# Should I Spend Money on the Course? I've Bought Seven and Finished None.
I've bought seven online courses in the last three years. Seven. Writing. Marketing. A business course. A coding one I got halfway through. A "build your personal brand" one I'm too embarrassed to name. Combined, they cost me more than I'd like to add up, and I have finished exactly none of them.
The pattern is always the same. I get excited — genuinely excited — about the idea of the person I'll become. I watch the sales video, read the testimonials, imagine the version of me who knows this thing, and the imagining feels so good that buying the course feels like progress. I click purchase. I get the welcome email. I open the first module. And somewhere in module two or three, the momentum dies, the tab closes, and the course joins the others in the digital graveyard.
Three years. Seven courses. Zero completions. And yesterday, a new one — a really good one, by someone I actually respect — landed in my inbox with a launch discount. And I found myself, for the eighth time, with my hand hovering over the button.
The three signs it wasn't about learning
- I'd watched the testimonials more times than I'd watched the actual lessons. The success stories were the product. The course was just the delivery mechanism.
- I felt the excitement before buying and the guilt after — a perfectly consistent pattern that should have told me something.
- When I thought about "learning the skill," I pictured myself having it, not practicing it. I wanted to be the person on the other side of the course without doing the days in between.
What the reading said
I did a reading. The question: should I buy the course?
The reading didn't assess the curriculum. It asked: are you buying the knowledge, or the feeling of becoming?
And there it was — the thing I'd been paying for seven times and never receiving.
I wasn't buying education. I was buying the feeling of being someone who's learning, someone who's moving, someone who's about to become. The course was a short-cut to that feeling — for the price of a few hundred dollars, I could feel like a person in motion, without the actual motion. It was the same trick as the treadmill of "researching" or "planning": the anticipation of becoming, sold to me as progress, delivered in a welcome email.
The courses weren't the problem. The course was a symptom. The real thing I was avoiding was the slow, boring, unglamorous work of actually learning — which doesn't feel like becoming at all. It feels like being bad at something for a while. And I'd been paying to skip that part.
What happened
I didn't buy the course.
Not because I'm strong. Because I wrote down the one question — are you buying the knowledge or the feeling? — and taped it next to my monitor, and the question did the work for me. Every time I got the itch, I'd look at it, and the itch would die. You can't sell a person the feeling of becoming when they can see the sales pitch for what it is.
I also did the embarrassing part: I went back and looked at my seven unfinished courses, and I finished one. The smallest one. It took me three weeks of boring, unglamorous evenings — the exact thing I'd been paying to avoid. And here's the thing: it didn't feel like becoming. It felt like a chore, most of the time. But at the end, I actually knew the thing. For the first time in three years, I'd completed something, and the knowing was worth more than all seven welcome emails combined.
Anyway. The launch discount expired. I didn't feel like I'd missed anything. The course will exist again, and if I'm ever actually ready to do the work, it'll be there. But I'm done paying for the feeling of becoming — I want the becoming itself, and it doesn't come in a welcome email.
If there's a course, a book, a subscription you keep buying to feel closer to the person you want to be — try a reading. Three numbers. No account. It won't tell you whether to buy it. But it might show you what you're actually paying for, and whether it's something you can receive or something you have to do.
FAQ
Q: How do I know if a course is worth buying? A: Ask what you'd do the week after buying it. If you can picture the schedule — the specific hours, the first lesson, the practice — it's a real purchase. If all you can picture is the feeling of having bought it, you're buying the feeling. The course is worth it when you're ready to do the work, and not a moment before. See also: I Picked the iMac Three Weeks Ago. I Still Haven't Bought It. — same trick, different price tag: spending money to feel like you're moving without actually moving.
Q: Isn't investing in yourself always a good idea? A: Investing in yourself means doing the work. Buying things that feel like investing — courses, gear, subscriptions — is often just paying for the fantasy of the person you'll become. The test isn't the purchase. It's whether the thing gets used. I had seven receipts that said otherwise.
Q: What if I buy it and actually finish it this time? A: Then it was worth it, and you'll know within the first week. If you're still in module two after a month, you bought the feeling again. The course doesn't make you learn. It just sits there, like all seven of mine did, waiting for you to decide whether you're buying knowledge or hope.
Q: How does a reading help with a spending decision like this? A: It separates the purchase from the story attached to it. I thought I was deciding whether to spend money on a course. I was actually deciding whether I could stop paying for the feeling of becoming and start doing the boring work of actually becoming. The reading named the pattern. After that, the purchase was easy to skip.