Photo by Alex Dos Santos
As a late-night insomniac teen, I was fascinated with the underbelly of cable television infomercials of the late 80s and 90s.
Friday and Saturday nights, my parents’ hulking floor-console CRT television—with its fake plastic wood-panel cabinet—would display an array of characters: spiritual charlatans, 900-number party hotlines where mingling, sexually vibrant singles all appeared to be swimsuit models, and my personal favorite: the Get Rich Quick schemers.
This was the age of Greenspan, trickle-down economics, and Gordon Gekko’s Greed Is Good.
We were in the age of Global Economics.
Money flowed effortlessly.
And if you were tired of being a de-industrialized blue-collar slob and wanted to fulfill your own Greed Is Good lifestyle, well, hell—just call my 1-800 number and order my Get Rich, Get Hot Chicks Now! ten-set VHS collection for only fifteen payments of $19.95.
Look! Even that Asian immigrant is living the good life in Florida on his yacht! (If you remember that commercial.)
This was also the age of the pyramid scheme: Boomer New Age spiritualism, cancer-healing smoothie cookbooks, penny-stock success stories, and real estate investor bazillionaires.
Everywhere, all the time, someone or something was willing, waiting, and ready to exploit your scarcity mindset.
And…
The world has never changed.
Instead, it’s no longer the blurry, smeary VHS-quality of the 80s and 90s—but a seductive, vibrant Silicon Valley 1080p…maybe even luxurious 4K.
In the Internet Age, the Get Rich Quick schemer class waits to entrap the beleaguered entrepreneurial spirit inside sales funnels, YouTube myth-making, and podcast success stories devoted to The Hustle, The Grind, Optimization, and 1000x Growth Strategies.
We’ve all watched. We’ve all listened. Our emails and phone numbers swallowed into automated hellscape funnels. Our eyes and ears submerged in a digital deluge of newsletters, special access codes, bonus episodes, private Telegram groups, monthly elite-member-only calls…
Same promise. Same extraction. Just in higher resolution.
As humans, we’re always in search of The Shortcut.
That program, affirmation, or elixir that promises to efficiently separate us from the dirty, sweaty, existential-crisis-in-waiting of the building phase.
The problem isn’t that we want things to be easier. It’s that we want to evade who we’re required to become.
To Know Thyself requires focused energy, practice, and surrender. To Build The Business often requires the sacrifice of comfortable foundations—routines, social circles, familiar versions of yourself.
The Get Rich Quick mentality offers a shortcut. A reduction of sacrifice. A promise of certainty in a reality that has none.
And the real, quiet cost of this? (Not the line on your credit card statement from buying The YouTube Guru’s Mindset Hack System.)
You never develop your own judgment.
You’re like the Harvard Business School expert who flies all over the world expounding on leadership…
Yet…
Has
Never
Led
Anyone.
Here’s what doesn’t change, no matter the era:
There is no shortcut to acquiring your own judgment.
Instead, you must Build Thyself. Build Thy Business.
Most people try to reverse this. They attempt to use the business to manufacture the self. Status, money, traction, audience, scale…all hoping the reflection in the mirror eventually stabilizes.
Sometimes it works temporarily.
But it rarely holds.
It’s the artist who chases success, instead of their art.
You can’t even call them a sellout. Hell, selling out is all they ever wanted.
Every new novel, song, painting, app, founding—is just another Get Rich Quick scheme.
Real judgment isn’t acquired through insight. It isn’t granted by proximity to smart people or installed through proprietary, five—even six-figure frameworks.
It’s built inside…consequence. Repetition.
Inside the slow, sometimes agonizing, sometimes boring accumulation of decisions you formulated, tested, and instituted.
You make a call. You watch what happens. You absorb the outcome.
Did it bruise? Fail? Sting?
Then you adjust.
You make another call.
Over time, something subtle forms.
Not certainty.
Not some sort of performative mindset mentality, but rather…
Quiet internal calibration.
You begin to sense when something is off before you can explain why. You recognize familiar failure patterns earlier.
You stop needing external permission to trust your feeling of a situation.
That’s judgment.
This is why shortcuts are so destructive.
They don’t just promise acceleration. They remove the very conditions that produce the growth you’re after.
There are no shortcuts to judgment. No cheat codes to bypass certain levels or bosses.
Instead, this path is slower than we’ve been told. Way less glamorous. Way less sexy. No Miami yachts filled with The Beautiful People.
This is…ordinary.
You make decisions. You live with them. You adjust.
If you fail the level…
Can’t beat the boss?
You start over.
Over time, you begin to trust yourself.
Not because you’re certain. But because you’re honest.
Build Thyself.
Build Thy Business.
In that very ordinary, unsexy, non–Get Rich Quick scheme.