We all at one time in our life have read a self-help/self-improvement/personal growth book. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it and I think the world would be a much better place if people did. I started into this genre with Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich“. From than on, I noticed that it was a quest for the next self-help book to read and I think I finally figured out why people get stuck in this pattern.
All self-help books give pretty much the same message: set a clear and defined goal, set a plan, follow plan and there might be extra stuff like auto-suggestion, affirmations, etc. If they’re all typically the same, than why do we keep find new ones to read? I used to think the root lied in procrastination, but I think it falls much deeper than that.
What do we associate with ourselves when we get a self-help book? We associate that we don’t like who we are or where we are in our lives. We get this book to change ourselves. Change is a verb, it’s an action. I always thought that getting the next self-help book was the way to procrastinate and delay the work, while still thinking you’re accomplishing something by reading it. I’m not convinced by that argument anymore because it never really applied to me.
Change also has another association to us: pain and struggle. Change requires us to step outside of our comfort zone. If you get a book on public speaking, it’s not going to get you on a stage speaking in front of an audience. You’re going to have to do it, eventually. I’m no longer convinced that excessively reading self-help literature is an act of procrastination. I think it is a continued search for something to numb the pain.
I think most people understand and have accepted that change requires some sort of pain or struggle. Continuing with the public speaking example, you know you’ll need to get up on the stage and speak while you’re nervous, while you bumble through sentences, while you sweat, while you umm and ahh your way through it. It’s a struggle. I think most people that excessively read self-help books are looking for something to the numb the pain. I’ve looked for self-hypnosis and NLP books with the hope that I could some how numb the pain or make my mind like it better.
The thing people seem to miss by this is that the act of getting on a stage to do public speaking isn’t what ends up changing you. It’s the pain and struggle that changes you.
I’m convinced that pain and struggling is a currency for change. To be a different person, you’re going to have to pay the price. It doesn’t matter if you’re starting your own business, public speaking or trying to pick up chicks, you got to struggle through the pain. You need to be embarrassed. You need to screw up. You need to have exciting highs and crashing lows. It is what is required to build this new person.
Pain and struggling is change. Put down the book and go feel the pain.
i agree. we all learn best from trial and error, because that is the best teacher.
even if everyone of us can retain everything from those self-help books, it really takes the living out of the equation. it would seemed that we could become a robot since we would decide or do the most logical & sound decision.
I definitely agree with this factor. I did that for a while and it gave me a to much information overload.