My college professor used to constantly recall the difference between information and knowledge. Information is any piece of content that exists in this world. It could be videos, textbooks, articles, research papers, conversations, games, yadda yadda. Knowledge is when you apply it. In essence, information is steel and knowledge is sharpening it into a sword. Information is wood and knowledge is shaping it into a bench. Information is useless without it being applied as knowledge.
If you're a fan of non-fiction, you’ve probably come across countless tales weaving endless magic on how you can become a better person by waking up early, going to the gym, eating healthy, dreaming big, following your passion, getting the rupees and living that life in the big mansion you earned from all these healthy practices. This is the biggest piece of fiction that the self-help industry propagates like crazy. It's bigger than anything that JK Rowling or PB Shelley could've composed. What people need to understand about today's society is that it’s mostly dominated by business motives. Anything you do, however good or bad, is not entirely deviated from capitalistic intentions. It’s not wrong to make profits, but it’s what those profits are made out of that is the concern. Social media channels make profits by selling your attention. But the self-help industry makes profits out of something more concerning.
It sells you a life of impossibility as a possibility, reinforces yourself as being inadequate, and hooks you onto self-help literature as if it’s a "good drug" to consume. Let me elaborate.
Reading a lot of this literature will make anyone believe that they're soon going to become great people themselves. But that’s where the problem lies. Reading it makes you believe that you WILL become a great person. But what you are now is NOT GREAT, or to be more precise, inadequate. What you are now is a mess that’s waiting to be built into something magnificent and if you don’t do anything to change it, you’ll end up living like a mess and that’s bad. Mark Manson calls it, the backward law. And the backward law is very frustrating. I used to constantly think that there was a better self of me out there and I just need to work a little bit harder on this project, on this test, on this task, and ill get there. But there isn’t a better self. It’s a never-ending quest to be better. This business notion that good is the enemy of better, and better is the enemy of best fuels the backward law in your personal life. Reading self-help literature acts as an ego boost and endlessly chasing the fictional life built by it makes it worse. Not. Better.
It also puts you in a spiral. Just like drugs. The more you take it, the more you believe that you'll be good, and if you don’t do the work, you avoid it by hopping on to the next self-help book. It's endless hopping until you realize it's hopping that’s endless. Get it?
A lot of the self-help books have the same trend of topics. You can make good friends if you do these tactics. You can become richer by following these steps. You can achieve any goals you want if you follow these plans. But you can’t. Humans naturally move into entropy, and denying that is like denying the elephant in the room.
How to resolve it? A few pieces of self-help advice-
Take information diets. Not everyone is trying to be a content creator or a blog writer that has to constantly go through several pieces of self-help literature in order to complete a short blog that satisfies this capitalistic machinery. Not everyone. Not every piece of content you read is useful. Not every piece of the self-help pie needs to be consumed. Im not denying self-help is entirely useless, it can be useful. What’s useful is what you need in your life, right now. If you have money and want to know what to buy, read Napoleon Hill or Morgan Housel. Don’t read it when you’re broke it’s kind of pointless. Thus, use the self-help information that is relevant, and it becomes knowledge. Until it’s not relevant, take that diet.
STOP depending on self-help books for your problems. They're not the solutions for everything. Sure they provide valuable insights and make you go "aha", but that’s it. It won't help you reach your goals. In order to start with goals, you need to bridge something called as the intention-behaviour gap. It states that there’s a difference between what we want to do and what we actually do. After you realize what you want, you can then start by making concrete plans of action for the same, without any self-help books needed.
Lastly, it’s ok to be a mess. Marcus Aurelius used to say when the mind puts a command to the body, it follows it. But when the mind puts a command to the mind, it resists it. It's alright to be a mess sometimes. It’s alright to not wake up in time. It’s alright to not eat your veggies. It is ok. You might not be Nelson Mandela, but you don’t have to be. You can be you, you can be the mess that you are, and it’s alright. Love comes not from knowing the good sides but from acknowledging your bad sides and embracing them. Henceforth, love thyself.
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