Also, when it comes to self-help, you’re in luck—the number of actually different methods that exist is fairly small, but they are infinitely repeated over and over again in different books, using different language.
My personal sorting tool of choice is looking for specificity of language: techniques that are described in as much sensory-oriented, “near” language as possible, with a minimum of abstraction. I also don’t bother evaluating things that don’t make claims that would offer an improvement over anything else I’ve tried, and I have a preference for reading authors who’ve offered insightful models and useful techniques in the past.
Okay. Another take. Is this really true? How long would it take for a new-commer to walk through every available option? How much would it cost? What is the chance he should expect before starting the whole endeavor that any of the available options will help? For the last question, the lottery analogy fits perfectly, no “works only for ME” excuse.
I’ve read dozens of self-help books and numerous websites, etc. and pjeby’s claims of repetition seem mostly true (and his point that some who have unscientific philosophies have great practical advice is definitely true in my experience).
That huge numbers of books are about the same things, in different language? Absolutely. Books that contain something genuinely new in self-help are exceedingly rare in my experience. Books that have one or two new twists or better metaphors for explaining the same things are enormously common.
Take for example, “the law of attraction”. I don’t believe it has any objective external basis: rather, it’s a matter of 1. motivation and 2. making your own luck—i.e. “chance favors the prepared mind”. However, the quality of information about its practical applications varies widely, and some of the most woo-woo crazy books—like one of the ones supposedly written by a spirit being channeled from another universe—actually have the best practical information for leveraging the psychological benefits of belief.
I’m specifically talking about the “emotional energy scale” model from the book “Ask and It Is Given”. Note that I don’t know if they invented that model or swiped it from some psych researcher… and I don’t really care. By putting that information into a useful context, they gave me more usable information than raw experimental data would have provided.
Now, if I were looking for “truth”, I’d certainly trust peer-reviewed research more than I’d trust a channeled being from beyond. But if the being from beyond offers a useful model distinction, I don’t especially care if it’s true.
Now, some people reading this are going to think because I mentioned the LoA that I believe all that quantum garbage—but I do not. I do believe, however, that self-fulfilling prophecies are useful, and the LoA literature is a great source of raw practical data in the application of self-fulfilling prophecy, as long as you ignore all their theories about why anything works, and focus on testing specific physical and mental techniques, and break down the attitudes.
For example, one fascinating commonality of themes in this literature: the idea of gratitude or abundance, giving things freely to others and it will be given unto you, and a “friendly universe”. It’s interesting that, although some of these writers are borrowing from each other, others seem to have independently stumbled on an idea or attitude that reflects this notion: that in some larger way, “everything happens for a reason” or “the world is an abundant and giving place”.
Most will also insist on the importance of adopting this mindset for achieving results, which makes me wonder: could it be that there is some hardwired machinery in our brains that is triggered by conditions of perceived “abundance”? Is it then triggered by acting as-if conditions are abundant, in the same way that smiling can trigger happiness or friendliness?
It’s certainly food for further thought, although in my current simplified model of LoA, I assume that this is more of a test condition: i.e., if someone cannot act as-if they are in abundance, then they have not successfully made whatever internal transition is required. This seems a more parsimonious model at this point, than assuming that the actions themselves are relevant.
How long would it take for a new-commer to walk through every available option?
They would probably be FAR better off picking ONE book and sticking to it with absolute Zen-master determination, especially if they choose a book that offers sensory based language, and most importantly, a way to tell if you’re doing it right in a relatively short period of time. Comparatively few books contain this, but browsing in a bookstore will certainly find you a few. (I’ve linked to a few here in the past; “Loving What Is” and “Re-create Your Life” are two of the easiest for a beginner to master, if they pay close attention to the extra distinctions about “listening to yourself” that I’ve thrown out here on LW. )
How much would it cost? What is the chance he should expect before starting the whole endeavor that any of the available options will help? For the last question, the lottery analogy fits perfectly, no “works only for ME” excuse.
