A friend of mine recently asked his friends what we all thought of self-help. And because the answer was longer than could be reasonably encapsulated in a paragraph or two, I figured I'd respond here.
Self help tends to fall into one of six (by my reckoning) categories...and the different categories have different levels of effectiveness.
Category one: The self-help book that attempts to help you change your personality. Sorry, it's substantially genetic. You mostly just lose. Some books in this category admit it, for instance Sonja Ljubomirsky's Happiness book leads by saying 50% of your happiness is basically genetic and unmodifiable outside of decade-long work that no one is willing to do.
Category two: The self-help book that attempts to teach you something new. See, for instance, Robert Greene's books on Seduction or Power. I prefer Yudkowsky's term for this kind of book: Epiphany porn. She looks awful good on the pages, but she ain't gonna do you. What you think once has no impact on your life at all, with p>0.99. So what is one to do?
Category three: The books that attempt to teach you to think differently as a habit are a completely different category of book. Much academic learning tries to do this but fails. Some succeeds. This is easily understood by folks who took their curricula seriously, and studied a brain-bending discipline (I know personally that math, econ, philosophy all try to deeply reconfigure how you think about everything. In general, I found that psychology didn't...nor did most education courses). The good news is that this is far better than insight porn. It can actually change how you think about many things. The bad news is that again, it probably has no impact on your life at all (p > 0.95). Human beings suck very very badly at translating idea into action. If it involves human action in natural realms (dealing with people), 19 times out of 20, your action will remain as it was, while you think about your failure differently than you used to. WTF? So we're screwed?
Category four: The book that attempts to teach you to act differently as a habit is a kind of book that has some chance of working. I found that Neil Strauss's 2nd book on Game was a beautifully well-done book in this form. What can you do? The primary issue that self help books fail on is that self-help is 99% about action and 1% about thinking. And almost all of them attempt to screw with your thinking, not your action.
Category five: Long term books. A sequence of meditation practice books can be beautifully self-helpful, if you practice their approach over the course of decades, without seeing much progress at any one point. Good Luck.
Category six: Encouragement books. Some books exist simply to give you the psychic strength to persevere. Much fiction is like this. Neil Straus's first book on Game is like this. Gain strength from the story to persevere in building a habit. IF you use this kind of book this way, it can be useful. Most folks don't.
To summarize:
There are two primary issues in self-help:
1. Action is 95% of the issue...what you think matters almost not at all.
2. Habit is 99% of the issue. Anything you do once is useless.
3. Motivation is essential. Getting motivation supplements helps. Almost no one can build habitual action without motivational supplements...and stories are one such.
Books fail at at least a 99.95% rate to address the twin dangers of needing both action-focus and habit-focus, and most of them are not primarily motivational. But then again...books are about as bad a medium as one could find for getting any of these things you need for actual life changes. Talking head lecturing would be even worse.
How this impacts New Years resolutions is left as an exercise for the reader.
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6 comments:
The things that I have noticed* actually make a real difference in my life tend to be one line, casual comments that just make a whole lot of my existing, unstructured, thinking suddenly fall into place.
For example, one blogger once said something like "If you want to change your behaviour, don't beat yourself up about your bad behaviour every day for years, just introduce systems so that the good behaviour becomes automatic".
That struck me as BRILLIANT. And it's so true. You want to remember to feed the fish? Keep the fish food next to your alarm clock so you do it when you wake up. You want to remember to take X with you when you go? Put X on top of your car keys. Brush your teeth? I have toothbrush/paste/floss kept in the shower, AND on the sink, AND in the briefcase. For a couple of dollars I ensure I'm almost always ready. etc. etc.
*Much bigger changes no doubt occur, and have big causes too. But these things are too slow to notice.
So, is Warfighting epiphany porn?
Wow. Good question. Not for me. Warfighting is the best presentation in simple terms of 30 distinct ideas that I've been selling for at least 5 years.
It's not intended as a read-once, be enlightened book. AFAICT, it's intended as a read every month for your tour-of-duty book.
I asked about Warfighting, because it struck me as a less engaging version of Robert Greene's The 33 Strategies of War, which is chock-full of evocative examples — and which also rewards (or requires) re-reading.
Have you seen his latest, Mastery?
Isegoria,
I haven't read much on war. I'm guilty of not having studied that topic well enough...and of picking sources that confirm my (feedback systems) biases. Sun Tsu, Musashi, van Creveld, Boyd, Warfighting.
I've just ordered both of Greene's books that I haven't read, though the Mastery one seems to be a similar thing to the sequence of books that Howard Gardner did: Leading Minds, etc. Thanks for the suggest.
OK, I've downloaded the book and am up to about page 65. So far the section on training lines up very well with Aretae's education writing. The military stuff lines up with... well with other stuff I've read. I've never actually fought a war so what do I know?
And Robert Greene? I tried reading his blog, but it just kept looking like a continuous stream of him saying how awesome he was.
-I understand power better than anyone else.
-I understand tech development better than all the big tech companies.
-And ladies? I get ALL the ladies. Oh yeah, I'm a total playa.
etc.
Maybe he's better in book form, and the blog is just an ad for the book. In which case I don't have much respect for his advertising skills.
(I have a similar problem with the 4-hour guy. Some of his work reads just like cheap amateur porn with his saying how totally sexy he is, how he walks into a room and all the girls get wet. )
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