What Do Cookies And Self -Help Have In Common
Think back to the last time you’ve held a self-help book in your hands. How did you feel? Looking at one unspecified self-help book, you might have seen the following:
- well-designed, minimalist cover
- title that has been reiterated ad-infinitum to have the highest impact
- upon opening, a vignette of the author with his or her achievements (in a third person, of course)
- superb page layout with many paragraphs to give you the sense that changing your life is easy
- short, well-edited, hemingwayan sentences
- easily understandable graphs showing cheerful curves
All this gives you the feel of a crisp, warm cookie wanting to be eaten. Yum.
You skim through the book, noticing all the fancy buzzphrases that trigger your curiosity:
- bleeding edge research (“cutting edge” is now obsolete)
- optimized growth-hacking
- leveraging immediate results
These get you all excited!
“So much new information! I will finally be able to turn my life around! It’s time to move from my parents basement and live my own life!”
Now for the bad news.
Whenever you read a self help book, you have the sense that things can get better, right? The author (that you saw earlier in his slick vignette) is trying to relay his own experiences, in distilled form, in the hopes of general applicability. And there might be something to it. But it usually misses the 80% of the whole pie. It misses the tedious everyday routine. It misses the situational element that is different for each of us. It misses the hodgepodge of reality. And, most tellingly, it misses the element of pure luck that it takes to, for example, get published and read by more than your mom and family.*
Imagine a self help book that would tell you that — get lucky. Assuming it would even get on the shelves, it would be the worst-rated self help book ever. Which is a paradox, because it would be truer than most.
Not only that, just as a perfect photoshopped Instagram photo, it will leave you feeling inferior. How is it that he or she could achieve it and I couldn’t? Or worse yet — I did the same, I followed the steps, and nothing happened.
And so, instead of getting better, you feel worse. You wonder why is it so difficult to have the life like the person who wrote the book. You wonder why is it that he or she achieved so much while you sit here in your 9 to 5 job, thinking how to pay the huge student debt, and wondering if there is more to life. You think, justifiably, that maybe the book didn't suit you or that it somehow was incorrect. So you grab the next one thinking that this time it will have the right strategy tailored just for you. But it probably won’t, sorry.
It’s no different than eating tons of cookies. It feels awesome at the moment, but boy oh boy, you're inevitably going to feel sick in an hour.* And just like any obese person who got fat on cookies can attest, the void can never be filled no matter how many of them you’ll eat.
So let’s bust the two great untruths that self-help unwittingly spreads:
Untruth #1
People who are successful are successful because they earned it.
Untruth #2
They earned it because they worked hard.
The two untruths are more of an idealized myth. If the world was perfect, this is how it would truly work. But the world isn’t perfect, it’s messy. And thanks to this messiness not everyone (most of us) don’t get what we deserve.
This is exactly why the self help books spreading these untruths are so successful (and dangerous). They tell us that we have to earn our success and work hard at it. That we are in control. But most of the time we aren’t.
And so what you ought to keep in mind is that sometimes it takes more than hard work to succeed. It takes more than dedication. Sometimes it’s serendipity that you need. The knowing that you are enough no matter what you do, even if (especially if) the results don’t reflect that.
Because if you want to make a difference, if you want to make your contribution, however big or small, you need to stay sane. You need to know that there are things outside of you that you can’t control and that’s fine. And you need to remember, nay, burn it into your skull, that it takes more than hard work, dedication, and a rad morning routine to be successful. Sometimes the answers lie already right in front of you. You just have to look more closely to see them.
Notes:
*This applies to any creative endeavor, not just books. Successful creatives take the lion share of the market while the majority, that in some instances may be on a comparable skill level, get way less or nothing. This law is called Pareto Principle, or 80/20 Rule.
*Whether that’s still worth it is up to debate.