Sadly, if you limit yourself to books only, this might well be true. Live trainings and coaching are substantially more likely to make a difference, because the feedback loop can be closed.
I have had more than one student report that after live work with me, they were able to go back and understand all the things in self-help books that they were never able to apply before, because now they knew what those books were actually talking about, once they had experiential reference points. (It’s unfortunately a lot easier to recognize whether a guru is “for real” once you are one, than before.)
My original goal for the book I am currently writing was to create a kind of Rosetta Stone for self-help material, but I have concluded that all I can really do is make such a Rosetta Stone for the sort of person who already would’ve found my approach enlightening—or more precisely, I can write a book that will get past the kind of filters that would keep a lot of those people from learning from the sources I learned things from. But the very fact that I do it that way will be a filter for a different group of people!
And this, by the way, is why we won’t see a scientifically-validated model of these things any time soon: learning them really requires a feedback loop of some kind, and most books don’t include enough of one to work with EVERYBODY, only for the set of people whose perceptual filters initially match those used by the writer. (Of course, even if there was such a feedback loop, it’s not prestigious to test practical ideas that somebody else came up with, versus impractical new ones.)
In the first draft of my book, I listed all sorts of ways to get a certain popular visualization technique wrong, that had bedeviled me and some of my students in the past. My newer students read it… and promptly found NEW ways to get it wrong, that I had to give them live feedback to fix.
I’ll add those ways of getting it wrong to the second draft, but I’m now far less confident that it is possible to eliminate ALL the ways that somebody can misinterpret a discussion of how to observe or manipulate their internal experience.
(And if I actually included ALL the ways I know of to get popular techniques or self-help ideas wrong, it would be much longer than the instructions of how to get them right… thereby making an unusable and unmarketable book. Which is probably why most self-help books only give a handful of misinterpretations and hope for the best. It probably doesn’t hurt that there are also financial rewards for selling some of your readers on live programs, but I honestly would like there to be a book that doesn’t need that option… I’ve just given up on my current book being that book.)
By far the best way to learn is with someone who can tell from your external behavior whether you’re doing it wrong, being a kind of human biofeedback system. The way I learned was definitely the hard way.
However, for the kind of successful person that I was talking about, these caveats don’t apply. A person with the attitude I was referring to, will find something useful in virtually anything they read, and promptly apply it. These are also the people who need self-help least, but that was actually part of my original point.
What I probably wasn’t clear enough on, was that it’s this attitude that determines the person’s success in LIFE, not their success in finding good self-help books! We are now way off of that particular reservation.
I haven’t read the above yet, I’ll do it later; but I want to make a general observation for now: everybody would be better off if your replies were shorter. You are already talking past many of the people here, so you should focus on communicating clearly, which may mean fast back-and-forth understanding checks, not on communicating lots of stuff, all of which doesn’t do any good.
My initial question was an introduction to the rest, which ask whether the method of looking at everything is going to pay off. I don’t ask for details about the content, since the worth of looking at these details is exactly what I’m asking about. I split the following question into its own thread:
They would probably be FAR better off picking ONE book and sticking to it with absolute Zen-master determination, especially if they choose a book that offers sensory based language, and most importantly, a way to tell if you’re doing it right in a relatively short period of time.
Now you are talking past my question again. The conversation started where you asserted that it’s possible to test all of the available methods on yourself, since there are so few genuinely different ones. In response you recommend sticking to one method. Fine. What are the answers to my questions for a single randomly selected method (among a number of surface-filteredavailable options)?
How long would it take for a new-commer to walk through every available option? How much would it cost? What is the chance he should expect before starting the whole endeavor that any of the available options will help?
My available samples say: Years, thousands, and slim. Of course, people for whom these things are not the case, will be considerably less likely to be my customer, so it’s a severely biased sample. (Which also means that it’s possible my techniques work best on people who try lots of self-help and fail, but that seems more like an advantage than a disadvantage to me.)
