<prompt> Human: Im a little nervous to be here since I read reddit every single day and Im in awe of some of the other people whove done AMAs.Im Ramit Sethi. I wrote I Will Teach You To Be Rich, a NYT bestselling book on how to take control of your finances.My philosophy on personal finance is, Spend extravagantly on the things you love, but cut mercilessly on the things you dont. Im a big fan of automating your finances, mastering the psychology of money, and using your money to live a rich life, guilt-free.Over the past few years, Ive shifted beyond personal finance to other parts of a rich life -- earning more through starting a business and negotiating a raise, social skills, even fitness and food. Most of my material is free on my blog: Some tidbits you might find interesting: I applied to over 65 scholarships to pay my way through college I dont allow anyone with credit card debt to join my flagship courses Im a huge fan of the developments in the financial blogosphere like MMM and in fintech Wealthfront, Betterment, etc I have extremely bad taste in music Im here today to bring attention to what I believe is a very important cause, Pencils of Promise. PoP has built over 300 schools for 3,000 children around the world, in countries like Laos, Ghana, and Guatemala. IWT recently launched a campaign that has raised nearly 200,000 so far, and were matching donations 2-1. If youre interested, heres a link to our campaign: Well match your donation 2-to-1.Ask me anything! Verified: P.S. Ill be here answering questions beginning at 12:00pm Eastern time.Thank you! I stayed an extra 2 hours because we had so many great questions. I hope my answers were useful. Quick reminders that IWT is matching donations to PoP 2-1 up to 100,000 until next week. Thank you for reading and for asking such detailed questions. This has been a huge honor.Assistant: A lot of your advice seems good. I cant shake this feeling that all of your success has come from selling this advice without having created anything other than more advice.Do you have any wealth successes prior to getting into the self help realm or was teaching people how to get rich your secret to getting rich?Human: Im glad you asked this question, and I think everyone should be asking it from anyone who tells you they can help you with your finances, your career, your business, or anything else in life.AND, to top it off, the name of my site throws up a bunch of red flags. If I had to start over today, Im not sure Id choose the same name.Heres my take.First, anyone can make grand promises, or feature logos from the WSJNYT. To me, what matters is results. I am fanatical about tracking our students results. You can see a lot of those results in this thread alone or elsewhere on redditSecond, I think my credentials are pretty solid. I grew up middle-class with no special connections, graduated from Stanford, co-founded PBwiki, and have grown IWT into a serious business with dozens of employees. More details below.Third, and again, what matters to me is the results I get for IWT readers. We have over 10,000 documented success stories. Not just people earning more, but improving their social skills, losing weight Every year for my birthday, I ask readers to share their IWT successes, and we get amazing results like thisAnd finally, Im well aware of the skepticism against self-development especially anything with the word rich in it. To combat that, Ive done everything possible: I ban anyone with CC debt from joining my flagship courses I make it incredibly difficult to buy anything from us. You cannot pay us a cent directly from our website. We actively discourage people from buying our material and tell them how much work it takes to complete it. I know I have to overcome this skepticism, so I give away 98 of my material free. You can find 10 years worth of blog posts, and also videos like this and this Then you can decide if you find me credible or not.If you decide my material isnt right for you, or for some reason you dont find me credible, thats cool. Hopefully there are other sites out there that are a better fit. But I just hate the idea that people paint self-development with this broad brush of It must be a scam when in reality, self-development has changed my life and the lives of tons of IWT readers.EDIT: Hi guys, some people have pointed out that I didnt answer the question directly, so I want to do that now.Here are what I consider some important successes I had before IWT: Grew up in a middle-class family, no special connections. My first job was working at Round Table Pizza. Got accepted to Stanford. Paid my way wscholarships since my family didnt have money to pay for it. At Stanford, I was a senior researcher in the Stanford Technology Lab Upon graduation, got job offers at Google, Intuit, a multi-billion-dollar hedge fund. Turned them down to co-found PBwiki. Started the blog in 2004, wrote for years without making a cent, grew it to 150,000 monthly readers before ever selling a thing. Wrote 2 books, Recruit or Die PortfolioPenguin, co-authored and IWT Workman Publishing, NYT bestseller Started investing at age 16. No secrets, everything I did is is the same as I teach in Chapter 7 of my book. Incidentally this made a lot more money than the book ever did I dont recommend writing books if your goal is to make money! Learned to take control of my body through fitness and nutrition picI dont have a rich family or special connections. And money is not my primary goal, or I would be doing things very differently. I achieved the kind of things I did through hard work, luck yes, theres always luck involved, and lots of mistakes and time. Ive also made tons of mistakes along the way, which I write about on my site and in my emails. Hope this clears some questions up.  <response>: I dont think the question was about your credibility, it was specifically if you had success prior to entering the self help industry. 