There's no such thing as bag transfer.
The other day, my roommate was cleaning out his desk before listing it on Facebook marketplace, and amidst years of stuff, he came across his old MCAT flashcards. He jokingly asked if I wanted them, and I joked back that he should hold on to them and sell them to some joker on LinkedIn.
In today's freelancer/creator /"buy my course” world, we, more than ever, are being bombarded with people trying to sell us their bags.
A bag is a useful skill set or roadmap to success, and bag transfer is the automatic transfer of those skills to someone else. Like copy-paste type automatic.
While today we can enjoy unprecedented access and exposure to different skills, careers, and ways of living, we should aim for bag building rather than bag transfer.
Often, folks' bags overlap with themselves, and the line between business and personal becomes blurred. They start to sell themselves. This is especially true for influencers who sell access to their lifestyle and personality.
For sellers, this can be problematic because people are not products, and treating them as such can run people ragged and negatively influence their self-worth.
The more we focus on bag building, the better we can separate ourselves, sellers, and skill sets.
Sometimes the promotion of success and a roadmap to that success create the illusion that there's success in the first place.
In “If You’re So Rich, Why Are You Desperate?”, Nick Maggiuilli gives us some big brain language to question if we’re being sold snake oil: "if you’re so good at building wealth, why don’t you just go and build more for yourself instead of selling me on how to build it?
It’s backward for rich people to sell you their secret money tips instead of using their skills to get more bread. You would think a rich person would simply continue to do what they're doing to get richer.
Because of this, you could come across everything from people pushing forex (scammers: people taking value) to masterclasses (people with bags promising bag transfer) to people showing their work (people with bags showing you how the sausage is made).
When we focus on bag building, we get better at recognizing who can hoop and who can’t. We’re more knowledgeable about what it looks like to be highly skilled, and we focus on learning from people who show their work.
Although many courses and roadmaps are presented by their creators as something that requires work to achieve results, there is an implicit promise that if you buy this thing, you can get like me. We assume, at some level, that we are analogous to the bag seller.
People are often too different for this promise to be fulfilled. Nonsense tells us that "analogies are abused when one particular similarity is used to equate two very different things" and "when a person uses the terms of one element to predict the terms of another element."
In order to believe the promise of bag transfer, our thinking may go something like this:
1) I’m a beginner like this person was.
2) Therefore, I’m in the same situation as this person.
3) Therefore, I can replicate their success.
or
1) I’m a beginner like this person was.
2) They were successful by following these steps.
3) Therefore, I’m going to be successful by following these steps.
A lil fallacious thinking can cause us to believe in promises that aren’t applicable to us. We forget the influencer who lost 50 lbs off tummy tea has an entirely different genetic profile than us and exercised vigorously the whole time they were drinking it!
When we remember that we’re different than everyone else, we’ll stop fixating just on what made other people successful. We’ll start actively discerning what an effective bag looks like for us and what work is required to get there. Leaning into what makes us unique leads to more originality and authenticity.
The outcome is often more attractive than the process. Similarly, teaching, showing, and promoting a skill can get to be more attractive than the skill itself. I often think about this phenomenon in the context of Craig Mod's 'gilded cage':
I try to avoid what I think is the scariest part of running a membership program—having it become a gilded cage. That can happen if, for example, you get good at publishing newsletters, but instead of continuing to write newsletters about subjects you’re interested in, you end up becoming the person who writes about how to write newsletters. You become the meta-version of yourself. In other words, you end up not doing the stuff you set out to do at the beginning. It’s easy for that to happen, too—it tends to be more profitable (it’s a form of self-help, which is always quite profitable), and it can be easier to grow—but it’s something I’ve always been wary of.
The stakes with membership programs seem low, but when we look carefully, it’s clear how quickly we can lose recipes. Take creators of physical, crafted goods, for example. I just followed this dude on IG who has a deep woodworking bag; bro built this custom wood amp housing that was unlike anything I’ve seen. Right now, he posts content about the items he's making and the process he undergoes to construct these objects.
But imagine if, in light of his virality, he started putting out content about how to teach people how to woodwork. Yeah, he's still providing value to somebody, but the more degrees of separation he gets from the craft, the higher the opportunity cost. The time he spends teaching people how to teach is no longer spent learning new woodworking skills (getting a bag) or woodworking content that could help someone like me who's trying to get into woodworking (showing his work).
Essentially, he's running the play Bobbie Armstrong jokes about: "Let me teach you how to teach other people how to teach other people how to [woodwork]."
And what happens when the context is medicine? The danger of people focusing on selling their path to medical school or their MCAT flashcards, as I joked about earlier, is that people get pushed into marketing and out of medicine.
Focusing on the process of developing lifestyles, hobbies, and skills for ourselves can make us happier and more fulfilled.
The belief in bag transfer is rooted in instant gratification. Know that many good things don’t come without work.
Be grateful for the failures on your way to getting better; you can’t learn from perfection.
Austin Kleon writes about the right way to steal. You read that right; artists (and others) have been doing it for a minute. Stealing like an artist means reverse engineering ideas and skills from all of the artists whose work speaks to your soul.
At some point, you have to buckle down and get down to business. The only way to get a bag is to build a bag.
Work smarter, not harder, sure. But don’t get in the habit of switching teams or running from work.
Get in the gym and do the thing.
Getting on your grind, reverse engineering experts’ bags, and trusting the process are the remedy for the false promise of automatic bag transfer. You’ll lean more into your unique qualities and potential, avoid dm exchanges with “rich” people trying to help you get rich, and tread closer to fulfillment and happiness.
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