However, I have noticed that highly-successful people also own large self-help libraries, but they are not disappointed in them, because they always find at least ONE thing of use to them in EVERY book.
My original point, which you still seem to be ignoring, is that I am not and have never been advocating that a self-help seeker engage in a random walk of self-help books. I am saying that people who succeed in life have the attitude that they can find at least one useful thing in every circumstance they encounter, if they apply themselves to looking for it, and applying it.
Cultivating that attitude is what I actually recommended, as you will see if you return to the beginning of the thread.
How long would it take for a new-commer to walk through every available option? How much would it cost? What is the chance he should expect before starting the whole endeavor that any of the available options will help?
My available samples say: Years, thousands, and slim.
[...]
My original point, which you still seem to be ignoring, is that I am not and have never been advocating that a self-help seeker engage in a random walk of self-help books. I am saying that people who succeed in life have the attitude that they can find at least one useful thing in every circumstance they encounter, if they apply themselves to looking for it, and applying it. Cultivating that attitude is what I actually recommended, as you will see if you return to the beginning of the thread.
My question, however, was about the worth of studying the theories of which you speak, and in particular of interpreting your long comments that try to communicate them. Thank you for answering it.
Sadly, if you limit yourself to books only, this might well be true.
What might well be true? The connotation of my question that implies that your field is worthless? I was specifically asking how much it’s worth, only the conclusion that you may draw, as an expert, not the reflections leading to naught.
The rest of your comment also talks past the questions. You note that you receive student feedback that could answer my questions, talk about your book implying that it’ll answer my questions, talk about how the still completely unknown to me efficiency of your methods improves from personal tutoring.
What might well be true? The connotation of my question that implies that your field is worthless?
Yes. I’m a rather outspoken critic of the field, and not just for marketing reasons.
The problem isn’t the industry, it’s that developing “kicking” skills requires practice, and for practice to work you have to have feedback, even if that feedback is you yourself checking your performance against some model. Most self-help material doesn’t even teach explicitly making these checks, let alone giving substantive criteria for telling whether you’ve done something correctly or not. People are left to blindly stumble on the right method, if they happen to hear a metaphor that works for them or read in someone’s story about doing it wrong, how they’re doing it wrong.
The entire field—at least in books—is like teaching people to ride bicycles without giving them any bicycles to practice on. Common practice in workshops isn’t a hell of a lot better, but your odds are a lot better of stumbling on a workshop where you can get coached or walked through something. Even there, testability, repeatability, and trainability are not the focus.
So yes, the entire self-help field might as well be a lottery right now, if you have no information on where to start. Many of my students, like me, own literally hundreds of self-help books, from which they got little or no help until they “got it” from something I wrote or said or did with them.
As for me, I just got lucky enough to get an insight from computer programming that opened my eyes to what was going on, that gave me my first “rosetta stone” for the field.
Okay. Another take. Is this really true? How long would it take for a new-commer to walk through every available option? How much would it cost? What is the chance he should expect before starting the whole endeavor that any of the available options will help? For the last question, the lottery analogy fits perfectly, no “works only for ME” excuse.
I’ve read dozens of self-help books and numerous websites, etc. and pjeby’s claims of repetition seem mostly true (and his point that some who have unscientific philosophies have great practical advice is definitely true in my experience).
That huge numbers of books are about the same things, in different language? Absolutely. Books that contain something genuinely new in self-help are exceedingly rare in my experience. Books that have one or two new twists or better metaphors for explaining the same things are enormously common.
Take for example, “the law of attraction”. I don’t believe it has any objective external basis: rather, it’s a matter of 1. motivation and 2. making your own luck—i.e. “chance favors the prepared mind”. However, the quality of information about its practical applications varies widely, and some of the most woo-woo crazy books—like one of the ones supposedly written by a spirit being channeled from another universe—actually have the best practical information for leveraging the psychological benefits of belief.
