Here's the real reason why the stuff you read in self-help books just doesn't stick.
The stuff you read in self-help books works—but only for those primed to implement advice consistently and long-term.
That's not you; at least not yet. An initial identity transformation has to occur for such advice to stick.
I end the article with some advice on how this can be done (i.e. what has worked for me).
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On the surface, your life looks ok.
You have a roof over your head. You get to eat. You go to work or school, you do the exact bare minimum to get by, usually at the last second. You play some of this and watch some of that. You go to bed and repeat.
On a deeper level, you know ‘ok’ is nowhere near good enough. There’s something missing. You want more out of life. You yearn to break out of your routines and habits; out of your rut.
You yearn to get disciplined.
This is normal. This is good.
So you seek some inspiration and perhaps a few tactics or a method to follow. You find a post on this subreddit that recommends a self-help book. It provides you with amazing ways of seeing things, with smart tactics to break bad habits and clever ways to cajole you into starting up good habits.
You feel inspired and optimistic.
You go a day without engaging in your vices. Then two. You manage to work for a few hours on your side-project, despite some mental resistance. You even manage to go to the gym and cook a healthy meal.
But, well… eventually… inevitably… understandably, your resolves softens a bit.
“I should have a little reward. I deserve it. Look. 5 minutes on Reddit, check what’s new, get it out of my system, then we can get back to work.”
So you give in a bit.
It’s fine. The content was fresh; quite good actually. No harm, no foul.
As the hours go on however, you find yourself using more and more of those mini excuses. You rationalize that you simply need breaks and rewards to help make it through the struggles of living this new life of effort, sacrifices and discipline… of delaying gratification for some distant goals.
Before you know it though, somehow, it spirals out of control. By the end, you wind up spending an entire weekend binging on Netflix, YouTube and junk food. You’re back to being stressed and anxious and, naturally, you come down on yourself really hard.
Eventually though, you pick yourself back up and you dust yourself off, then you start over. Onto the next book.
Around and around you go. For weeks, months and now years.
This is the cycle of self-help, and I know how brutal it can be when things fall apart. I wish we all had twins to serve as a control, but I’d bet we’d all be better off if we never bothered trying to get better.
I actually have a theory as to why this happens to us. I call it the “Spaceship Analogy”.
So it takes a lot of the fuel to get a spaceship to reach its destination—100s of thousands of gallons.
But, as you probably know, most of the fuel is actually consumed at lift off; at getting the giant metal tube thing to accelerate from 0 to an escape velocity of 11 km per second (just picture something going that fast) while pushing against gravity and the dense hot friction of the atmosphere.
Once out there in vast nothingness of space, the ship’s inertia and lack of things pulling it in or slowing it down keeps it moving with hardly any fuel. If it needs to go a bit faster or course correct, a quick boost from a side thruster can make it happen.
Now, the stuff you read online or in self-help and productivity books is just like that thruster. If in your life you are already out in space—as in you are moving in some way, consistently… say you exercise regularly, you eat well and have good basic work and lifestyle habits—then all it takes is a slight nudge from new insightful advice for you to change course, go a bit faster, go a bit smarter, and reap the promised benefits of that wisdom.
But, activate that same thruster on a spaceship parked on earth and it'll barely budge.
If you are grounded in life, if you are stuck in a rut, struggling with being consistent on the simple commitments you make, struggling with basic things like controlling how much time you spend on Reddit or playing video games… struggling with eating well or exercising consistently; if you are routinely procrastinating on necessary work, let alone on the side project that’ll get you to your dream life… then any principle; any line of advice or program; any brilliant philosophy; any beneficial thing to start doing, no matter how enlightened it is, just won’t move you.
Good advice always requires you to do. It says, do this thing for a while, do it over and over, keep doing it, and eventually you’ll get that result. But if you’re not already moving; if you can’t bring yourself to do the thing, again and again over a long enough period of time; if the gravity and friction of your bad habits and lack of self-control keep you from being consistent, then it doesn’t matter how ‘good’ the advice is. You’ll always stay grounded, or worst, you’ll lift off a bit, only to come back down in a painful crash of self-contempt.
