Why I Disavow The Self Improvement Craze
I told my mother she was making a big mistake and that she should finish her Business Degree. She only needed 6 more credits, and she spent decades and thousands pursuing it. But no, she un-enrolled and became a full-time carpenter.
Under the ethos of self improvement and business sense, I suspect my mother would be called a fool. Most credential faithfuls would say “you wasted two decades of time, energy and money, and you foolishly quit at the finish line!” But not until you sit with her, listen, and melt into her disposition do you wonder, “wait, should I become a carpenter too?”
Literally, probably not. I bet you’d make for a horrible carpenter and you’d probably hammer your fingers to pulp. But metaphorically, yes. We all should.
Becoming The Carpenter
Truth is, my mother has been a carpenter since I was young. In her 20s, she chose to buy a home before going to college. It was a peculiar move for a single female in the early 80’s, but on she went with her smirk that makes it all seem right.
Her home would become her canvas, her hands and tools became her brush, and home improvement became her art. She’d learn flooring, then roofing, plumbing, electric, and so on until she could practically build a house.
She did this for two decades while intermittently pursuing her bachelors degree in business. But at age 42-ish and six credits shy of completing her degree, she pumped the breaks and asked herself something professors hadn’t — “why am I even pursuing my degree?”
As it would turn out, fixing and building houses is a metamorphic experience. It cleanses you of the theoretical, and leaves you with a lens for the practical. It replaces the question mark sitting at the end of your self worth with an exclamation. Try to timidly point at a house you renovated all by yourself.
It won’t happen.
And then try convincing yourself that you’re not good enough until you get your degree in business. It’s hard to do. A degree might signal sufficiency, but building a home is sufficiency.
“I don’t need the degree” my mother told me. She had already graduated before she graduated.
The Self Improvement Industry: From Prophet to Ferriss
In year 0, the most famous self help figure was born. He was also the first documented hippy with abs. Maybe he didn’t know it, but Jesus was a trend setter. I imagine that’s when the self help industry really kicked into a new gear. The writing of the Bible. Then, the countless interpretations and re-writings. Zoom forward, and now self-help experts are spreading their divine wisdom to target markets (I mean disciples).
The original form of self improvement — learn by doing — is being phased out by what now appears to be a dispenser of digital chewables. They taste sweet, are infinite in supply, and promise the goodness of the real thing. But the endless feeding and discursive consumption has become masturbatory and sport like. Turn left on any corner of the web and you’ll crash into some variation of “101 books That Changed My Life This Year!” Turn right and you’ll jump the curb of “5 Things You Should Never Do If You Want To Be A Millionaire.”
Unfortunately you won’t get physically hurt by these crashes. You’ll come to like the abuse, hand over your email address, and then click back to the supplier for more on a future date.
The supplier I’m (un)fairly demonizing right now is today’s ubiquitous “self help marketer.” There have been plenty of scathing pieces written about certain folks, and I admit there are some (but increasingly fewer and fewer) that I actually follow and like depending on the day, so I won’t un-subliminally add an opinion on who is good or who isn’t. Doing that would be precisely antithetical to the point I do want to make — if you’re always praying to someone for an answer to a new problem you’ve been fed, then you’re failing to graduate.
While good doctors, mentors, mechanics, dentists will send you on your way once you’re well, the bad ones keep prescribing, charging, and fixing you. Unfortunately, and similar to the drug industry, many self help marketers have every iota of incentive to over-prescribe and pull you into dependency. For most of them, it’s better if you can’t solve problems yourself.
And so we allow ourselves to be hypnotized, perpetually un-graduated, anxiously in pursuit of another personal prophet, and forever in need of a mechanic to fix our shit. Sadly, this latest generation is growing into adulthood with this en vogue, non-approach to personal growth and maintenance. It’s a strain of the consumerism manifesto, which favors the “get by paying, not by producing” mindset. And in this sense, we’re paying heavily with our attention:
“Our stupidity may be clearly proved by the fact that we hold that “buying” refers only to the objects for which we pay cash, and we regard as free gifts the things for which we spend our very selves.