I’m specifically talking about the “emotional energy scale” model from the book “Ask and It Is Given”. Note that I don’t know if they invented that model or swiped it from some psych researcher… and I don’t really care. By putting that information into a useful context, they gave me more usable information than raw experimental data would have provided.
Now, if I were looking for “truth”, I’d certainly trust peer-reviewed research more than I’d trust a channeled being from beyond. But if the being from beyond offers a useful model distinction, I don’t especially care if it’s true.
Now, some people reading this are going to think because I mentioned the LoA that I believe all that quantum garbage—but I do not. I do believe, however, that self-fulfilling prophecies are useful, and the LoA literature is a great source of raw practical data in the application of self-fulfilling prophecy, as long as you ignore all their theories about why anything works, and focus on testing specific physical and mental techniques, and break down the attitudes.
For example, one fascinating commonality of themes in this literature: the idea of gratitude or abundance, giving things freely to others and it will be given unto you, and a “friendly universe”. It’s interesting that, although some of these writers are borrowing from each other, others seem to have independently stumbled on an idea or attitude that reflects this notion: that in some larger way, “everything happens for a reason” or “the world is an abundant and giving place”.
Most will also insist on the importance of adopting this mindset for achieving results, which makes me wonder: could it be that there is some hardwired machinery in our brains that is triggered by conditions of perceived “abundance”? Is it then triggered by acting as-if conditions are abundant, in the same way that smiling can trigger happiness or friendliness?
It’s certainly food for further thought, although in my current simplified model of LoA, I assume that this is more of a test condition: i.e., if someone cannot act as-if they are in abundance, then they have not successfully made whatever internal transition is required. This seems a more parsimonious model at this point, than assuming that the actions themselves are relevant.
They would probably be FAR better off picking ONE book and sticking to it with absolute Zen-master determination, especially if they choose a book that offers sensory based language, and most importantly, a way to tell if you’re doing it right in a relatively short period of time. Comparatively few books contain this, but browsing in a bookstore will certainly find you a few. (I’ve linked to a few here in the past; “Loving What Is” and “Re-create Your Life” are two of the easiest for a beginner to master, if they pay close attention to the extra distinctions about “listening to yourself” that I’ve thrown out here on LW. )
Sadly, if you limit yourself to books only, this might well be true. Live trainings and coaching are substantially more likely to make a difference, because the feedback loop can be closed.
I have had more than one student report that after live work with me, they were able to go back and understand all the things in self-help books that they were never able to apply before, because now they knew what those books were actually talking about, once they had experiential reference points. (It’s unfortunately a lot easier to recognize whether a guru is “for real” once you are one, than before.)
My original goal for the book I am currently writing was to create a kind of Rosetta Stone for self-help material, but I have concluded that all I can really do is make such a Rosetta Stone for the sort of person who already would’ve found my approach enlightening—or more precisely, I can write a book that will get past the kind of filters that would keep a lot of those people from learning from the sources I learned things from. But the very fact that I do it that way will be a filter for a different group of people!
And this, by the way, is why we won’t see a scientifically-validated model of these things any time soon: learning them really requires a feedback loop of some kind, and most books don’t include enough of one to work with EVERYBODY, only for the set of people whose perceptual filters initially match those used by the writer. (Of course, even if there was such a feedback loop, it’s not prestigious to test practical ideas that somebody else came up with, versus impractical new ones.)
In the first draft of my book, I listed all sorts of ways to get a certain popular visualization technique wrong, that had bedeviled me and some of my students in the past. My newer students read it… and promptly found NEW ways to get it wrong, that I had to give them live feedback to fix.
I’ll add those ways of getting it wrong to the second draft, but I’m now far less confident that it is possible to eliminate ALL the ways that somebody can misinterpret a discussion of how to observe or manipulate their internal experience.
(And if I actually included ALL the ways I know of to get popular techniques or self-help ideas wrong, it would be much longer than the instructions of how to get them right… thereby making an unusable and unmarketable book. Which is probably why most self-help books only give a handful of misinterpretations and hope for the best. It probably doesn’t hurt that there are also financial rewards for selling some of your readers on live programs, but I honestly would like there to be a book that doesn’t need that option… I’ve just given up on my current book being that book.)
