You think the market rewards competence. It doesn’t. It rewards the people best at pretending to work while shifting the blame to you. Whether it’s your boss, your kid’s travel coach, or the “guru” selling you a course, the goal is the same: extract value without delivering results. Look around and you’ll see the pattern—it’s not a bug in the system, it’s the feature.
Here’s What Matters
The Failed Entrepreneur Pivot I watched my ex do this exact dance. She walked away from a corporate job, failed to make a dime freelancing for three years, and immediately pivoted to “coaching.” Now she sells courses on how to succeed in the very niche she just abandoned. It’s a brilliant loop—when you can’t do the work, you sell the dream of doing it. She’s making money now, but not from the skills she claimed to have. She’s getting paid to validate the delusions of others.
The Art of Corporate Meta-Work The corporate ladder isn’t climbed by doing your job well; it’s climbed by avoiding your actual responsibilities entirely. You need to get your name on as many committees as possible to fill your schedule with “meta work.” Find a problem, create a flashy action plan to solve it, and present it enthusiastically. The trick is to move to a new role before the plan is ever implemented. This lets you claim credit for the “strategy” while someone else takes the fall for the execution. You destroy company value, but you get a raise.
The Travel Sports Delusion You’re paying $3,000 a year so your nine-year-old can play ball in a different town. Rec leagues are dying because every parent thinks their kid is the next superstar, but the data says otherwise. Most of these kids will quit by high school, surpassed by the late bloomers who didn’t pay a dime for “elite training.” You’re sacrificing your weekends and your bank account for glorified babysitting run by washed-up players who just want your money. Enjoy the game, but stop kidding yourself about a scholarship.
Influencers Are Just Infomercials An influencer is just a friendly-looking ShamWow guy. It’s the same sales pitch, wrapped in a prettier package with vacation photos to distract you. They aren’t reviewing products; they are the product.
The Entry-Level Experience Trap Companies complain about a talent shortage while refusing to train a single soul. They want five years of experience for an entry-level wage, creating a loop where no one can get hired because no one will hire them. This is the legacy of “stack ranking”—decades of firing the bottom 10% of the workforce until you’ve fired everyone who actually knew how to do the job.
The Tax Prep Scam Tax preparation companies lobby hard to keep the tax code absurdly complex. They do this solely so they can sell you a solution to a problem that shouldn’t exist. In almost every other developed nation, this is handled automatically for free. You are paying a ransom just to give the government your own money.
Diamonds Are Just Carbon People will argue until they’re blue in the face that lab-grown diamonds aren’t “real.” They claim they’re “too perfect” compared to natural stones. If “too perfect” means I didn’t fund a war or overpay for a rock just to impress people I don’t like, I’ll take it every time.
What Now?
Stop looking for competence where there is only a profit motive.
The systems you trust—business, education, consumerism—are designed to extract, not to serve. Once you realize that adding value often gets you punished while gaming the system gets you promoted, you can stop playing the victim. You don’t have to become a grifter, but you damn well better learn to spot them.