I had spent the three years waiting tables in a nightclub. It took me a year to realize that the longer I stayed, the more it would cost me later, so I was looking for any way out, but the market back then was dead. The man who owned the club thought well of me, and a friend of his owned a car dealership, so that is where I landed. I said yes even though I already knew I didn’t want to sell cars, and that I would be bad at it.

The dealership carried two brands, Subaru and Renault. About Subaru, I could talk all day, because I thought it was a genuinely good car and would have driven one myself. I quietly considered Renault subpar, and you could see it on my face. In eight months, I sold four cars. The worst salesman ever.

And I was bad at selling both of them. Liking the Subaru did not make me a good salesperson. So this is not a story about belief making me good, because it did not. The only difference was inside me. Selling the Subaru, I was bad and untroubled. Selling the Renault, I was bad and could not hide my opinion about the car.

I cannot sell a thing I do not believe in without it leaking out of me. I want to call that a principle. But the dealership results confirm it does not influence my selling skill whatsoever. Or lack of, to be more precise.

Years later, I worked in trading, on the growth side, marketing the trading platform. I used it, contributed to developing it, and was proud of it. What I didn’t like was the view the seat came with. My job was to bring people toward the thing, and from there I watched how the prop firms and the influencers operate, which was mostly selling hope of fast money to people who were never going to see any. I was involved in the part of the machine I could stand behind.

I saw the potential of owning an audience, not a trading one though, so I started planning to build my own with one reason in mind. Freedom. I kept watching people on the platforms I write on grow enormous followings by feeding them easy, digestible motivational filler, and the filler monetizes. A crowd like that would have freed me from employers and from clients, freed me from ever again having to sell a thing I did not want to sell. So I started sketching a course. The audience was the real product, and the freedom was the whole point of it.

Then I looked closely at how people build one. Content produced on a schedule, whether or not you have something interesting to say. Messaging other creators with invented warmth, a friendship opened purely for the end goal of reach. Scrolling through strangers and leaving great work under one post and love this thought under the next, on things one does not really read. It stopped looking like marketing to me. It looked like prostitution, and I could not make myself do it.

So there was no course. And I would like to paint it as principle, but I decided not to make it from the cozy enough space of current life.

Which is exactly where my theory falls apart, and I would rather explore it than sweep it under the rug like I did for years.

Take Tony Robbins. He sells hope at a scale with a well-oiled humongous monetization machine, which makes my hair stand on end. Based on everything I’ve established so far, he is a hope merchant, and yet the thing he is actually telling people, like take responsibility, stop waiting to be rescued, is mostly true, and might genuinely move someone’s life. The method can be everything I distrust while the message underneath it stays sound. My neat rule, that the distasteful sell is the false one, does not survive him.

So I don’t have a clear answer. Maybe he helps people, or maybe the help is the hope itself, that feeling of change which wears off by Tuesday and makes them go back for another ticket. I cannot tell from out here.

And I am not sure I can tell it about myself either. I would like to believe I refuse to sell what I do not believe in because I am made of something solid.

But I have been against a wall before ending up at the dealership, taking work I did not want because the alternative was nothing. And yet I had an option to be bad at selling cars as my rent was always covered. And the machine I called prostitution and walked away from, I walked away from with savings behind me and options still open. My refusals have all been affordable.

The thing I keep calling a principle has never once had to carry weight, so I cannot honestly tell you that it would.