One of the most reliable signs of a gold rush isn’t the discovery of gold. It’s the sudden appearance of people selling shovels. And not just selling them, but selling them with the promise that this specific shovel is the secret to finding gold.
The internet today feels like a perpetual, digital gold rush. Everywhere you turn, someone is selling a shovel. A course on dropshipping, a boot camp for day trading, an ebook on becoming a social media influencer. The shovel changes, but the sales pitch is always the same: a shortcut to wealth, a secret system that lets you bypass the hard work.
There’s a simple heuristic you can use to filter out 99% of this noise. Ask yourself: if this system for getting rich worked so well, why are they selling it to me?
Think about it like a programmer who finds a critical zero-day exploit in a major piece of software. What do they do? If they’re a black hat, they use the exploit themselves or sell it quietly on the dark web for a huge sum. If they’re a white hat, they report it to the company for a big bug bounty.
What they don’t do is create a $499 online course titled “My Secret Method for Finding Zero-Day Exploits” and advertise it on Instagram. The very act of selling the method, especially selling it to a mass audience, would destroy its value. The secret is only valuable as long as it’s a secret.
This isn’t just a hypothetical. Look at the companies that are actually the best in the world at making money with complex systems. Firms like Renaissance Technologies or Jane Street are famously secretive. They are the financial equivalent of the NSA. They hire brilliant physicists and mathematicians, make them sign iron-clad NDAs, and build walls, both physical and digital-around their work. They have found a kind of “exploit” in the market, and their entire business model depends on no one else knowing how it works.
The secrecy of RenTech is the proof of its success. The public advertising of a “millionaire mentor” is the proof of their failure. The product they’re selling isn’t a working system for generating wealth. The product is the dream of wealth. The customer is buying a fantasy, and the seller’s business model is not trading, but selling courses. They make their money from you, not with you.
Why do so many people fall for this? Because real work is hard, and the path is often unclear. Building a useful product, gaining real expertise, creating something people want, it’s a slow, grinding process full of uncertainty and failure. It’s far more comforting to believe in a secret map than to accept that you have to draw your own, step by painful step.
So when you see someone selling a shovel, don’t ask if it’s a good shovel. Ask why they’re selling it instead of digging. The answer tells you everything you need to know. The real gold is never in the shovel being sold, but in the quiet, painstaking work of digging in a place no one else has found yet.