In the abstract, people buy what makes them feel good. This can be "direct purchase" like nice clothes, good food, vacations, property, furniture, life insuran

In the abstract, people buy what makes them feel good. This can be "direct purchase" like nice clothes, good food, vacations, property, furniture, life insurance, etc. Or it can be an "indirect purchase" in the form of attention which equals money in aggregate since some percent of youtube viewers will spend money downstream as a result of either paying the public speaker or clicking the ad before the youtube vid and paying an advertiser (public speaker gets a cut), etc. A million writers/public speakers have cropped up because there is a market - people are willing to pay indirectly with their attention - for 'feel good' snake-oil style self-help advice. The trouble is filtering the signal from the noise where a good filter tends to be whether the person providing you with productivity advice needs your money. Interestingly, the value of productivity / 'self-help' advice (applied to personal or entrepreneurial life) is usually proportional to the person providing it's net worth. Peter Thiel's 'Zero to One', for example, is excellent. Most of the time self-help is just a circle jerk though