These we should refuse to buy, if we were compelled to give in payment for them our houses or some attractive and profitable estate; but we are eager to attain them at the cost of anxiety, of danger, and of lost honour, personal freedom, and time; so true it is that each man regards nothing as cheaper than himself.” — Seneca
As peppered with prophets as history is, I’ve always wondered why and when exactly prophets went out of style. I used to think we smartened up to the lofty promises of all-knowing messengers, but then I looked inside my podcast app — with all my subscriptions to advice peddlers. I realized our need for prophets has just taken a more personal and convenient form.
I won’t seriously knock anyone’s personal Jesus. Following others can be a step in serious progress, and was for me. But there’s a confusing moment when this type of self improvement becomes more synonymous to bacteria than to medicine.
The Self Improvement Fallacy
“What better way of avoiding work than going to a workshop? But what I hate even worse is the word support.” — Steven Pressfield, Turning Pro
There’s a mostly unchallenged notion amongst the self improvement community that if it’s in the name of self improvement, it must be good for you. Some say “stand on the shoulders of giants!” Others say “always be sharpening the sword!” And still others say “avoid mistakes others have made!” And I say that these tweetables sneakily cross-function as enablement for what I call the Self Improvement Fallacy.
Self Improvement Fallacy: The fear to self-embark dressed up as the incessant pursuit of self-improvement. A word made up by Matt.
I’d be willing to bet a large amount of money, if I had it and if it was provable, that most people who eat Wheaties on a regular basis are quite overweight and un-athletic. Maybe it’s because of who Wheaties attracts — people predisposed to finding no way out of being unfit — or maybe it’s because Wheaties persuades them of some magical undoing per heaping tablespoon of dried stuff.
Either way, Wheaties is not what makes the difference.
The Wheaties Fallacy, the Self Improvement Fallacy, call it what you want. Steven Pressfield calls it being an Amateur — someone who disguises sabotage with incessancy. In his potent book “Turning Pro” he re-tells a dream that prompts a question worth asking ourselves every single day:
“She was a passenger on a bus. Bruce Springsteen was driving. Suddenly Springsteen pulled over, handed Carol the keys, and bolted. In the dream, Carol was panicking. How could she drive this huge rolling Greyhound? By now all the passengers were staring. Clearly no one else was gonna step forward and take charge. Carol took the wheel. To her amazement, she found she could handle it […] A dream like that is real support. It’s a check you can cash when you sit down, alone, to do your work.”
And so what would you do? How would you improve your life if the self-improvement prophets suddenly handed you the keys and left? Pretend Tim Ferriss, Gary V, or whoever you rely on for answers did what all great teachers actually do — they shut up and left you to it.
On the ascent to top performance may sit that story and that question. And at the pinnacle of performance lies mastery — improvisation, self sufficiency, creativity, and eventually the untried cross-breeding of ideas — all rolled up into your earned ability to get something done and be original.
It sounds like a delicious place to be. And if we want to taste it we’ll have to some day ditch the consumerist strain of self improvement, unsubscribe to most of our personal prophets, and go at it. We’ll have to graduate.
Despite all the wondrously inspiring hype that comes from someone like Gary V, and some of it is truly amazing, he does give you a useful hint of what devouring his content can become — escapism. Not graduating. Not self embarking. But if you knew that, you’d stop consuming him.
Please, check the blogs, blabs, instagrams, twitters of your favorite self helper all you want. And then at some point I hope you’re doing what all doers do — disavow escapism, wage a defensive against the Self Improvement Fallacy, and close out those shitty listicles.
“A teacher is never a giver of truth — he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself. A good teacher is merely a catalyst.” — Bruce Lee
EL FIN
If you’ve missed my point and think I’m a hypocrite, imagine how wonderfully confused you’ll be if you pressed recommend, and shared this article.
