How Hacks Sell the “Law of Attraction” with Sophistry

And how to dismantle Ayodeji Awosika’s advertisements for the creator economy

If you squint hard enough, you can often tell how self-help hacks write like wily, duplicitous advertisers.

They promise miracles with the headline and walk it all back in the small print, and they avoid harsh truths with slick slogans. This is what happens when someone with a salesperson’s sensibilities tries to offer therapy by writing about how people can change their life for the better. What’s promised is uplifting, but because we are what we are, the salesperson can’t help but churn out mere sophistry.

The snake oil of self-help advice

Take Ayodeji Awosika, for example, the writing coach, self-improvement author of several books, and a Medium writer with over 90,000 followers. Here are a few of his recent titles on Medium, to give you a sense of what he does:

• You Don’t Need Insane Levels of Motivation to Get What You Want
• 5 Questions You Can Use to Help Figure Out What You Really Want From Life
• 11 Traits of Confident, But Not Arrogant, People
• Admit These Six Hard Truths to Free Yourself and Live a New Life
• 9 Signs Your Life is a Bit More On Track Than You Think It Is

In “What You Choose to Focus On Becomes Your Reality,” Awosika defends a naturalized (and thus ultimately worthless) version of the so-called law of attraction. As in a splashy advertisement, Awosika starts off with bold pronouncements:

Regardless of your current position, it’s on you to decide what to focus on next. What you focus on becomes your reality.

And you’d be surprised at just how much you can change your life by choosing to focus on the upside and making a plan for a better future regardless of what’s going on in your life right now.

Then he deflates them by conceding that “The law of attraction isn’t some supernatural phenomenon.” Thus, he means to naturalize the bogus law that the universe works like a genie’s lamp so that we get whatever we wish for. According to Awosika, “It’s simple. If you prime your brain to see opportunities, it’ll find them. If you prime your brain to see failure, you’ll find it. Your brain has a selective focus mechanism. Positive thinking tweaks your selective focus in the right direction.”

And that’s true. There is such a thing as selective attention. We can focus on the positive or on the negative. The supernatural law of attraction is that that subjective choice suffices to change your life for the better or for the worse, as though there were no objective world out there that’s indifferent to our preferences.

To his credit, Awosika steers clear of that supernaturalism. But he downplays the objective side that must be added to that choice to be optimistic or to focus on the positive. The problem with pessimists, he says, is that “their brain will filter out positivity and opportunities. Some people in society, who are programmed for outrage and helplessness, genuinely can’t conceive that upward mobility exists.”

But again, finally recognizing opportunities that have been there all along wouldn’t magically bring you success. Thus, Awosika adds that you should “Focus on the upside the world has to offer, brainwash yourself into seeing these opportunities, and get serious enough so you’ll do the work” (my emphasis). It’s a two-step process: change your mindset so you can identify opportunities and do the hard work of taking advantage of them.

Awosika says his success as a writer exemplifies this process. He became, as he says, “an opportunity spotting machine” when he saw others posting their writing on blogs and eventually on Medium. “I joined Medium shortly after and it paved the way to the full-time living I make now.”

And he adds, “Maybe I got lucky, but I also focused. Whenever I saw something promising, I jumped on it right away. I doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on this process until I got what I wanted.”

Watch again, though, how he slips in the downside of his naturalized form of the law of attraction, in his article’s grand finale in which he says, “Just take all the clichés in self-help and apply them to your life. It’s really that simple. Believe in yourself, focus on what you can control, don’t complain, write down your goals, make a decision, slug it out inch by inch until it works” (my emphasis).

All the clichés work after all, he says, even though there’s no magic involved. Indeed, “You’ll come to find that it’s not that hard to be successful at all. It’s time-consuming. You’ll have to win a psychological battle, sure. But if you get to the other side of the work like I have, you’ll kick yourself for ever having doubt in the first place.”

Notice the devil in the details of that word “if,” in “if you get to the other side of the work…”

The harsh facts buried in the fine print

What Awosika’s salesmanship hides is that his success perfectly illustrates how the law of attraction is, rather, bogus. What you focus on does not thereby become your reality. True, searching for opportunities and working hard to take advantage of them might be necessary conditions of succeeding in certain markets. But none of that will change how the world works.