By far the best way to learn is with someone who can tell from your external behavior whether you’re doing it wrong, being a kind of human biofeedback system. The way I learned was definitely the hard way.
However, for the kind of successful person that I was talking about, these caveats don’t apply. A person with the attitude I was referring to, will find something useful in virtually anything they read, and promptly apply it. These are also the people who need self-help least, but that was actually part of my original point.
What I probably wasn’t clear enough on, was that it’s this attitude that determines the person’s success in LIFE, not their success in finding good self-help books! We are now way off of that particular reservation.
I haven’t read the above yet, I’ll do it later; but I want to make a general observation for now: everybody would be better off if your replies were shorter. You are already talking past many of the people here, so you should focus on communicating clearly, which may mean fast back-and-forth understanding checks, not on communicating lots of stuff, all of which doesn’t do any good.
My initial question was an introduction to the rest, which ask whether the method of looking at everything is going to pay off. I don’t ask for details about the content, since the worth of looking at these details is exactly what I’m asking about. I split the following question into its own thread:
Now you are talking past my question again. The conversation started where you asserted that it’s possible to test all of the available methods on yourself, since there are so few genuinely different ones. In response you recommend sticking to one method. Fine. What are the answers to my questions for a single randomly selected method (among a number of surface-filtered available options)?
My available samples say: Years, thousands, and slim. Of course, people for whom these things are not the case, will be considerably less likely to be my customer, so it’s a severely biased sample. (Which also means that it’s possible my techniques work best on people who try lots of self-help and fail, but that seems more like an advantage than a disadvantage to me.)
However, I have noticed that highly-successful people also own large self-help libraries, but they are not disappointed in them, because they always find at least ONE thing of use to them in EVERY book.
My original point, which you still seem to be ignoring, is that I am not and have never been advocating that a self-help seeker engage in a random walk of self-help books. I am saying that people who succeed in life have the attitude that they can find at least one useful thing in every circumstance they encounter, if they apply themselves to looking for it, and applying it.
Cultivating that attitude is what I actually recommended, as you will see if you return to the beginning of the thread.
My question, however, was about the worth of studying the theories of which you speak, and in particular of interpreting your long comments that try to communicate them. Thank you for answering it.
What might well be true? The connotation of my question that implies that your field is worthless? I was specifically asking how much it’s worth, only the conclusion that you may draw, as an expert, not the reflections leading to naught.
The rest of your comment also talks past the questions. You note that you receive student feedback that could answer my questions, talk about your book implying that it’ll answer my questions, talk about how the still completely unknown to me efficiency of your methods improves from personal tutoring.
Yes. I’m a rather outspoken critic of the field, and not just for marketing reasons.
The problem isn’t the industry, it’s that developing “kicking” skills requires practice, and for practice to work you have to have feedback, even if that feedback is you yourself checking your performance against some model. Most self-help material doesn’t even teach explicitly making these checks, let alone giving substantive criteria for telling whether you’ve done something correctly or not. People are left to blindly stumble on the right method, if they happen to hear a metaphor that works for them or read in someone’s story about doing it wrong, how they’re doing it wrong.
The entire field—at least in books—is like teaching people to ride bicycles without giving them any bicycles to practice on. Common practice in workshops isn’t a hell of a lot better, but your odds are a lot better of stumbling on a workshop where you can get coached or walked through something. Even there, testability, repeatability, and trainability are not the focus.
So yes, the entire self-help field might as well be a lottery right now, if you have no information on where to start. Many of my students, like me, own literally hundreds of self-help books, from which they got little or no help until they “got it” from something I wrote or said or did with them.
As for me, I just got lucky enough to get an insight from computer programming that opened my eyes to what was going on, that gave me my first “rosetta stone” for the field.