There is no “Magic Bullet”

Overcoming Our Frustrations With Self-Help Failure

Wake up at 4 am, get in some distraction free work before a nutritious breakfast, work out/meditate for an hour, and make sure to get at least 8 hours of sleep.

We eat up advice about how to best live our lives from books in our libraries and from articles online. Then we either forget about them or we implement them without question only to “get lazy” or stop doing them after a month or two — if we make it that far. Then the habit gets tossed on our ever growing guilt-pile. The pile we sort through every year and optimistically scribble on our New Year’s resolution list.

But sometimes the guild we feel is completely useless. Sometimes we choose the wrong habit, sometimes we shouldn’t be doing that thing in the first place.

Our personal context is different

I love the mornings, I always have. My mind isn’t nearly as full of the millions of things that happened in the day in the mornings. It narrows it’s dizzying sprint towards everywhere and heads in just one direction for a minute. The mornings are a breath of fresh air for me.

My best friend hates mornings. When she doesn’t have to wake up she is up at 11 a.m on the regular and all of her best work is done before she goes to bed at 1… a.m. Waking up at four leaves her strung out and upset for the rest of the day.

Surprise, surprise, we are two different people, and the same thing applies to self-help articles. The people writing them are different than us are. They have their own lives and their own context surrounding that habit.

In there many studies, there is always a percentage of people who didn’t do better with the brilliant new technique.

We shouldn’t full scale throw out their information because their context is different, but before applying it we should seriously consider how it will play out in our lives and how it could potentially help or hurt our goals and our direction.

Times are changing

Before the internet we rarely ever needed productivity tips. We weren’t competing against a global market, if people wanted a bowl they would go to the local potter of which there was barely a handful within a reasonable distance.

Now we can order in the best bowls, in our favorite colors, with a dishwasher safe coating from the internet. Being the local potter has become a nearly impossible profession. And it has become almost entirely relegated to the ‘optimistic side hustle’ box.

Now that we do have the internet, times are changing even faster and the tried and true methods with loads of research behind them are quickly becoming obscure and as change accelerates the best skill may just become radical flexibility and rapid experimentation to figure out what works every year, month, or day — then within that flexibility find the best methods for remaining sane — which may also change as our brains become less and less human.

Maybe the healthy habit of reading self-improvement books in itself becomes irrelevant and ends up being the worst way we can spend our time. Times change, habits become obscure, and we have to change with it.

Not every habit is useless to us. Those studies may have a percentage of people that don’t show any improvement, but there is also a percentage — normally a significantly larger percentage — of people who thrive using those habits.

Think about it, read the literature — after all, there is always someone who argues the opposite — then experiment. Take some time to dedicate yourself to a habit and after a bit, if it isn’t contributing to your goals, move on.

Don’t throw out a habit because it is hard, but genuinely give the habit a shot and if it doesn’t help accomplish the goals you have set, then bury it.

But when you find one that seems to help — attack it with all you have. Focus on it until it becomes necessary to your life, until you can’t do without it and you love it.

Slow down the rapid fire self-help, and just deal with that one habit. We only have so much self-discipline and attacking all 15 of those great steps to success at one go is much more likely to leave you burnt out and doing none of them then building the habits up one or two at a time is.

Eat that self help, chew it up, internalize it, and digest the stuff that works then don’t be afraid to spit out the stuff that just doesn’t help. Just because it works for someone else doesn’t mean it has to for us. And that’s perfectly fine.

Self-help is a place to start, but it isn’t a foregone conclusion and it certainly isn’t place to find habits to add to our guilt pile.