Self Help

I am a happy human. I see so many unhappy humans. Some, I talk to for my job, and some are my friends.

There is no thing I can tell them that will make them happy. I don’t have that power. But I do see one thing that I think leads to dissatisfaction more than anything: comparisons. Self-help books thrive on presenting models of what you “should” do to achieve the levels of success that others might have. But those others have made different bargains with themselves, and others.

The people those books ask you to compare yourselves to are outliers in those things. You are not an outlier in those things. You are an outlier in something else.

Your bargains are your bargains.

What made me think about these things today was thinking about people who have BHAGs. Big, Hairy Ass Goals. We all need BHAGs. I have some. But the real question is this: if your BHAG takes three, or four, or five years to realize, does that mean you are enduring years of not thinking you are good enough, or strong enough, or knowledgeable enough, before you get to that “moment” in which you do think those things?

How long will that moment last?

Will it last longer than those years of thinking you “aren’t there yet”?

I ask myself these questions a lot.

Tony Robbins says that only real dissatisfaction leads to change. He is right. But putting ourselves into a state in which we “endure” years of dissatisfaction/struggle/effort to get to some envisioned change point, is really just years of being unhappy.

That kinda sucks.

Right?

So, here is my point: people buy self-help books and courses because they are dissatisfied. Those books and courses present a model to which they should strive. That model is very likely based upon an outlier, not the middle of the bell curve. And thus, that model is actually more unattainable for those book/course purchasers, than ACTUAL happiness is.

It’s simultaneously not that easy, and easier than you think.

If you think years of strife will lead to happiness, you only buy yourself more years of strife. We need better models. The people who write these books, or are the subjects of these books, made it after years of struggle. So, we believe that we need those years of struggle in order to emulate them. But they are the .01%. If you buy a book teaching you how to emulate Richard Branson, you are 99.9999% likely to be not-quite-Richard-Branson. And the .0001% didn’t need the book.

The things I have done have not made me happy. What makes me happy, today? How I think about things. I can do that in an instant. It’s truly the only thing I can control.