“The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.”
Thomas Edison
Especially since the start of the 20th century, the self-help industry, as we know it today, has had a major influence on social behavior. Largely founded on the law of attraction and positive thinking, this brand of self-help was first popularized in books such as James Allen’s As a Man Thinketh and Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. Ever since, the industry continued to expand through the likes of same-ish content in more books, and seminars, audio programs and infomercials.
Self-help can be a great thing. It’s great to have that jolt in your life which gives it a sense of urgency, that makes you go after the things you’ve always dreamed of. That’s why we love self-help content. But we don’t like to consider how self-help may be unhelpful, or even damaging to us, because that would mean questioning what “the good life” even looks like.
In the recent years, there have been increasingly vocal opinions on the toxic side of self-help. At its core, the fervent belief in the law of attraction, that “what we think we become”, tends to create in us a sense of entitlement. We think and act as though the world revolves around our own wants and needs. We become self-absorbed and out of tune with reality. We lose touch with our common sense.
Consequently, we are led towards continually making bad decisions in our life that derail our overall wellbeing, as well as our relationships.
Coming from a former self-help buff myself, here are the biggest realizations I’ve had over the years on how conventional self-help can be unhelpful.
1. There’s Nothing Wrong With Working a Job. The self-help space is in no shortage of folks parading the entrepreneurial spirit, which in itself, isn’t exactly a bad thing. But it can quickly get toxic when entitlement comes into the picture.
My idea for this article came about the other day, when I heard a business figure saying that there is no bigger scam than a job, or spending years of your life working for paychecks. This hit me as the most self-indulgent thing I’ve heard in a while. Because here’s a simple reality check: not everyone can be entrepreneurs or CEOs.
Businesses need workers to survive. If everyone were to be entrepreneurs, there would be no workers. So this would essentially mean that there would be no businesses. If working a job is a scam, then, as a business owner, this makes you a scammer as well.
Owning a business isn’t the only way to get wealthy — and there’s really no guarantee of you succeeding in business either, because it’s a fact that most businesses fail. Not only that, not everyone is suited for the unpredictability that running a business inevitably involves. If it’s not for you, you don’t have to do it. I’m sure you know plenty of people in your life who have gotten well off from excelling at their jobs.
2. Zeal Isn’t Everything. A common trope in the self-help space is that you can do anything if you just have enough zeal, or in other words, if you have the passion, the drive, the motivation. But there’s a reason why the great French diplomat Talleyrand warned his protégés, “Surtout pas trop de zèle (above all, not too much zeal).”
Passion can make you do stupid and reckless things. Passion can make you underestimate risks. Passion can delude you into overvaluing what you want and how you feel, and undervaluing how things are in actuality. Passion can make you unreasonably hurt yourself.
Personally, I’ve never been impressed by David Goggins’s story, like how he finished a 100 mile race despite being severely dehydrated, having fractured feet and shin splints, and feces and bloody urine trickling down his legs. And what was he trying to prove anyway? In Goggins’s words, it was simply that he was a “one hard motherfucker.”
I’ve always thought of his extreme “no pain no gain” story as being one of a man who is likely just externalizing his physically abusive childhood. And really, if other people weren’t around to save him, he could’ve easily died during his passionate endeavors.
Passion and zeal can be important, but not without a modicum of common sense. A mantra like “sleep is for the weak” can sound inspiring, but do you really need someone to remind you why you need to sleep? Likewise, can you really “fake it ’til you make it” and call yourself an expert on a subject when you don’t have any marketable skills?
3. The Process Matters More than the Goal Itself. One of the biggest things that caused me to be disillusioned with conventional self-help is the over-fixation with outcomes or goals. The self-help space likes to market the practice of setting goals (often materialistic ones) as a miracle tool to turn your life around, to finally make you happy. But of course, in reality, the high you get from achieving things quickly fades away. It doesn’t take long for that inner void to seep in again as you realize that your life hasn’t changed all that much. So what do you do? You set another goal, hoping to feel that momentary high again while you feel miserable the rest of the time when you haven’t gotten what you want.
And the thing is, outcomes aren’t always in your control. We tend to underestimate how much of a role luck plays in our success. We often overlook factors such as timing, market conditions, and public opinion because we like to think that we earned all of our success through our own hard work. But that’s just not how life works. To tether your happiness and wellbeing to outcomes, then, is a recipe for disaster.
Another unhealthy thing about goals is that the moment you achieve them, you’ve already lost. Because when all you care about is that you’ve achieving a goal, you are likely to flout the process and cut corners. And when you do achieve your goal, you don’t have a reason to hold on anymore to the dreadful routines and practices that got you there.
Arguably, it would be more sustainable to think about goals as flexible roadmaps, in which the journey matters more than the destination. You may have an idea of what you’d like to achieve, but what matters more to you is the person you get to become by immersing yourself in the process. You may or may not achieve the outcome that you initially planned. And that’s fine. You’re open to being led towards better outcomes that are more suited for you.
Here’s an easy way to think about this. Say you’re starting out at the gym. You have some idea of how you want to look like. But that doesn’t matter so much when you care more about just working out and practicing fitness. When you’re in love with the process instead of the outcome, you don’t find yourself having to drag your feet to the gym every time. You look forward to it because it makes you feel good. And you actually get good at doing the workouts too, because you focus on keeping the proper forms and doing the full range of motions, instead of just rushing through them.
4. Live By Your Own Book. With the hustle culture running deep in the self-help space, it can seem like everyone is constantly working hard. And when you look back at your own relatively chilled-out day, it can be easy to feel like you’re a lazy ass, and that you’re not doing anything important with your life. So, you too fall into the kiasu trap — being constantly busy out of fear of missing out.
It’s fair to say that at the root of this hustle culture is really just insecurity. When you lack your own sturdy definition of what success means to you, you’re compelled to look towards others for their definition of success. And it’s likely that those people are following other people’s definition of success. It goes on and on.
It takes stillness and self-assuredness to look at this sort of things and say, “So what?”, because you know your own priorities, your own goals, your own strengths and weaknesses, and your own way of doing things.
This goes the same way when it comes to “success routines” that are often talked about. For example, if you want to be as successful as this or that guy, you need to wake up at 5 am every morning, meditate, and journal, etc. Of course, these things can be beneficial in and of themselves. But it doesn’t mean that they’re for everyone. At the end of the day, you decide what works for you. If you work best as a night owl, then keep it that way. If you don’t like journaling, don’t do it.
Warren Buffett, one of the world’s most legendary investors, eats the same trashy McDonald’s breakfast every morning, for God’s sake. How is he not dead yet, right? My point here is, be successful in your own way. Live by your own book.
“The good life” is only what you make of it.
Izzat Zailan 