How to Be a Non-Douchey Self-help Guru

Sell the people something worth buying

The internet is rife with self-help “gurus” — either self-proclaimed or being heavily evangelized by others. You can’t swing the digital equivalent of a dead cat on sites like Medium without hitting some listicle about the x things that successful people do that you need to do. And of course, if you even try to read the article, there’s an e-book or course you can buy.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to build your business upon helping people live better lives. In fact that’s actually very noble. The problem is that — like so many services — if you don’t take care to do it right, it can actually hurt more people than it helps. It pains me to see people get hurt, and it pains me to see people get ripped off. It also pains me to see people act as if things are very simple and easy when they are almost always neither.

So, here’s a few things that you can do, if you’re trying to be a non-douchey self-help guru.

Admit That It’s Hard

It’s very very difficult to be successful because it entails two other very difficult things: finding a goal that will fulfill you and achieving it. Those are the most difficult things to do, and most people spend their entire lives trying to do one or both of those things, and never do them. So if you really want to help people to help themselves become successful, don’t try to convince them that it’s easy to be successful. At best you just perpetuate many peoples’ cycles of self-doubt. At worst, you make people feel inadequate and idiotic for just not getting the “simple” “secrets” to success.

I’m guessing that if you are successful — in the sense of finding a fulfilling dream and seeing it come true — you know damn well that it was difficult. I think you also know that no listicle you read or talk you saw was the panacea that launched you headlong into living the dream. Only one person’s life was really transformed by The 4-hour Work-Week, and that person is Tim Ferriss.

Admit That There is No One Habit or Trick

Let’s dispense with the pretense, shall we? Let’s agree that while Ockham’s Razor is a great principle in scientific explanations, there’s really nothing to recommend it for prescriptions about how to navigate something so complex as living a good life. Even if you can construct a single sentence that you think is the definitive advice on how to do well in life, it’s likely that such a sentence actually has a bunch of complex advice packed into it. In other words, it’s easy to oversimplify things — but it’s also really unhelpful.

Admit That You — Like Everyone Else — Are Just Trying to Figure Things Out

Even if you have — by all accounts — succeeded, and you’re standing atop the mountain, looking down at the rest of us schmucks, don’t be so cocky. Do you wake up, and your coffee makes itself? Does nothing require effort for you anymore? Are all of your thoughts and emotions totally in line with ideals? Do you never experience pain or resistance? Don’t be stupid! You are a human being, and part of being a human is pain, disappointment, and striving against resistance — to some degree. If you write as if you are somehow above these things now, I can’t imagine why anyone would be interested in reading you for any length of time. After all, how could anyone relate to you?

Maybe some people believe that you can leave behind all the valleys of human experience, and that it is possible for it to be all peaks all the time. I feel sorry for those people, and hope they quickly realize their mistaken beliefs. But I guess until then, they will be the primary spenders on self-help BS that pretends to take everyone up above being human. However, if you wish to actually be successful in helping people, and not just in taking their money, be honest about the human experience.

Don’t Just Sell “Success” — Do the Hard Work of Defining It

To me, the term success is like the term productivity. It’s been fetishized, but no one really knows what it is or why it’s good. I’ve written about this before, but I’ll emphasize the point again here. Productivity means nothing if you’re just doing a lot of stuff that’s not worth doing. The same goes for “success”. You can be successful at doing x, but if x is not something worth making happen, you’ve been successful at doing something worthless. Both concepts are vacuous on their own — without the hard part of identifying what is worth producing or being successful at.

Some might read this and say that the hard work of defining what’s worth doing is subjective, and everyone needs to do that on their own. This is only partly true. We are all involved in the discussion of what is valuable, what makes a good life, and what we should be pursuing. Sure, there is nuance, opinions differ, and we can get confused. But if anything, that just means that answers are worth finding.

So the message here is this: Sell me a vision for what the good life really is, or sell me a way to do better what I’m currently trying to do. Hell, sell me both. But don’t only sell me one and pretend you’re selling me both.

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Originally published at yourfool.com.