Self-help books suck. Here's something better
On history class and biographies and Ken Griffey Jr.
I freaking hated history class in school....but I love history.
How's that work?
If there was class I always dreaded, it was history class. Thing is: I absolutely adore learning about history. Hello irony.
The problem? Most history books, especially history textbooks usually suck.
So so so many of the history books I read when I was younger were basically just who did what to who, when.
When I start hearing about what Britain did in response to Germany after Italy invaded Ethiopia...
Boring.
The reason: there's no people. With no people, there's no story. Even though there are lives at stake, lives lost.
Here's a better version of that same story:
Churchill sat behind his desk, slightly obscured beneath a cloud of smoke. He listened in silence before he slammed his fist down on his desk, startling everyone in the room. With their attention on him, he proceeded to look each man in the room in the eyes and said, slowly: "Hitler will go no farther."
Which one makes you remember more?
The one with the human in it. That's all history is.
Humans acting, individually or in large numbers.
There's a lot to be learned from history but only if it's told in the right way and that requires a story.
The Single Essay that Made me the Person I am Today
I excavated my old college notes recently. They were where all college notes go to die:
My mom's basement.
It was fun digging through all the old essays I’d written. It was real proof that showed me how much I've grown as a writer (and I'm a much better editor).
I bring this up because I came across a copy of one of my favorite pieces I read in college. It was written by literary critic and man-whose-name-definitely-sounds-like-he's-a-critic, Kenneth Burke.
It's called "Literature as Equipment for Living" and it was only upon finding that essay that I realized that I've been talking about that essay for years now and it really had a profound effect on how I write, think, and create.
The essay is available for free online, so if you want to read it, I'm not stopping you. For the purposes of this conversation, I'll highlight the important points here.
Burke talks about how proverbs, those old folksy sayings, are a medicine of sorts. They're made to "treat something" and fit into categories based on the ill they're trying to treat.
Here's a few examples of what he means. Proverbs can be used for...
...Consolation: "the sun does not shine on both sides of the hedge at once"
...Vengeance: "At length, the fox is brought to the furrier"
...Foretelling: "Red sun at night, sailors delight"
And so on.
But, if proverbs are "strategies for dealing with situations", isn't literature just proverbs writ large?
Literature also helps us take a "typical, recurrent situation" that arises frequently and shows the outcome based on decisions made by the characters in a way that's simply not possible in life. When we read a work of literature, we get quickly sucked into the story. The experiences of the characters stand in for our own experiences.
The Plague of Self-Help
I've read so many self-improvement, self-help, self-transformation books that I should be absolutely fucking perfect.
But I'm not. I consider myself a permanent work in progress.
Still, I do love me some self-help books. I've gotten some really great insights out of them and have several of my shelves dedicated to getting better.
But as much as I love them, there's a huge problem with them.
They are a band-aid for a bullet wound.
Sure, it'll do something, maybe. But it won't be until you dig out the hunk of metal that you're actually going to be able to heal.
Same thing goes for trying to fix your own life with just one more self help book.
Going back to Burke:
"We usually take it for granted that people who consume our current output of books on "How to Buy Friends and Bamboozle Oneself and Other People" are reading as students who will attempt applying the recipes given. Nothing of the sort...
What he wants is easy success; and he gets it in symbolic form by the mere reading itself.
To attempt applying such stuff in real life would be very difficult, full of many disillusioning difficulties"
Yet that's exactly what you need to do. You need to understand that any sort of success, any sort of creative effort and output, any sort of improvement will be full of disillusioning difficulties.
Take whatever issue is plaguing you right now and there's likely no one-quick-fix that'll work here.
It takes experience.
Sometimes you can even borrow the experience.
Why You Should Read More Biographies
Earlier this year, I went to Nashville for a conference hosted by The Copywriting Club.
It's packed with people who love nothing more than writing, reading, writing about reading, reading about writing, and talking about it.
One of my favorite things I heard was a presentation by videographer and really awesome dude Jude Charles.
(Also, he just wrote an awesome book. You should read it.)
Anyway.
In Nashville, he shared his own relationship with biographies. He's a guy after my own heart, loves to read, and finishes at least 60 a year. But when things got tough, there were no self-help books that were helping dig him out of that dark place he was in.
So he started reading biographies.
And slowly but surely, it helped.
Why?
Biographies are not one-size-fits-all, generic advice like a history textbook or an algorithm (IF you wake up at 5 am, THEN you'll be successful).
Instead, the biographies he read were full of real people, living real lives, and taking real action.
But he didn't just read the biography and sit around and wait for it to fix things. Jude took advice from them. He experimented and applied them to his life, his work, and his business.
There's the second part of the equation:
He also took action.
Massive, transformative action.
Motion is not Progress
One of my favorite baseball players growing up was Ken Griffey Jr.
Partly because he was amazingly Hall-of-Fame-level good even early on in his career. Partly because he was so cool.
Partly had a video game that I loved for the N64.
He has a quote that I have up on my wall. It goes:
"Just because I made it look easy doesn't mean that it was and you don't work hard and become a Hall of Famer without working day in and day out."
Books may tell you what to do or even how to do it. It doesn't stand it for actually doing it.
If you read any biography, there's going to be one consistency to every story no matter who it is focused on, Maya Angelou, Steve Jobs, or Charles Bukowski.
In every single case, the biography is going to be a story about a person who did something great because they took action.
There's this concept in philosophy that Jaeggi describes as the false idea that there is some "true" self at our core that's always there.
She writes:
"The authentic or true self is something located somewhere inside.
It exists independently of whether it is expressed, of whether it is realized in actions or externally manifested in other ways.
The self we are capable of falling away from somehow has a substantial essence that exists prior to and remains the same, independently of what it does."
A simpler way of imagining this is what Frederic Jameson labels as the "container model of self".
Who does this refer to?
It's the writer who doesn't write, the painter who doesn't paint, the banker who claims they're really a musician at heart yet hasn't played their guitar in years.
We so often can delude ourselves into thinking that the motion we're taking stands in for the goals we really want to achieve.
Our choices and our actions make up our story of who we are and where we're going.
Buying the book isn't the same as reading the book which isn't the same as taking action.
So, Dear Reader, I want you to think about the thing you're not taking action on today.
What would change if you took the smallest, next, best possible action?