The self-help scam
And how to break free of it
Bringing about any long-lasting change in your life isn’t easy. Who we are in the present is a result of all the habits and beliefs we’ve accumulated till that point. As a result, our thoughts and feelings flow in mostly predictable patterns. Years upon years of experience creates mental and emotional guardrails that keep our behaviour fairly consistent.
In other words, how we react to the world depends on who we already are. To start reacting in a different way means we need to rip out all those hardened concrete pathways and lay down fresh ones. That is difficult.
This is why self-help books that make change seem within reach are lying. Such books exploit the liminal space between the desire for change and the desire to stay the same. They make us feel good in the moment, so that with adrenaline coursing in our veins we give the book five stars and stay on a high for a few hours, even days.
But we all know how this ends. Motivation soon tanks, and like junkies we go looking for the next hit of self-help.
If reading self-help books is all it takes, we would have people quitting their jobs in droves, moving to Bali, founding billion-dollar startups, or whatever. That we don’t have a glut of island-hopping, startup-founder-billionaires crawling all over the planet should tell us that the only people most self-help books help are the authors themselves.
The real problem is that success in the real world is a function of many other factors, motivation being only one of them. Motivation is like a spark plug, which can get you started, but can’t take you far on its own. What matters more in the long run is whether you have the right resources (skills, intelligence, capital, network), an ability to work hard, and dollops of luck.
Any book that tells you this harsh truth will not sell as well as the one that preaches a single hack like meditation or visualization. Books of the latter kind are actually in the motivation-as-entertainment genre. They are meant to provide some respite from the daily grind that pushed people to buy these books in the first place. Reading them will make you believe you’re taking action, while staying in your comfort zone.
I personally see self-help in a meta kind of way. I’ve read a lot of them over the last few years. A few were good, most were average. While I didn’t really get much out of them, I did realise that the very fact of my reading so many self-help books meant two things: one, I really had a focus and a procrastination problem. In the guise of discovering myself, I was just wasting more and more time.
Secondly, I was sending my a subconscious a message by reading so much self-help: that I can’t motivate myself without external help. Once I realised this, the term ‘self-help’ started seeming more like a cruel joke.
There is no harm in reading books that can light a fire under you, but the problem with that is you start ignoring your own inner voice. The fact is even if you can’t articulate what you’re really looking for, you do have some sense of what that is. It might feel like an itch, an uneasiness or just an urge to shake things up. If you can just stay with these feelings without going off to find answers in a book, you would have taken the first step towards change.
Our body and minds are our closest confidants. If you give them a chance, they will tell you the direction you need to be moving in. The answers are buried inside, only if we question ourselves deeply enough.