I’m not advocating against conventional self-help and productivity advice. I’m not against having a vision of a dream life and setting big goals and mapping out a process to achieve them.
That stuff is good. It’s great and it’s necessary. I’m just saying, first… first… you need to get out to space.
And to get out to space, you need something different, you need the rocket jet of a process. A process that’s hyper focused specifically on and only on defeating the gravity of cravings, compulsions and rationalizations—which, like gravity, stems from somewhere deep beneath the surface.
It goes without saying that help is essential for this. Professionals know to dig deep; to get to the core of your issues and to begin the healing and growth from in the inside out.
From there and with that support, I encourage you to carve your own path towards this identity change. But keep in mind the Spaceship Analogy, if only to allow yourself to be compassionate with yourself when you fail. Patience and understanding is essential; what you are trying to do is tough—like sending a dang metal cylinder to the moon tough—but it can be done; it has been done; you just need to be smart about it. And being kind and patient with yourself is the smartest thing you can do.
We tend to compare ourselves with others, especially the ones that make it look easy. But others do not have to contend with the same gravity and friction that you do. These are the cards you were dealt, but trust me on this, when (not if) you get through this, you will be all the more grateful for the struggle. Your suffering has abundant meaning—finding that meaning should be your life's mission. It's there for you to grow, and grow strong. Iron is forged in fire, as they say.
This is exactly what I had to learn over the years. Through the guidance of a caring social worker, I found my way to a mindfulness practice, which helped me manage my depression so I could deal with and process the pain, rather than reflexively reach for the relief of a vice. I found my way to alternate and unconventional view-points, my favorites being memoirs written by ex-alcoholics. I found these to be brutally honest, relatable, and surprisingly useful, especially on the importance of self-compassion.
My biggest piece of advice to you is patience. It took years, and countless cycles of trial and error, but I ended up patching together a method that's been working for me. It's centered on self-compassion and mindfulness, plus the notion that I will trip and fail, so I better bake that into the system. It's the free PDF on my homepage, if you're curious, but again, this is just what worked for me and I encourage you—with some good help of course—to patch together and custom fit something (or a combination of things) that works and resonates with you and your aspirations.
So I’ll end this already long article with this: the world is comprised of two types of people: natural born achievers and non-achievers. The achievers are out in space. They might have little bad habits, but they are not bogged down by addictions or a lack of motivation. Tell them to start a meditation practice for the next 2 months because this brain study showed it improves concentration, and they’ll do it. Give them a 'trick' to reduce their screen time, and it's done. Provide a process to start a business or study more effectively and they will follow-through.
Born non-achievers (and yes, I'm def in that camp) can get the best and most credible advice there is, but since it requires consistency in their actions, they always fail.
Because, here’s the thing: all that self-help stuff has been written by natural born achievers; by the type-A personalities of the world—the kind of people who’d get around to starting a blog and writing a book to begin with. Many of them don’t know the struggle. These writers might not know what it’s like get suddenly drained of all motivation and energy for no damn reason. They don’t know the pain of knowing exactly what you should do to be successful or happy or just better, but then to somehow not do it with the same tired excuses. They don’t know what depression and regret and worry feel like. If they did, they wouldn’t try to tell you to use those things to propel you to better habits.
I mean, consider this quote from Gretchen Ruben, who’s an author of a book on habits :
"People would say to me, but how did you get yourself to do these things? And then I would say, well, those are the things I knew would make me happier so I did them… but then people would be like, but how did you get yourself to do them? This was a big mystery to me. I was like... I don't know, what's so hard about that?"
I mean, c’mon.
If you want to get the most out of the advice written by and for achievers, Step 1 is to BECOME an achiever. Get that transformation to happen. Get yourself out into orbit.
- Simon ㋛