The Epic Online Course Debate 2018

All right Tom Kuegler, I’m throwing down the gauntlet.

In a recent post, you made the great point that there’s so much more that we could be doing with Medium. Like throwing down with other authors on Medium. It was a great post:

So here I am, stepping up and making the first move.

There was another piece that you wrote that I have a bone to pick with, and it’s this one right here:

Your main point is actually, well…on point. Your big idea is that there’s a lot you can learn from the best of the best without shelling out any of your hard earned cash 💰 for an expensive online course.

Point taken.

My problem is this statement:

You shouldn’t buy courses ever again (including mine) because many times the entree is already on the table in front of you. -Tom Kuegler

Now I know that you were using a bit of hyperbole for dramatic effect and that you tried to hedge that statement with a few qualifications, but they were too feeble for me.

Yes everyone should learn how to learn from others by watching what they do, but someone needs to stand up and make the case for online courses.

Turns out that someone is me. Let’s do this. 🤺

To put my cards on the table, one of my goals this year was to take four paid online courses this year. If you don’t believe me, take a look at this snapshot of my goals page from my bullet journal (because I apparently have no sense of privacy, here’s the whole page, the last one is the relevant one:

Oh, and if you still don’t believe me, here’s a post I published on The Ascent two months ago:

So not only do I see online courses as being a critical part of my growth in 2018, I see them being important enough to commit in my written goals to taking four of them.

Why would I do such a thing? Here are three key advantages to online courses:

Automatic Commitment

Have you ever signed up for a free online class and then never taken it?

It’s because you have no skin in the game, you’ve never committed.

Without having to really commit, you’re free to jump ship whenever things get difficult to chase whatever the new latest and greatest advice is.

Here’s the thing about commitment: it’s an insanely underrated component of success. That sounds like such a cheesy self help guru thing to say, but it’s true.

Doing anything worthwhile takes a heck of a lot of courage in the face of the unknown, and if you aren’t firmly committed to something, it’s too easy to let yourself off the hook.

The important thing to remember is that we all want confidence, but confidence comes after success, not before. Before you have to settle for courage.

Commitment is the foundation of courage.

Plus, the kind of commitment that an online course offers is the rare opportunity to use the sunk cost fallacy to your advantage.

Humans have a bad habit of thinking that we “need to get our money’s worth.”

If we were purely rational, we’d recognize that sunk costs shouldn’t influence how we decide to move forward, but we all hate taking a loss.

The reason why online courses have been powerful for me is because I know if I don’t take action, I’ll be a sucker who wasted my money.

I really don’t want to be a sucker.

Is this rational? Heck no, I shouldn’t care. But in this case I can use human irrationality to my advantage.

Laser-Like Focus

Here’s the thing with an online course, everything you need is queued up in the order you need it.

This is huge, because if you want to get focused and get something done, you actually want a low information diet.

The more rabbit holes there are to follow, the more potential there is for wasting time.

What’s worse, you could get paralyzed with perfection.

The more you study the greats, the more you notice how much you have to learn.

In many ways this is a good thing, but the problem is that it can trick you into thinking that you need to have it “all figured out” before you move forward.

In order to succeed, you need to overcome your preoccupation with perfection and put imperfect work into the world.

Online courses help you focus on exactly what you need to succeed. You can start adding the tactics of the masters at any time. A good online course will give you a shot in the arm and help you get started.

Piercing Insight

Yes, you can watch what someone does, but you won’t always be able to pick up what was going on behind the scenes.

Some things will jump out as being obvious, but others are so subtle that you’re likely to miss them.

Take the example of an online course I’m taking now about how to become a bestselling author on Amazon Kindle.

If I had decided to skip the books and just looked at the 20 or so listings that the teacher has on Amazon, I probably would have noticed that there seems to be something going on with the way he picks the books sub-categories. But without him explaining it, I probably couldn’t have spotted the logic behind his selections.

(It turns out you want to pick two categories that are quite different to maximize your reach. You want to pick sub-categories that are small enough that you can crack the bestseller list so you have a nice credential)

My Story

So far, the online courses that I’ve taken this year have had a HUGE impact.

The first one was on becoming a better writer. I might not be the world’s best writer, but if you saw where I started you’d be glad I moved.

The second one I’ve already mentioned: How To Become a Bestselling Author on Amazon Kindle. This is the one that has been game-changing for me because…

I wrote a freaking book!

In case my excitement wasn’t clear enough in that exclamation, here’s a GIF of how it feels to finally write a book:

Like I said earlier, confidence follows success.😉

Here’s the story in a little more detail:

I finished my writing course in late February and got started on the Amazon Kindle course.

A few days in, I got so excited that everything that I needed to become a self-published author was right in front of me, that I ran and told my wife that I was going to start working on a book. Here was the crazy schedule I set for myself:

By the end of March: finish the rough draft

By the end of April: have a final revision

By the end of May: have the book proofread, the cover design done, and set up an email autoresponder for people who sign up for my list after discovering me on Amazon

Publish and promote the book in June

As crazy as that schedule sounds, I’m actually on track. I finished the rough draft in March and I might cut it close, but I should have a final revision ready to be proofread by the end of this month.

There’s no way I would be here right now without this course.

I consider myself to be a lifelong learner, and I think that online courses are a big part of the future of education.

Our society has outgrown the educational model that’s been handed down to us.

I don’t have time to unpack that more, but this epic post by the one and only Seth Godin does a better job than I could ever do:

Okay, one final thought about the value of courses. Now this one is old-school. We’re going pre-internet here to pull a powerful insight from the best-selling personal finance book of all time, Rich Dad, Poor Dad By Robert Kiyosaki:

A neighbor bought a condominium for $ 100,000. I bought the identical condo next door for $ 50,000. He told me he’s waiting for the price to go up. I told him that profit is made when you buy, not when you sell. He shopped with a real estate broker who owns no property of her own. I shopped at the foreclosure auction. I paid $ 500 for a class on how to do this. My neighbor thought that the $ 500 for a real estate investment class was too expensive. He said he could not afford the money, or the time. So he waits for the price to go up.

That’s pretty incredible. A $500 investment in his own continuing education yielded him an immediate return of $50,000. And I’m sure that wan’t the only property he was able to get a killer deal on with the knowledge he aquired from the course.

Online courses are a powerful way to force yourself into taking massive action, and the results can be staggering.

You’re up Tom.

I have a feeling that we aren’t actually too far off on this one.

I mean, I see the value in learning by watching.

In fact, I learned how to make my Medium posts visually interesting by reading yours. How did this one do?

Hopefully we both see the benefit in online courses since you still want to sell your course and I will eventually be selling a book (although for the first five days after I publish it I’m going to let all my followers get it for free).

But hey, we’re experimenting here. This is a Medium throw down. There’s no holds barred. We can — nay — we should pointlessly magnify small differences for the sake of entertaining the captivated readers!

I eagerly await your reply. I expect nothing short of EPIC creative escalation.

A note to all curious bystanders

First of all, thanks for reading this far!

Second, I’ll just put out there for the record that Tom is one of my favorite writers on Medium. We’ve never met, although we did chat once on Smedian.

So this article is intended to be a friendly, but epic challenge where we explore the depths of the Medium medium (wow, I can’t get over the fact that the phrase “Medium medium” looks wrong) and provide more value to everyone by diving deeper into a topic.