About
We check the claims the industry sells you.
Beyond Growth is a small independent publication that reads the fine print on the self-improvement industry. The gurus, the bestselling myths, the seminars, the “science-backed” techniques and the money behind them — we take the confident claims and check them against the actual evidence, in plain language, with our sources shown.
The industry is built on exhortation: believe harder, want it more, follow the system. We are built on the opposite instinct — ask what the evidence actually shows, and who benefits from you not asking. That is what the asterisk in our name is for. There is almost always a footnote, and it is almost always the interesting part.
An honest note about this domain
From roughly 2009, beyondgrowth.net was the blog of the writers Duff McDuffee and Eric Schiller, who published sharp, well-argued criticism of the personal-development world. That site went offline and the domain later expired. We acquired it.
We want to be completely clear about what that means, because domain histories are easy to be cagey about and we would rather not be. We are a new, independent publication. We are not Duff McDuffee or Eric Schiller, we are not affiliated with them, and we do not republish their articles. We admired what they built — careful skepticism about an industry that rarely gets any — and we are continuing that mission in our own voice, with our own research and our own words. Where we write about a topic the old site once covered, the writing is ours and the sources are re-checked from scratch.
How we work
Every claim we make is meant to be checkable. We cite primary sources at the point we rely on them, we steelman the idea we are examining before we take it apart, and we try never to trade a fair argument for a cheap dunk. Our standards — how we source, how we choose what to examine, how we correct mistakes, and how we make money — are written down.