If you’re like most people then you may have gone through a self-help period in your life or maybe you’ve been stuck in one for years. Maybe you bought books on self-help, attended seminars or simply just find yourself watching lots of motivational videos YouTube. I personally have found myself falling into the cycle of watching videos on self-help over and over again trying to find golden nuggets of information. However, there is a problem with self help, in fact, there are a few problems with self help as far as I can see. In this post, I’ll go over the problems with self-help and why it’s essentially not real.
This interesting Huffpost article describes how self-help books rarely work because they exist in a vaccumm. When the individual who is reading the book has to apply the teachings inside it to their own lives they often fall short. You may have seen the same thing happen in your own life with friends or family. Someone you know might be raving about a new self-help book they’re reading and trying to follow but they then stop the new habits they’ve learned a few weeks later after the initial excitment wares off.
Self-help books don’t work
Self help books and those who read them are in a weird kind of paradox – the author who writes his or her self help books is drawing from the experience and momentum of their own lives but for someone else to get the same momentum from reading their book is very difficult. Instead, it’s likely that their teachings will inspire them for a short period of time but it won’t be enough to steer them in a different direction in their lives over the long run.
The individual who seeks the self-help is often looking for a golden nugget of information that’s going to change their lives forever. Whilst this is possible, it’s unlikely. If you do a quick search for self-help books on Amazon, you’ll come across an abundance of books about losing weight, quitting drinking alcohol, being more confident and so on. With over 1000,000 books on the same subject, do you think there’s going to be anything unique left on the subject? You could argue that even with the same rehashed information being published in multiple books, at least it’s coming from different people’s experiences.
The problem with self-help #1 – it’s just rehashed and repackaged
If you do a quick search for ‘self-help books’ on Amazon you’ll quickly notice the same old titles that have been around for decades including; How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, but you’ll also come across a new generation of self-help books that have an abundance of curse words in their titles, supposedly for no other reason but to get your attention and click on them. What this tells you is that the subject is so over-saturated that authors need to hit it from a new angle to stand any chance of selling their books.
Whilst this is refreshing in a sense, I can’t help but wonder if it’s clever or just taking advantage of vulnerable people who are looking for something new. The fact of the matter is, people are always going to look for self-help information and if you can stand out from the crowd you’re going to sell a lot of books, even if the contents aren’t anything new.
Take the popular ‘new age’ self-help book; The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck as an example of this.
This book was released a few years ago and it was popular for one reason – its name. Never has a self-help book been so in your face with its title. Needless to say, customers flocked to Amazon to buy it in their droves. However, if you look through the reviews on Amazon, you’ll see the same comments underneath 1-star ratings; “the author just rants”, “it’s all anecdotal”, “author contradicts himself”, “insulting and arrogant”, “nothing new or well thought out”.
Of course, there are good reviews for this book too but the large majority are negative. This just highlights the fact that due to high demand for self-help information, over-saturation and authors wanting to stand out to make a quick buck with flimsy information, self-help is by large disappointing and you’re rarely going to find anything new unless you’ve never read a self-help book before.
And that’s the problem with self-help, no information learnt ever feels enough to scratch the ‘self-help itch’.
The problem with self-help #2 – it’s addictive
Whilst you might find yourself being sucked in by fancy new book covers you might also find yourself addicted to the ‘mining’ of self-help information. I call it ‘mining’ because its as if you’re constantly digging for the golden nugget of information that’s going to change everything for you. Self-help might be a category on Amazon but it’s also an addiction. Verywellmind wrote a great article about addiction to self-help and some of the signs.
These signs include the amount of time you spend looking for self-help. I’ve personally seen people that I know buy self-help information and then the next week they’ve got another book or course they’re following. It’s easy to get stuck on the hamster wheel of self-help without actually stopping and applying anything that you may have learnt. Because of this, you can have a lack of focus as you’re taking in so much information that you end up doing nothing at all and that’s when you have a sense of shame and feeling like giving up your self-improvement journey.
Another problem with self-help is that it can feel exciting. You can start a journey to improve yourself with a book or a program and whilst it is exciting at first the buzz usually dies out quicker than you’d hoped and you’re then looking for the next thing that’s going to make you feel the same exciting feelings towards improving yourself. You can end up becoming impulsive and buying courses that you don’t really need.
The problem with self-help #3 – it’s expensive
Self-help doesn’t have to be costly if you read one book and then leave it at that however if you get sucked into the world of self-help, books and courses end up becoming expensive, especially if you become addicted. What’s worse is that if you spend all your time looking for self-help information on the internet, you’re going to get bombarded with ads about self-help and every guru and his dog is going to target you with their paid courses.
The internet is aflush with costly information courses and has been since its inception. It’s easy to claim you have all the answers to peoples problems and market your $47 course as a solution to everything. If you’re desperate or naïve then you can end up spending thousands on these types of copy cat courses that never really offer any kind of real value and are instead designed to make the creator money. The truth is, the information provided in these types of ‘courses’ can be found in books for a few dollars instead.
It’s a sad truth that people prey on those who are desperate for help and they are happy to charge them large amounts of money for that information. We’ve all seen self-help guru’s that charge you $5k for their three-day seminars which end up being 72-hour motivational speeches. The types of individuals who are willing to pay for those are paying more for the exciting experience than learning anything new they can action in their own lives.
The problem with self-help #4 – it doesn’t work if you don’t do anything
It is true that some self-help information is helpful, especially if you’ve never visited the world of self-help. However, self-help doesn’t work if you don’t actually do anything. If you’re addicted to finding new information or just the pursuit of self-help then you never give yourself time to implement anything new. For example, there’s thousands of exercise and motivation videos on YouTube. The problem is, you watch one and then YouTube feeds you another and before you know if, you’ve just been watching motivational videos without doing anything yourself. It’s kind of like getting your kit on for a football match and then standing on the side-lines for 90 minutes.
The self-help industry is focused more on making you come back for more because that’s where the money is. This is when you have to implement some self control. It’s better to watch a few snippets of videos or a few pages of a book and then go away and do that thing in your own life instead of consuming hours of video or hundreds of pages of a book, in my opinion.
Before I started this blog I procrastinated for years, trying to find the best information about how to start a blog. However, I didn’t get that sense of satisfaction that I was after until I just made myself get on with it and do it.
Procrastinating is easy. It’s much more comfortable to read about how someone else did something than do it yourself. You find yourself living of that inspirational buzz but you have to kill that off eventually if you want to actually change anything your own life. Applying difficult things in your own life to make real change takes hard and real work. At some point, you have to turn off the TV and put the book down.
Problem #5 – it’s not a real thing
Sure, information and the pursuit of it is a real thing but is self-help itself real? Does the word ‘help’ not imply that someone else is helping you? If you’re ‘helping yourself’ aren’t you just ‘doing things yourself’? not helping yourself?
I don’t like the implication of the words ‘self-help’ because they imply that you always need someone else to help you to be better. It takes away the sense of personal responsibility we each have and further hides the inner strength we all have but never really call upon or utilise. It’s easier to pay someone to tell us what to do but even when you do so you’re still left in the same place you were before you picked up that book or paid for that course. When you get stuck, you usually just need a little nudge in the right direction or to listen to your intuition, not pay for a $5k seminar or to buy five books on Amazon.
You can be inspired by others but that window has to stay small and controlled. After that, you have to then trust yourself to do the rest.