Read an excerpt
from the introduction -
What’s Wrong With Self-Help Books
So let me be clear from the get-go. This book will not lift your spirit, improve your sex life or make you rich. It won’t make you a better person or help you cope with life’s challenges, although you might have more fun if you choose to follow some of its advice.
That’s because it’s not a self-help book.
Most bookstores have shelves heaped full of personal growth and self-development tracts, but what good are they? As the psychologist James Hillman points out in his book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Therapy and the World’s Getting Worse, “We’ve had a hundred years of therapy and the world’s getting worse.” People are just as depressed and anxious as ever, if not more so.
Why are self-help books so useless? Why do they have so little effect even on people that go through them like boxes of Kleenex during a bad cold?
First, as the inimitable George Carlin pointed out, they’re a misnomer. How can it be “self-help” when you’re utilizing what someone else has written? If you’re really going to help yourself, don’t read a book. Go out and do something.
Second, it’s really hard to get perspective on yourself. “To thine own self be true” may be sound advice—although it comes from Polonius, one of Shakespeare’s great stumble-bums—but only if you know what your real self is. And who but the most elevated and advanced of human beings, someone just this side of the Dalai Lama, can claim to know that and keep a straight face?
Third, self-help books like to divide things up into components, like mental, emotional, physical and spiritual. Having made these distinctions, their authors think they’ve prepared you for the world. It’s like going to a fast-food restaurant and having the server hand you the milk, ice cream, strawberries and whipped cream and say, “Here you go. Now you figure out how to put them together to make a sundae!”
The proof of the pudding is in the way these ingredients interact, overlap and blend into one another. It’s what makes people unique, frustrating, unpredictable and endlessly fascinating. And self-help books never tell you how to do that because their authors have no idea They’re just as cllueless as you are about how to reassemble the ingredients!
That’s why most financial gurus who tell others how to make money, make their money by telling others how to do it. And why so many relationship coaches and marriage counselors have all kinds of advice for staying together and juicing up a relationship, while they’re on their own second, third or even fourth marriage.
The most egregious case—isn’t that a nifty word? Egregious! I first heard it when TV sports commentator Brett Hull used it during intermission of an ice hockey game. I looked it up in the dictionary and have been using it ever since. Which brings me to my first piece of advice—if you don’t know what a word in this book means, look it up! But I digress.
The most egregious case in my lifetime was Maribel Morgan, an anti-feminist author and public speaker in the 1970s, who wrote Total Woman. She had lots of advice on how to spice up a marriage, recommending that the little woman stay at home, put on a sexy negligee for hubby arriving after work, and greet him at the door with a beer or cocktail in hand. What she neglected to tell her audiences was that she made her own marriage work by being away from home more than 200 days a year, telling other women how to become domestic(ated) sex kittens.
Most self-help books are the work of quacks.
One of the more foolish notions these snake oil salesmen have inflicted on the unwary public is the idea that when it comes to making important changes in your life, you have to start with yourself first.
These days, it’s often referred to as “change from the inside out,” and just about every other self-help book that comes along repeats that mantra ad nauseam.
Common sense would tell you that it’s unadulterated hogwash, but people are so insecure about having ideas on their own that they’ll take anyone else’s word over their personal knowledge and experience. Why else the proliferation of media pundits? Got your name on a book? You’re an expert! It’s better than buying a PhD diploma on the Internet. Trust me. Why do you think I wrote this book?
The idea that you can only change yourself flies in the face of reality. There is plenty of change that comes from the outside.
It is possible to teach new tricks even to an old dog, and it doesn’t have to take centuries of therapy; you just need a big enough stick. In other words, it requires the right kind of outside pressure. They’ve figured out how to make diamonds in less than a week in high-pressure vaults, and those gem stones are all but indistinguishable from the ones Mother Nature created by grinding away over millions of years. The same goes for human behavior.
Still, short of the right kind of external force, most people will take the easy way out every time. It’s known as the course of least resistance, and it works very well, thank you very much.
So, if you want to change the world, work to change others. It’s too difficult to step outside of yourself, get objective, and then on top of it start changing yourself. Much too much work, and no fun. Much easier to recognize the problems of others and fix them.
This book then is a return to what most of us have been doing all along—more or less—trying to fix others. If we take charge by giving advice to them, surely—according to the law of what goes around, comes around—someone will take us on as a project. Which is what we’ve wanted all along, isn’t it?
I recommend dispensing advice before you even consider about applying it to yourself. It’s easier, cleaner and more satisfying all around.
