13d (edited) • General
I Spent $175K on Self-Help. Here's What Nobody Told Me
I just published the most personal thing I've ever written.
Full story here: https://aligncore.ai/letters/i-spent-175k-on-self-help/
The short version: I spent 15 years and $175,000 from my inherited childhood home trying to fix myself. Self-help books. Motivational seminars. A SPECT brain scan where they told me my brain had small dips like someone had been scooping it out with a tiny spoon to taste it like frozen yogurt. They prescribed a hyperbaric oxygen chamber and $600-every-six-months supplements. I stopped ordering a year ago. I'm still alive.
I bought 250 copies of Ed Mylett's book just to spend a day at his house. His neighbors were Adele and Justin Bieber. He was tan and intense and cool. I cheered. I felt awe. But deep down all of it felt like a stage performance: beautiful, emotional, motivational... but rehearsed. It's like I was watching a 2025 video generation AI produce an intimate scene in real time right in front of me: cool looking. No real intimacy. At least that's what I saw with the mindset that I had at that time. I didn't realize that until later.
I did 75 Hard while working nine-hour FedEx routes. Made it 28 days before I started forgetting package numbers and losing my train of thought mid-sentence. My manager said I was one of the fastest AND most accurate drivers they'd ever had. So the discipline was clearly there. The direction wasn't.
None of it stuck. Not because the advice was bad because I think every single guru taught me something real. But I never stopped to ask the obvious question: does this make sense for ME?
I figured it out by accident. I was SO excited when this feature came out: I connected ChatGPT to my journals in Notion. I was looking for patterns. I was looking for anything that could give me something. Something that made sense to me. A sign that I had core values. That I had a North Star. The response made me tear up. A thread I'd never seen: every meaningful thing I'd ever done (the dance crew with my brothers, the dot technique I invented for Color Guard, the systems I built at every job) was the same thing.
That's what I'm building now. A system that does what no guru ever did for me.
I know how this sounds. Guy burns through his inherited childhood home money and writes about it on the internet. But if you've ever spent money you couldn't afford on a promise you weren't sure about, just because staying stuck felt worse, you know this isn't about the money.
Has anyone else felt this specific gap? Disciplined but pointed at nothing? Working hard at something your gut already knows isn't it?
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I Spent $175K on Self-Help. Here's What Nobody Told Me
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