I bought a course once. I want that on the record before anything else, because it is easy to write this kind of post from a position of never having fallen for anything, and that is not the position I am writing from.

It was about delivery driving, of all things. I had been doing it for a year already. I bought it anyway, at eleven at night, after a bad Saturday, for a price I would describe as annoying rather than serious.

Eleven at Night, After a Bad Saturday

The timing is the whole explanation. I had come off an evening where I made almost nothing, I was in the kitchen with a reheated coffee doing the thing where you scroll to avoid going to bed, and the video found me at precisely the moment I was most willing to believe I was doing it wrong.

That is not an accident of the algorithm. That is the algorithm working exactly as designed. The content is optimized to find people at the specific hour they are most receptive, and I was as receptive as a person gets.

What sold me was not a promise about money. I want to be clear about that, because I would like to think I would have noticed a straightforward income claim. What sold me was a claim about efficiency — that there was a way of working the app that I, having done it for a year, did not know. That is a much better hook. It flatters you by suggesting you are almost there.

What Was Actually Inside It

Four hours of video in eleven parts. I watched all of it, partly out of obligation to my own money.

Roughly the first hour was legitimately about the work, and about a third of that first hour was correct. There was a point about staging yourself between two dense areas rather than inside one that I had genuinely never thought about, and I have used it since. One useful idea. I want to give credit where it exists.

The rest was structure. How to think about the work. How to stay motivated. A section on mindset that I would describe as a man talking himself into something on camera. And then, gradually, the actual subject: how the course itself was made, how the channel grew, why the real opportunity was in teaching this.

Which is where the thing gave itself away. The specifics ran out at exactly the point where somebody who did the job for a living would have had the most to say. He could talk for forty minutes about mindset and could not talk for four about what to do when a restaurant has closed early with an order in the system, which is a Tuesday for anybody who has actually done this.

What It Cost, Including the Part That Was Not Money

The money was annoying and survivable and I am not going to pretend it wounded me.

The cost was four hours, and the specific quality of those four hours. I watched it across two evenings that I would otherwise have spent either working or with my family, and I watched it in the posture of a student, taking it seriously, on the assumption that the gaps were my failure to understand rather than his failure to know.

That is the real damage of this stuff. It is not the price. It is that it puts you in a receiving position toward somebody who knows less than you do about the thing you are both discussing.

"Did it work?" John asked me a couple of weeks later, and I said there was one good bit about where to park, and he laughed for an uncomfortably long time.

I have thought about that laugh more than I have thought about the four hours. He was not laughing at the course. He was laughing at me having paid a man to tell me where to park.

The Test I Use Now, and Why It Is Not About Credentials

I do not check whether somebody has done the job, because everybody claims they have and the claim is free. I check whether they can be boring about it.

Anybody who has actually done a thing for a year has a stock of tedious specifics: the restaurant that is always slow, the apartment complex with the impossible gate, the hour on a Sunday where it is not worth being out. Those details are worthless as content. They are the entire substance of the work. Somebody who has done it cannot help producing them, and somebody who has not cannot manufacture them.

So that is the test. Four minutes of listening for something too dull to have been invented. It costs nothing and it has saved me from every subsequent version of that eleven-o'clock moment, of which there have been several, because that bad-Saturday feeling has not gone anywhere.

One useful idea about parking, four hours, and a price I would rather not discuss. Post the Ls too.

Note: Everyday Hustle Jeff is the written side of a digital series. These accounts are composite and dramatized. Any figures are what they were on the day, for one person, and are not a projection, a track record, or advice.