Addicted to Self Help
Take-aways:
- Your life can get better.
- Pursue progress.
- Read a self-help book, then get another. Repeat.
Addicted to Self Help
I’m addicted to self-help and time management books. It started when my boss asked me to read The Toyota Way and Competing on Analytics.
These are not self-help books. These are business books, how-to guides for profitability. The Toyota Way describes the way Toyota auto manufacturers operate. Competing on Analytics lays out a road map to creating a company that makes data-driven decisions. But, as I read these books I realized that the suggestions in them could apply to my own life, to my daily processes, organization, and decision-making.
Next I read Getting Things Done: The Stress Free Guide to Productivity and I was hooked. After that I read The 4-Hour Work Week, Think Like a Genius, Why You Behave in Ways You Hate and What to do About It, and Manifesting Your Destiny. I got audio tapes by Wayne Dyer and tapes on meditation techniques to listen to in the car. I started frantically book-marking sites like psychologytoday.com, mnmlist.com, zenhabits.net, and lifehacker.com.
Life has never been better.
Before this addiction, I turned my nose up at self-help books. Why waste my time with those? They’re just going to tell me what I already know. Or they’ll give me wishy-washy, abstract advice or tell me to repeat positive phrases until everything is alright.
Maybe I just wasn’t ready to listen to good advice, but the bigger obstacle was not wanting to even take the first step and try.
The first step is often the hardest, so that’s what I want to encourage others to take, just that first step. I would be honored to be your catalyst.
Catalysts are molecules that lower the energy barrier preventing spontaneous chemical reactions. Platinum is the catalyst in your car’s catalytic converter that breaks down harmful emissions into more benign molecules. Enzymes are biological catalysts, without which life would grind to a halt.
I can’t imbue anyone with confidence, or motivation, or self-worth. As Morpheus says in The Matrix, "I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it." All I can do is encourage. So here I go: Pursue progress even if you don’t believe in yourself. Pursue it. That’s the one thing you must do. Pursue all forms of progress: emotional, physical, and mental, because in the end they are all intertwined.
Get a self help book from the library and read it. It doesn’t have to be a book on confidence, any self-help or time management book will do (though I will make some specific recommendations shortly). Look for things in this book that can help you. These may be small things, but if you get just one iota of advice, awareness, or efficiency out of the book, then that’s one iota of good that you can carry with you to improve your life forever after. And if you pick up another book and get one small thing out of that, now you’ve got two things for the rest of your life. This is powerful stuff.
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
– Albert Einstein
Do something different. Go after positive change.
Recommended reading sorted by the area you would like to focus on:
Organizing:
- Getting Things Done: The Stress Free Guide to Productivity by David Allen
- Lifehacker.com
Organizing, confidence, and wealth:
- The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss
De-stressing, minimalizing, saving money:
Positive thinking:
- Anything written by Wayne Dyer
- Manifest Your Destiny by Wayne Dyer
Tips for reading self-help books:
Skim over passages that don’t suit your needs, but be careful not to discard advice without honestly evaluating it. For example: I skipped the section in the 4-Hour Work Week about speed reading. When I read, I want to read, not speed read. It’s not an issue.
Be prepared to modify advice that you can’t entirely swallow as given. Manifest Your Destiny is not a book that atheistic determinists are going to enjoy, but look past the author’s language and you will see that there really is something to this concept of manifesting, something real in the mind, and therefore real, period, even if the author plays fast and loose with the laws of physics.
Get the book from the library so that you are forced to read it before returning it. Also you won’t be able to dog ear pages thinking that you’ll come back to it later. You won’t. Read it once. Follow its advice. If you must, put a reminder in your calendar to check it out six months later and read it again.
If a passage really strikes you, put the book down and think about the passage. Don’t be afraid to stop and put good advice into affect that very moment. The rest of the book can wait, even if you have to return it to the library and check it out again later.
