perseverance to be patient until it worked because they really wanted to change their life. One can be motivated for various reasons, such as running away from pain (a terrible current life) or towards pleasure (the prospects of dating the quality people you want in abundance).
Let’s peg this percentage at 1% to 20% max. The amount that has this motivation or this success, can be surprisingly lower than you think, usually closer to the 1% range than the 20%. There’s somewhat of a Pareto Principle at play here.
Why are the percentages like this? There’s probably many reasons. Based on my experiences, I typically don’t sense a lot of motivation from others. They’ll dip their toe in and try out some of the big principles. But if it’s not working, they’ll move on and stay content with their life. Or even claim it didn’t work. When you press them on if they actually followed all the steps to a tee, some will claim they did follow everything, almost being blind to the fact that they glossed over specifics and just dabbled with some high-level stuff. For example, let’s say they tell you to post at least 9 epic photos for your Instagram grid, preferably 15 or a lot more. They do close to the bare minimum and get 9 passable, but not great photos, many of them they paid a photographer to do the work, and call it a day, complaining about how much work they put in when you press them on it.
They also can’t withstand the short-term pain and discomfort they have to go through for long enough to see results, so they’d rather retreat into their comfort zone. Many people don’t like going out to talk to women and practice their social skills because they don’t like loud, night-time environments or getting rejected. They may go out for a few weeks before throwing in the towel. So, what’s the solution? Treat it as a chore that you should have the discipline to muscle through? The key is not to brute force it until you burn out, but instead, to try to make it fun.
They don’t dive deep into understanding every little aspect of what’s being taught. They’ll dabble here and there. Some will go out to practice socializing with women for 2 to 8 weeks before swiftly stopping and going back to their comfort zone of staying home, especially those who don’t like nightlife and see it as a chore. Their comfort zone overrides their determination, so no amount of yelling or persuasion usually gets them off their butt to practice their social skills.
I don’t know the answer, but I think it comes down to a mixture of strong motivation and fully diving into understanding and taking action on everything someone tells you that gets you to that small percent that rise above and see the results they dream about. Dating also makes it harder because this is a field where you’re competing with almost every other single person in the world, and there’s so many factors for what can attract or repel a women that it’s a multi-variate situation unlike simpler topics to teach.
