The “truth” about that “great opportunity”

Kevin Kelly’s “Excellent Advice for Living” had a lot of great snippets in it, and these two seemed to go hand-in-hand. First, he shared:

Actual great opportunities will not have “Great Opportunities” in the subject line.

I probably get 10 of these a day, with companies offering us a “great opportunity” to partner with them. While they’re all spam, I see two different things about them:

1. They’re just plain spam. Their “great opportunity” isn’t that great, which is why they resort to lowly tactics like that.
2. They remind me of courses you can purchase online to learn how to “get rich with the internet”. Most of the time, the way they propose you get rich is to make a course helping others to get rich, and you get rich from the course itself. It’s a circular disaster, with a bit of pyramid scheme built it.

If you get any cold email, assume it’s a scam. If it’s a “great opportunity”, then even moreso. Kevin’s other quote:

You can ignore any website with the word “truth” in its URL.

I see this one a few different ways as well.

1. Often times those types of sites tend to be “the truth as we see it”, where it’s very slanted to one ideology. The content may or may not be true, but it’s certainly not fair or nuanced, like the comparison between transparency and honesty.
2. They may actually be going further to hide the truth. It’s like strongly anti-gay politicians that end up in same-sex affairs or partners that accuse you of cheating to try to mask their own infidelity.

Given the vastness of the internet, I have no doubt that there are sites out there with “truth” in the URL that are fair and helpful. As a general rule, though, I agree with Kevin that “truth” and “great opportunity” ought to have you taking some caution as you peek at what’s behind them.