Have you ever noticed how many things — especially when it comes to anything that involves a sales pitch — are shrouded in an air of mystery and "secrecy?"
Soap is made with a "secret" formula, we have "secrets" to success, or to enlightenment, or to attaining inner peace, or to losing 50lbs in 90 days... you name it, there's a secret associated with it.
There was a time in my life — I suppose when I was younger and more naive — when I actually believed that maybe there was a secret and maybe I was just missing out on it. Now that I am old and gray I am far more aware of that 90% of the time there is no actual secret, there is only taking common sense and putting it in prettier paper and labeling it a secret.
Sometimes I ponder weather it is more appropriate to label most people's journey through life as being fear based, or ego-based. Maybe there's no real difference; after all most ego is based in the fear of somehow being exposed as less than or inadequate or something along those lines.
The self development industry is particularly fond of marketing "secrets," perhaps because there really and truly are no secrets and the only way they can sell stuff that people actually already know about is by declaring it to be a secret.
You know, "the secret to making $10,000 a month" isn't going to be found in some pamphlet that you can buy for $99.95 from a huckster, it's more likely going to be found in doing a buttload of hard and tedious work.
Most of the time, the real secret to success is having a willingness to do stuff other people just aren't willing to do. Putting in more effort than they do, putting in more money and having it at risk than other people do, spending more hours than they do.
Of course many people don't want that to be true so they're willing to spend $99 on a book and six CD course that doesn't actually tell them anything they didn't know ahead of time and if there is something there? Well, it's usually so obfuscated by technical jargon and double-speak that you can't actually derive anything from it.
And then, of course, we end up straight back at "ego" because very few of us are willing to admit that the $99 we spent on "the secret to making $10,000 a month" was actually pure bullshit and we weren't able to spot it.
As I have aged, I have increasingly come to the conclusion that perhaps the biggest "secret" I can give myself is developing the Fine Art of not giving a shit. That doesn't necessarily mean not caring about work or not caring about success, but it means just determining where I want to go by tuning into my own inner compass rather than following external ideas like some blind trained monkey.
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2026.07.15 01:15 PDT
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