There is now a new class of people who are doing well in Portugal. They are those who, living up to the old maxim, as they don't know how to do, teach… to do.
They are people who, in workshops, seminars and other events, give short lectures full of commonplaces, but very well communicated, to tell us how we are going to succeed in life, to be entrepreneurs, to do better business, etc.
The funniest thing is that, in most cases, those people who discovered a real lode in these motivational talks never had a job, never created a company, never made a business idea succeed.
Or rather, your business is to promote yourself as experts in entrepreneurship, in motivation. They are real motivators of the discontented and depressed masses. And that's why they give lectures, promote workshops, write books with their tips and quick recipes for success, and, if we lived in another country, they would even have television and radio programs. As our market is small, these people do not have television or radio programs but are frequent guests for these same programs…
This comes from Miguel Gonçalves, the “creative” that minister Miguel Relvas, that ultimate and finished example of the self made man, chose to be the new face of the youth employment program.
Like minister Relvas, I've also seen some of Miguel's interventions on YouTube. And my opinion is that he can sell his product well, wrapped in fluent speech packaging, with a few jokes in the middle, American-style. Squeezed, that gives little.
Miguel Gonçalves says little more than banal things, evidence, which, wrapped up in a well-structured speech, easy to understand and attractive to most people, ends up working well for a certain audience, for which he is a true guru. He introduces himself as being a “creative”.
To me, the conversation of the said Miguel sounds a lot like a snake oil salesman. A 2.0 salesperson, modern, but no less snake oil salesman… And this is the face of the youth employment program…
Note: This chronicle was written two days before Miguel Relvas resigned. What will the Miguel & Miguel partnership to promote youth employment look like now?
This is the text of the radio chronicle that I subscribe to every Thursday at Rádio Universitária do Algarve (RUA) and that can be listened to podcast here.
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