Awosika succeeded not just by focussing on the positive and working hard as a writer. Crucially, he did a third thing, which is that he turned himself into a hack. And just to refresh your memory, it’s worth consulting the dictionary to define exactly what’s meant by a “hack,” because the dictionary’s specifications happen to be exquisite.

A hack is “a person, as an artist or writer, who exploits, for money, his or her creative ability or training in the production of dull, unimaginative, and trite work; one who produces banal and mediocre work in the hope of gaining commercial success in the arts.” Put alternatively, a hack is “a professional who renounces or surrenders individual independence, integrity, belief, etc., in return for money or other reward in the performance of a task normally thought of as involving a strong personal commitment.”

Keeping that in mind, I can point out that Awosika recognized not just opportunities but the reality of the popular niches on Medium, and he decided to sell out his artistic integrity to make a living as a sophist offering hackneyed, specious advice to gullible, wannabe writers. He chose to write almost entirely about how to succeed in the business of freelance writing, because that’s a topic that Medium promotes.

Why does Medium promote it? Because such articles are effectively advertisements for the platform, drawing in naïve wannabe writers, and encouraging writers who are already on the platform to keep grinding to achieve the content creator’s dream. The self-help hack is effectively saying, “You, too, can make a living as a freelance writer in the gig economy just by swallowing this snake oil!”

Oh, and you can dream of succeeding also only by ignoring the facts that there’s no middle class in the creator economy, and that only the tiniest minority of users who are the superstars make a living on the likes of YouTube, Spotify, Twitch, SnapChat, TikTok, Gumroad, and Patreon. The vast majority of hopeful content creators make much less than minimum wage on their precarious platform of choice. For example, “97.5% of YouTubers earn less than $12,140 per year,” and the top 1% of Twitch streamers “earned almost 60% of the total $889 million paid out to streamers,” while the Wall Street Journal reports that “75% made less than $120.”

As Clay Shirky explained in 2003, the reason for this apparent unfairness is that power law distributions operate in such social networks. Due to network effects, early dominators on a platform reap enormous long-term rewards that limit the chances of later adopters. Users flock to consume the most popular content not just because that content is presumably superior but in part because it’s popular. We don’t want to feel left out, which is also why we usually don’t proceed past the first page of a Google search. In the public’s mind, the platforms are identified with their respective superstars, and the rest of the content creators are largely ignored.

Again, with delicious irony, then, Awosika’s success story effectively falsifies the law of attraction because he succeeded by conceding the objective facts of how Medium and social media work. He realized that to improve his chances of making a living as a freelance writer, he’d have to specialize in sheer hackery. He’d have to cater to that dubious niche and to sell the rhetorical equivalent of snake oil, namely the sophistry that’s commonplace in the self-help industry and in the positive-thinking fad.

True, Awosika avoids the most egregious, New Agey excess of that sophistry, but his naturalistic defense of the law of attraction still functions like a manipulative advertisement. He focusses the reader’s attention on the subjective side of his technique, on the task of changing your mindset so you’ll no longer be blind to opportunities. But he neglects to spell out the downside of the objective part, of the hard work you’ll likely have to do to take advantage of those chances.

Awosika’s hard work was a case of selling out to the most promising but still degrading, dishonourable niche that’s available to freelance writers. He sold out to the prospect of providing ads for the neofeudal creator economy. That is, he sold out by writing a steady stream of “self-improvement” advice for budding entrepreneurs.

Awosika says, “it’s not that hard to be successful at all.” But if we’re talking about success specifically for writers, it depends on whether you have anything worthwhile to say.

If you find that you write for artistic reasons because you have a vision of how things should be, which you express with words, you’ll have fewer objective opportunities than the parasitic, pandering hack who floods the market with sophistry and flattery, providing bogus solutions and lame excuses for how the big tech companies exploit most content creators.

It’s rather like the fly-by-night amateur that claims to be able to do your construction work for a fraction of the cost, and then shows up on your doorstep and makes a hash of it. If only you’d listened to the more legitimate construction companies — but alas, you were enticed by the promotions of the shady fellow who undercut the more realistic bids.

Likewise, the work of genuine artists is routinely trivialized once it’s been digitized, and we’re fascinated instead by cheap flattery, platitudes, and the feel-good sophistry that aren’t intended to make the world a better place by getting to the root of our problems.

Wouldn’t you know it: If you speak truth to power, good luck succeeding in that venture! But if you make yourself a dupe of the powers that be, you’ll find your opportunities increase tenfold almost by magic.