Why Your "Coach" Doesn't Want to Cure You
There's a contrarian I follow on Substack. Goes by Cookie. Doesn't sugarcoat, doesn't hedge, just opens the vein and lets it run. I read every word.
Cookie dropped a line that's been gnawing at me since: there's more money in keeping people confused than in handing them the answer they came for.
Read it twice. People call that cynical. It's just the business model written down.
The Treatment Economy
Look at any industry that sells "help." Healthcare books you for the next appointment instead of curing the thing that brought you in. Coaching keeps you enrolled instead of solving the problem.
The subscription model crawled out of Netflix and infected everything. It's how gurus eat.
Run the math on it. A coach who fixes you in one session has just fired himself. A course that teaches you everything you need has nothing left to upsell.
That math terrifies most of the people working this racket.
The Confusion Machine
I've been on the wrong end of it. Paid good money for courses a one-page checklist would have replaced. Joined programs that smeared three weeks of content across three months like cheap butter. Bought systems engineered to be complicated, because complication is what justified the price tag.
The industry took problem-solving and turned it into problem-prolonging. Nobody wants to cure you. They want to manage the symptoms just well enough that you keep your card on file, but never so well that you walk out the door healed.
That's why a business course teaches you a dozen ways to find your niche instead of telling you to pick one and test it. Why the productivity guru hands you an app store's worth of tools instead of the three habits that move the needle.
Complexity sells. The fix doesn't.
The Healthcare Parallel
Cookie's comparison to medicine isn't an accident. Both rackets profit off the ongoing relationship, not the permanent solution. The cured patient stops paying. The successful student stops enrolling.
Here's where coaching gets uglier. At least the doctor went to medical school. Your average business coach learned everything from another business coach, who learned it from another business coach, virus passing through hosts, the same dead idea wearing a fresh face every time it changes hands.
What Real Help Looks Like
Real help is direct. It hands you the exact thing that solves the exact problem you have right now, and then it leaves.
It doesn't stretch a two-hour workshop into a six-month program. It doesn't wall the answer behind a community when plain instructions would do. It doesn't leave you needing the helper.
I learned this in the Air Force, then in the corporate grind that came after. Good managers solve the thing and move on. Bad ones build machines that only run while they're standing over them.
The best bosses I ever had worked to make themselves unnecessary. They taught me the job, trusted me to do it, walked off to the next fire. That's the whole shape of good teaching. Everything else is the subscription circus we're drowning in.
The Simple Alternative
You want to help people? Help them.
Answer the specific question with a specific answer. Build the thing that solves the problem and stays solved. Charge a fair price for the value and don't build the dependency in on purpose.
Kill the "How to Find Your Purpose" course. Sell the template that gets the thoughts out of someone's head and onto a page. Drop "Mindset Transformation" and teach an actual skill. Quit spinning up a community for every hangnail and write the instructions down.
The world is choking on coaches. It's short on people willing to say what works out loud without wrapping it in a lifestyle brand.
Why This Matters for Creators
Build anything in the creator space and you hit the fork. Feed the confusion machine, or solve the problem.
The machine pays better up front. Longer programs, fatter prices, customers who never leave because they never finish. It also hollows you out, and it can't last.
Solving the problem builds the other thing. People who got what they paid for. Growth that travels by word of mouth. Money you don't have to launder through your conscience before you spend it.
Cookie's right that there's more money in confusion. There's more sleep in clarity.
So the real question was never whether you can get paid keeping people lost. You can. The question is what it costs you, the part that doesn't show up on the invoice, the part you settle up with at 3 a.m.
The world has plenty of gurus selling the dream. Be the one who hands over the answer and walks away.