After all, it is better to give than to receive. And that’s biblical. You can look it up!
So let me be clear from the get-go. This book will not lift your spirit, improve your sex life or make you rich. It won’t make you a better person or help you cope with life’s challenges, although you might have more fun if you choose to follow some of its advice.
That’s because it’s not a self-help book.
Most bookstores have shelves heaped full of personal growth and self-development tracts, but what good are they? As the psychologist James Hillman points out in his book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Therapy and the World’s Getting Worse, “We’ve had a hundred years of therapy and the world’s getting worse.” People are just as depressed and anxious as ever, if not more so.
Why are self-help books so useless? Why do they have so little effect even on people that go through them like boxes of Kleenex during a bad cold?
First, as the inimitable George Carlin pointed out, they’re a misnomer. How can it be “self-help” when you’re utilizing what someone else has written? If you’re really going to help yourself, don’t read a book. Go out and do something.
Second, it’s really hard to get perspective on yourself. “To thine own self be true” may be sound advice—although it comes from Polonius, one of Shakespeare’s great stumble-bums—but only if you know what your real self is. And who but the most elevated and advanced of human beings, someone just this side of the Dalai Lama, can claim to know that and keep a straight face?
Third, self-help books like to divide things up into components, like mental, emotional, physical and spiritual. Having made these distinctions, their authors think they’ve prepared you for the world. It’s like going to a fast-food restaurant and having the server hand you the milk, ice cream, strawberries and whipped cream and say, “Here you go. Now you figure out how to put them together to make a sundae!”
The proof of the pudding is in the way these ingredients interact, overlap and blend into one another. It’s what makes people unique, frustrating, unpredictable and endlessly fascinating. And self-help books never tell you how to do that because their authors have no idea They’re just as cllueless as you are about how to reassemble the ingredients!
That’s why most financial gurus who tell others how to make money, make their money by telling others how to do it. And why so many relationship coaches and marriage counselors have all kinds of advice for staying together and juicing up a relationship, while they’re on their own second, third or even fourth marriage.
The most egregious case—isn’t that a nifty word? Egregious! I first heard it when TV sports commentator Brett Hull used it during intermission of an ice hockey game. I looked it up in the dictionary and have been using it ever since. Which brings me to my first piece of advice—if you don’t know what a word in this book means, look it up! But I digress.
The most egregious case in my lifetime was Maribel Morgan, an anti-feminist author and public speaker in the 1970s, who wrote Total Woman. She had lots of advice on how to spice up a marriage, recommending that the little woman stay at home, put on a sexy negligee for hubby arriving after work, and greet him at the door with a beer or cocktail in hand. What she neglected to tell her audiences was that she made her own marriage work by being away from home more than 200 days a year, telling other women how to become domestic(ated) sex kittens.
Most self-help books are the work of quacks.
One of the more foolish notions these snake oil salesmen have inflicted on the unwary public is the idea that when it comes to making important changes in your life, you have to start with yourself first.
These days, it’s often referred to as “change from the inside out,” and just about every other self-help book that comes along repeats that mantra ad nauseam.
Common sense would tell you that it’s unadulterated hogwash, but people are so insecure about having ideas on their own that they’ll take anyone else’s word over their personal knowledge and experience. Why else the proliferation of media pundits? Got your name on a book? You’re an expert! It’s better than buying a PhD diploma on the Internet. Trust me. Why do you think I wrote this book?
The idea that you can only change yourself flies in the face of reality. There is plenty of change that comes from the outside.
It is possible to teach new tricks even to an old dog, and it doesn’t have to take centuries of therapy; you just need a big enough stick. In other words, it requires the right kind of outside pressure. They’ve figured out how to make diamonds in less than a week in high-pressure vaults, and those gem stones are all but indistinguishable from the ones Mother Nature created by grinding away over millions of years. The same goes for human behavior.
Still, short of the right kind of external force, most people will take the easy way out every time. It’s known as the course of least resistance, and it works very well, thank you very much.
So, if you want to change the world, work to change others. It’s too difficult to step outside of yourself, get objective, and then on top of it start changing yourself. Much too much work, and no fun. Much easier to recognize the problems of others and fix them.
This book then is a return to what most of us have been doing all along—more or less—trying to fix others. If we take charge by giving advice to them, surely—according to the law of what goes around, comes around—someone will take us on as a project. Which is what we’ve wanted all along, isn’t it?
I recommend dispensing advice before you even consider about applying it to yourself. It’s easier, cleaner and more satisfying all around.
After all, it is better to give than to receive. And that’s biblical. You can look it up!