Stop Reading And Start Thinking. The Problem With Self Help.
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.
Wao!!!
What a sharpening msg u got?
This amazing we need to open up our inner eyes to have all we aspire.
thanks
Very interesting stuff and all true. The problem is most people are living just for today and find it difficult to exercise their own choice and reject other ones which are throne at us by the main stream providers. Life, particularly in UK and US is made to be quite regimented and for people wanting to step out of this set up is very difficult unless one decides to go and live in remote part of the countries I mentioned.
You are completely right when you say that we spend too much time reading and listening to ‘experts’.
Thank you for making me to reflect about this.
Rob,
Thank you for sharing your well-considered thoughts with us. I am incredibly impressed and humbled by your views published here. I have been on your mailing list since you were the happiness coach, and I didn’t realise you’d had such a change of heart. I wonder what you’re doing for a living now. Writing like this is not the sort of thing that gets heard often. I never paid for your coaching services because after consuming self-help for years in various forms, I too finally realised that self-help was not helping, so paying for more seemed pointless. I haven’t found many answers yet, but it’s really good to know someone that’s heading my way. I’d love to buy you a beer (or other consumable) if I was living nearby.
Could it be that we’re not more unhappy, but that we’re simply more vocal about our unhappiness? Who knows, and how would we gauge it? Pardon me while I misquote a comedian, who said something sort of like, “I wish everyone could have all the things they’d dreamed of and do everything they want, so they could realize that isn’t what makes a person happy.” With the money I’ve spent on therapy, self-help books, and attorneys, I could have bailed out a third world country. I have nearly everything I’ve dreamed of except for the ever-elusive ‘happiness’. I’d settle for halfway-content. Or even, ‘not-sad’. If I had a choice between time and money, I’d take the money and give it to my kids, because in all the time I’ve had, I haven’t done anything well and truly useful with it. Call me eeyore.
Thanks for your comments.
Alessi, good point. In a coming report I’ll be talking about how to deal with conflict, when you can’t change the system.
Robert, maybe one day I’ll keep you to your generous offer of a beer.
Making a living ethically has been the main issue of conflict in my life since I stopped selling my book and so on.
I’m still grappling with it, but when I get the reports done that I most want to share I’ll tell you the full details of why I think like this and how it’s affected me.
Kirk, very perceptive point. It’s going to be my next blog post.
That’s absolutly right!
Reading this rather short article I found out myself, exactly what for I read slef-help books. I can’t say that all of them are useless but buying 4 3 of them gave me nothing..I try to find the answer how to live better.the secret.
But not far, I understood that the main secret,the core of happy life is inside of us,in our understansing life.
Thank you for such articles.I really appreciate your work
[...] response to Kirk’s comment a short series on happiness and happiness [...]
Self help books are a waste of time and money.
Spend your time and money living.
Go out there, open your eyes, watch, learn, and jump into life.
Life is happening all the time all over. Good, bad or ugly learn to appreciate it all.
Thanks for the chance to talk Rob.
Paula
It took me a while to realize it but no one is happy and no one is sad. Reality is whatever you make it. The cup is neither half empty nor half full. The cup merely is. Half of the cup is water and half is air. If you want it view the cup as being half empty, then it is. If you want to view the cup as being half full, then it is. If you are thirsty, then you want it half full! If you are drowning, then you want it half empty! You have it within your brain, the power of your own mind, to produce your own happiness. You can create your own happiness. And it is just as real as any sadness you create in your own mind, your own brain. If you want to be happy, then just be happy.
I’m not saying it’s easy. It takes practice. But it works. I’ve been doing it now for three weeks. I still fall into the trap of depression, but once I become aware of the depression, I pull myself out of it through mere thought. I don’t want to be sad so I won’t be sad. I refuse to be sad. I want to be happy. I want to enjoy life. I still do the same things I always did. I haven’t changed anything in my life. I just enjoy the things I do. I’ve always enjoyed them, I just didn’t realize I enjoyed them! That’s why I did them because I enjoyed them. I just forgot!
ok…well it is a miracle i even read this…
I’m not drawn to read much of anything
I like to hear people and their experiences
Only if they make some sense.
If I don’t read the news I don’t think about it
I like to try to keep things simple
and thats not easy