There are two schools of thought on teaching: One is that, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” The other is, “Teach everything you know.”
As impressively as the Joker demonstrated the first in The Dark Knight, burning his $6 billion reward seemed a little excessive.
Meanwhile, Nathan Barry can think of 89,697 reasons to share your knowledge freely — that’s the amount of dollars collected by his friend Chris in a Kickstarter after teaching CSS for five years.
Both philosophies come with their own set of benefits and problems. If you always hold back a little, you’ll never find out how good you actually are, but if you teach everything you learn in real-time, your expertise will build slowly and can never quite ripen in your mind.
Today, we’re facing an epidemic of fake teachers. For every time I go, “I wish this person gave a class,” there are a hundred where I think, “I wish this person didn’t.”
Many people want to teach, but few are willing to learn something worth teaching. Hence, a lot of folks skip the learning altogether. They build a reputation entirely on “succeeding on Instagram,” and yet their Instagram is neither succeeding nor creative. It doesn’t warrant replicating.
If you claim to know a way to 10,000 followers but don’t have 10,000 followers, you’re a scammer. It’s very straightforward and easy to verify. I can go to your profile and see if the result you advertise actually exists. And yet, people keep trying to sell outcomes they can’t provide.
The first time I tried to sell an online course was in 2015. “Do More, Stress Less.” I had spent a year studying and writing about productivity, and tried to pre-sell the course on a webinar. I learned three valuable lessons when zero people bought: I hate webinars, vague results are hard to sell, and I was still way to stressed to sell a course about de-stressing.
In 2017, I took an article about goal-setting that had done well over the two years of its lifespan and turned it into a mini-class on Skillshare. The course was only an hour long, but it got featured and made $700 in its first year. In 2018, it still made $300, and it continues to bring in a few dollars here and there to this day. Lesson: Specificity wins, even on a small scale.
In my first four years of writing, however, I rarely thought, “I should make a course about writing.” Whenever I did, I brushed it off. I really didn’t want to be a scammer, so as long as there was a hint of doubt in my results, I didn’t feel like I had anything valuable to add to the writing conversation.
This is the first misconception that keeps qualified experts from teaching: You don’t have to change the face of your industry to be granted a seat at the table.
In writing, there is nothing new under the sun. Sharing your ideas isn’t about having the first original one in history, it’s about telling stories for the people of your time. If you can find a way to make what’s tried and true resonate today, that’s more than enough — and you’re doing a great job.
One cold September morning in 2018, I woke up and thought, “Today is the day. Now it’s time to make an online course.” Lesson titles just poured out of me. For the next four days, I could barely take notes fast enough. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, exactly how I wanted to structure it, and exactly how I wanted to present everything. That’s how I knew the timing was right.
I didn’t take a lot of courses myself, but one of the few I did — Aaron Sorkin’s Masterclass — taught me a lot more than just good writing.
It taught me that, like a great book, a fantastic song, or the funniest movie you’ve ever seen, even the best online course will never be the end-all, be-all — and it doesn’t need to be.
“You can be a screenwriting major, you can read books of varying quality, and you can listen to schmucks like me,” Aaron says less than one minute into the class. “I apologize in advance, but when I’m speaking out loud as opposed to writing, I swerve all over the road. I would much rather communicate with the world on paper.”
Aaron doesn’t teach this class because he needs the money. He made millions writing great movies. He’s not there because it’s so much fun for him either. Aaron Sorkin made an online course because, “My hope is that I’m able to say something in here that will be meaningful to some writer.”
If a small percentage of students finds a lot of value in Aaron’s perspectives on writing, that’s worth the effort — even if there are already a million classes on writing out there. Once again, it’s not about the technical nature of the information but about who delivers it to whom, when they do it, and how.
The big twist here is that what Aaron says will always have value to those who find meaning in his writing. It’s not about Aaron’s secret writing hack — it’s about spending more time with a person you’ve come to care about.
Yes, a good online course delivers hard-gained expertise. It shows you a clear result the teacher can prove to have achieved and outlines steps you can take to try and get there yourself. But on top of this basic exchange of information, an online course provides something much more important: connection.
We show little friction to buying “Michael Jordan’s shoes” for $200, and we don’t scoff at $500 Justin Bieber meet-and-greet tickets. But when an independent artist charges $300 to teach you their craft face-to-face, that’s often portrayed as an unethical, greedy ask. It is not.
If you enjoy an artist’s work, you want to learn more. You want to peek behind the scenes and understand how they think — in other words, you’d like to spend more time with them. It is part of the artist’s job to enable this progression of the artist-fan relationship, and if the size of their audience warrants them scaling it and charging for it, that’s a fair move to make.
Just because your fame isn’t as obvious as that of a box office superstar doesn’t mean a small portion of your audience won’t enjoy supporting you in exchange for an educational, more VIP experience.
People who say, “We don’t need another writing course” are probably right when it comes to technical information about writing. But that’s not the point. The point is that it’s your writing course for your people — and whatever an outsider thinks about it is none of your concern.
The only courses we really don’t need are those claiming to teach a result the creator can’t deliver. If you’ve put your head down for a few years and have a story worth sharing, a course won’t just help others get to where you are, it’ll also provide a deep moment of connection with your fans.
Nathan and the Joker are both wrong — and they are both right. If you’re good at something, never do it for free. But if you’re so good people keep coming to you for advice, you should teach them everything you know.