I guess I live in the self-help genre. I don’t like a lot of what I see there though. There’s a lot of nonsense and hot air. There’s seems to be a lot of falseness. My main beef with it though is that people buy into it from emotional insecurity and become more insecure the longer they are involved with it.

People buy almost everything for emotional reasons. For example, people buy Prada and Ferrari’s because they want admiration and are afraid people won’t admire them without this status symbol.

People buy cosmetics because they are afraid no-one will love them. As Charles Revson founder of Revlon said “In the factory we make cosmetics; in the store we sell hope.”

That’s why companies spend billions on building brands for their products. Often adverts seem completely unrelated to the product they are selling, because they are linking the product to a lifestyle or characteristic that they know their target market desires.

Now when people buy self-help books or courses, they do so for emotional reasons too. Because they are afraid that they aren’t good enough. Or that they’ll end up alone and unloved or they aren’t going to be a success if they don’t know this one key. And the key to building a successful business in this field is to keep aggravating that insecurity. But to solve it once and for all, would kill the golden goose.

In other words the real problem people have is a lack of faith in themselves. They believe what is outside them is more powerful than what is inside them and so they search for the ‘holy grail’, the secret that will take them to greatness. But the greatness is inside them being ignored.

It’s like the story of the person who sold a field so that he might seek his fortune and died penniless. But the person who bought his field discovered it was filled with diamonds and become rich beyond his dreams.

To maximize profit in a self help business you can’t solve the problem. You have to encourage them to go along with their misguided quest. You’ll make them more efficient in their quest, but the quest is still a wasted effort. And so they need to buy again.. Or they need your personally trained Coaches.

I got out of the Therapy business when I realized that bad Therapist’s make more money than good ones.  25 visits at say $50 works out at $1,250, whereas 3 visits at  $100 equals $300.

Now I’m not saying that these people are deliberately preventing you from solving the problem. Most of them are well meaning. But either they are as lost as the Reader or they’re stuck between making money or genuinely helping.

So now you have this situation where many people feel confused and doubt their ability to do anything without reading a book on a subject. To have enjoyable relationships, great sex, abundance, a good career, to develop spiritually and so on we have to consult the Oracle, or rather Amazon.

Think about this though, John Stuart Mill died in 1873 and is legendary in part for being the last man to have read everything published. There’s no way that one person could stay on top of the information published today. Reuters, the news agency, employs 17,500 staff to keep on top of news reports. Then there’s the 206,000 books published in 2005, in the U.K alone.

The average person today reads more in one Sunday Newspaper than someone just two century’s ago would read in their entire lives. In other words we have access to and use more information on a scale unbelievable to any other era.

Are we more enlightened because of all this reading?

Are our relationships better?

Are we happier?

The statistics actually show us as being less happy, more dissatisfied with our lives and relationships. This recent study found that 59% of Wives would leave their Husband’s if they could afford it.

Yet 2,000 years ago Jesus lived. 500 years earlier Buddha had reached enlightenment. Lao Tsu, Socrates, Epicurus and many more developed theories that helped them to live peacefully without any of the crap that fills most self help books.

Are we a more shining example than these?

Do you think that perhaps we’re missing something? That maybe the solutions we seek are not going to be found in books.

We spend too much time reading and listening to ‘experts’. Reading is all well and good, but the input needs to be digested. It’s like making a drink. If you pour too much in the glass, it spills over and makes a mess.

Read for stimulation. Read to be provoked into developing your own ideas. But do not substitute your ideas for those of another. That is the path to confusion and insecurity, to losing faith in yourself and so losing yourself.

When I studied nutrition, I learned that much of the problem is that people don’t digest properly. Now I’ve learned that much of the problems in life are because people don’t process and digest ideas properly.

The key to life is to develop trust in yourself. Not in others or in beliefs, but in yourself. Learn to think things through to a conclusion that is not only right for you. It is you.

Free yourself. Books are written from a cultural context. Learn to free yourself from your own generation and from your own culture’s biases. Take ideas from a variety of sources and cross pollinate.

Read classic books. Life is too short and their is too much choice to waste it on anything mediocre. It is better to read one great book twenty times, than to read twenty mediocre books once.

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