Most Advice is a Memoir, Part II

What happens when the storyteller has something to sell you

Last time I wrote that advice is autobiographical: a story about someone else’s context, offered to you as if it were a set of instructions for yours. What I didn’t get into, because it deserved its own space, is what happens when the storyteller has a product to sell you at the end of the story. That changes the transaction completely, and it is happening right now, at scale, to a very specific and very vulnerable audience: people who just lost their jobs.

Job search advice has the same context problem as any other advice. Someone got hired because of a referral they had, a market that was hiring, a specific gap in their resume that happened to match a specific gap on a hiring manager’s whiteboard that week. They tell the story afterward as a method (five things I did to land my dream job), because a method is more shareable than a shrug, and because most people, in good faith, misattribute their own outcomes to the parts of the process they controlled rather than the parts they didn’t. That’s the ordinary version of the problem, and it was the whole subject of the first post.

The job search version has an extra layer, and the extra layer is money. Losing a job is one of the more acute forms of vulnerability a person can experience in professional life. Your income is gone or going. Your identity, if you’re anything like most people in tech, is tangled up with your title in ways you don’t notice until the title disappears. You are anxious, you are scrolling more than usual, and you are, for a window of time, unusually open to anyone who sounds certain about a way out. That is precisely the emotional state an entire content industry has learned to target, and it targets it with a specific, recursive product: financial freedom, sold to you in the form of a $47 PDF that teaches you how to sell $47 PDFs.

I want to be precise about what that actually is, because the packaging is designed to obscure it. It is not a skill. It is not an asset. It is a replica of the sales funnel itself, handed to you as though it were the destination, when it is actually just another copy of the machine you already stepped into by watching the video. You buy the map, and the only landmark on the map is the gift shop where they sell the maps. It is a beautifully drawn map. It is laminated. It has testimonials. It was made by someone who has, in a meaningful number of cases, never actually been anywhere except the gift shop.

This is not a new scheme. It is one of the oldest ones there is, wearing a hoodie and calling itself a personal brand. What’s new is the delivery mechanism: an algorithm that has learned, with some precision, exactly which faces to put in front of you the week your employment status changes on a professional network. It doesn’t need to know you lost your job. It only needs to know you started looking at job postings, and searching “how to negotiate severance,” and pausing a half-second longer than usual on a video with a rented car and the word “freedom” in the caption. The targeting is the product. The PDF is just the receipt.

I said something like this in a comment a while ago, on someone else’s post about being laid off and not looking: if I have to choose between interviewing and grifting, interviewing seems a little better. I still believe that, and I want to be honest that I also went and built something in the space between those two options. I started a consulting business, not because I had cracked a formula, but because I had a specific set of skills and a specific set of people who needed them, and that combination happened to be enough to keep the bottom from totally dropping out. I am aware of how close that description sits to the thing I am criticizing. The difference, and it is the whole difference, is that nobody is buying a story from me about how I did it. They are buying the work.

That is the test, and it is the same test from the first post, just aimed at a sharper target. Ask what the person is actually selling, not what they say they’re selling. If the answer is a service, or a skill, or a thing that exists independent of whether you go on to sell it to someone else, you are looking at ordinary commerce, and ordinary commerce is fine. If the answer is a copy of the pitch you just watched, dressed up as a shortcut to the freedom the pitch itself promised, you are not looking at advice, and you are not looking at a business. You are looking at a chain letter with a landing page.

During a job search, this type of non-advice can cost you more than the forty-seven dollars.