I used to really be into self-improvement, self-help, positive psychology, etc. Now not so much. What changed?
My model is that I learned all I could from the genre. There’s a lot of great stuff in there to learn, and I still pick up little bits from folks all the time. But there’s a broad set of skills self-improvement stuff is trying to teach you, and you have to see a lot of it before the big deep insights really seep into your bones.
I was on a self-help kick for something like 12 years before I was really done with it, and probably the last 4 of those years were the most intense. Started because my life was a bit of a mess and GTD offered some solutions. It helped, and then I kept doing things that helped more until I discovered that the literature was out of stuff it hadn’t already taught me, and I had to go look elsewhere to continue down whatever path I was on (this is what ultimately led me to zen).
I’m not so sure you need to worry so much about self-help being a trap. It can be for some people, but the very act of questioning whether you’re in some kind of local maxima is itself evidence of doing the work needed to find your way off the current peak and onto a higher one.
I especially like the point about it being a sort of genre with overarching, big-picture ideas that starts to become less useful once you’ve picked up those big-picture ideas. In that Chris Voss episode of the Lex Friedman podcast some of the big-picture ideas I was hearing were the power of empathy, paraphrasing, and the idea that people are the hero of their own story.
It’s a little hard to remember and pick out which things I got from self-help vs. other places, but here’s a quick guess at what some of the big ideas are:
we make sense of the world through stories
this is especially how we make sense of our own lives
we can change our lives by changing the story
we’re systems that can be influenced/controlled by mundane means
problems usually can be solved by changing our conditions
if something is wrong in our lives, it’s never a characteristic failing
it’s a failure to create the conditions for success
co-dependency is the default state
our minds evolved to have strong expectations about others
this was adaptive thousands and even hundreds of years ago
now we need to be secure in our ability to live our own lives and let others in in healthy ways
self-esteem comes from self-trust
you can do surface-level things to feel better about yourself
but until you learn to trust yourself you’ll always be missing out
there’s a self-improvement cycle
you notice something is wrong
things get worse for a while as you deconstruct things
then you have an insight
things get better as your reintegrate and add in the things you observed during deconstruction
you enter a new stable plateau that’s better than before
you stay there until you notice something that drives the next round of the cycle
There’s probably more stuff. I wrote a lot about it on my blog and Facebook as I was going through it. That’s all here now on Less Wrong. It’s probably not everything but I’ve got some stuff I left behind for folks.
I used to really be into self-improvement, self-help, positive psychology, etc. Now not so much. What changed?
My model is that I learned all I could from the genre. There’s a lot of great stuff in there to learn, and I still pick up little bits from folks all the time. But there’s a broad set of skills self-improvement stuff is trying to teach you, and you have to see a lot of it before the big deep insights really seep into your bones.
I was on a self-help kick for something like 12 years before I was really done with it, and probably the last 4 of those years were the most intense. Started because my life was a bit of a mess and GTD offered some solutions. It helped, and then I kept doing things that helped more until I discovered that the literature was out of stuff it hadn’t already taught me, and I had to go look elsewhere to continue down whatever path I was on (this is what ultimately led me to zen).
I’m not so sure you need to worry so much about self-help being a trap. It can be for some people, but the very act of questioning whether you’re in some kind of local maxima is itself evidence of doing the work needed to find your way off the current peak and onto a higher one.
Thanks for the thoughts, that all makes sense.
I especially like the point about it being a sort of genre with overarching, big-picture ideas that starts to become less useful once you’ve picked up those big-picture ideas. In that Chris Voss episode of the Lex Friedman podcast some of the big-picture ideas I was hearing were the power of empathy, paraphrasing, and the idea that people are the hero of their own story.
It’s a little hard to remember and pick out which things I got from self-help vs. other places, but here’s a quick guess at what some of the big ideas are:
we make sense of the world through stories
this is especially how we make sense of our own lives
we can change our lives by changing the story
we’re systems that can be influenced/controlled by mundane means
problems usually can be solved by changing our conditions
if something is wrong in our lives, it’s never a characteristic failing
it’s a failure to create the conditions for success
co-dependency is the default state
our minds evolved to have strong expectations about others
this was adaptive thousands and even hundreds of years ago
now we need to be secure in our ability to live our own lives and let others in in healthy ways
self-esteem comes from self-trust
you can do surface-level things to feel better about yourself
but until you learn to trust yourself you’ll always be missing out
there’s a self-improvement cycle
you notice something is wrong
things get worse for a while as you deconstruct things
then you have an insight
things get better as your reintegrate and add in the things you observed during deconstruction
you enter a new stable plateau that’s better than before
you stay there until you notice something that drives the next round of the cycle
There’s probably more stuff. I wrote a lot about it on my blog and Facebook as I was going through it. That’s all here now on Less Wrong. It’s probably not everything but I’ve got some stuff I left behind for folks.
Thank you, this is an amazing summary!