(upbeat music)
- Okay, look, I know what you're saying.
You're saying, "You don't understand, Mark.
"You don't get it, this book changed my life.
"Hell, your fucking book changed my life."
Look, I've got books I love too, okay?
Now sure, self-help books can help,
but I think people mistake what they're actually doing.
So let's start with a point
that is kind of obvious to self-help critics,
but not so obvious to those of us
who are into these types of books.
And that's this, that there is nothing new
really being said in any of them.
Sorry, maybe you should have, you know,
put a big trigger warning on that.
But let's be real, there's nothing new in self-help,
and I'll prove it.
Here's a question,
what was self-help called before it was self-help?
(clock ticking)
Give up?
Religion, philosophy.
Most of the advice that we're all consuming
when we buy these books,
whether it's on how to be more compassionate,
less anxious, more humble and grounded, more productive,
more honest, and vulnerable.
These things have been covered
for thousands of fucking years
from Buddha and Jesus, to Plato and Seneca,
to Adam Smith and Benjamin fucking Franklin,
to Nietzsche and Freud,
pretty much nothing you find on a self-help shelf is new.
And that's fine because what does change,
and what does matter is the packaging.
That might sound a little bit disparaging,
but packaging it turns out, is incredibly important
that's because humans are weird with advice.
Let me ask you this, how many times in your life
have your parents told you to do something,
and you completely ignored them?
And then like three months later
your friend tells you to do the exact same thing,
and you're like, "Oh my God, that's fucking brilliant."
See, our receptivity to ideas and advice
largely has to do with the context in which we receive it.
Who is giving the advice,
how we're feeling when we receive the advice?
And yes, how the advice is framed and explained.
Some people wanna feel like they're receiving advice
from an authority like a doctor, or professor, or preacher.
Some people wanna feel like they're receiving advice
from a friend, another person
who's just as fucked up as they are,
but has lived through it to tell about it,
you know, like this guy.
Some people wanna feel like they're receiving advice
from some ancient wisdom,
whether it's an old dead Greek guy,
or some shamanic law passed down through the ages,
or a guru who spent his whole life
meditating in the Himalayas.
Some people wanna feel like
they're receiving it from the future,
some people want to feel like
they're receiving it from the past.
Some people want to feel like
they're receiving it from someone famous.
Some people want to feel like they're receiving it from God.
Self-help exists,
not because this information isn't already out there,
it just hasn't been evenly distributed.
By repackaging timeless wisdom and basic human knowledge,
these ideas can get distributed
to more people than ever before.
Now, here's the most important point,
and if you get anything from this video, it should be this.
Self-help ideas are what I call simple but difficult,
i.e. they are easy to understand,
but really fucking difficult to actually go do.
Now, this is the complete opposite
of most other hard things in life.
Studying for biology exam is not simple,
it's actually very complex,
but the physical act of sitting down
and opening a book is quite easy.
Figuring out how to cook a gourmet meal is not simple,
it's very complicated, has a lot of different steps,
but the physical act of actually doing it
is not that hard, it's easy.
Self-help is inverted in this way.
Breaking up with your partner,
is actually really, really simple.
You literally just say,
"I don't want to be with you anymore."
But holy fucking shit balls, is it difficult.
Who knew eight words could be so impossible?
Similarly, dealing with a panic attack
is technically quite simple, you just breathe.
But for whatever reason in that moment,
it is unbelievably difficult to actually do it.
Or let's take the mother of all self-improvement goals,
losing weight, it's not fucking rocket science,
you eat some vegetables,
you lift the weight, you go for a run.
Yet, pretty much none of us do it regularly.
This is because self-help problems
are not intellectual problems like studying for an exam,
or physical problems like figuring out how to cook food.
They are emotional problems, and emotional problems
tend to appear extremely simple on the outside,
like just eat a fucking vegetable.
But on the inside it feels like
we're climbing Mount Everest.
This is where the packaging of self-help comes in,
the way ideas are packaged can do a lot
to alleviate the emotional difficulty
of these problems in the short run.
Take Victor Frankl's book, "Man's Search for Meaning,"
maybe my favorite self-help book of all time.
If you're being objective,
it doesn't really say anything new.
The entire book can basically be boiled down
to the famous Nietzsche quote,
"A man who has a why, can bear almost any how."
Nietzsche quote is similarly,
just the regurgitation of Aristotle's beliefs
around eudaimonia, that happiness can only be achieved
when we're serving some higher purpose.
That's an idea that goes back 2,500 years,
and it's one of the foundational ideas
of "The Nicomachean Ethics," a book that is so boring,
about as fun as eating a plate of glass.
But Frankel, ugh sure, he's saying the same thing,
but this dude lived through the fucking Holocaust.
His whole family died,
and he came out the other end and still thrived.
That is nuts, that is some crazy powerful packaging.
You read that book and you start thinking,
"Oh my God, what excuse do I have?"
And that's great,
that's some really, really, really good stuff for a while
because here's the thing,
that ability to lean into emotionally difficult things,
to push your comfort zone, it's a skill,
we have to develop it over time.
And while a book can give you a burst of motivation
to lean into that difficulty in the short-term,
it can't do it for you in the long-term.
You can't magically get that skill from a book,
or a seminar, or hell, even a video like this.
You have to go and do it yourself.
So that first great self-help book is amazing,
it's wonderful, it's life-changing.
Gave you the courage to go do X, Y, and Z,
and blah, blah, blah, and great,
your life's been changed forever.
Then life gets tough again,
and you need to learn something else
that's simple but difficult.
So you read another book, and it helps a little or a bit.
So maybe you need to go back
and read your favorite book again.
And that helps just a little,
but not as much as you'd like it to,
not as much as the first time.
So then you get on YouTube
and you watch some assholes videos
about book recommendations, and buy a dozen more books.
And this is where self-help books
can actually start to suck.
And the reason is, "Learning can feel like progress
"even when it's not progress."
You know, say that again for everybody sitting in the back,
"Learning can feel like progress
"even when it's not progress."
Like I can read a dozen books about nutrition,
and feel like I'm focusing on improving my health
while eating a pizza and drinking a beer.
This is what I see time and time again
with people in the self-help space,
they begin to use learning as a replacement for doing.
They keep thinking, "Well, maybe the next book
"will make this, simple but difficult thing,
"feel less difficult"
And it doesn't, so they try another book,
and another, and another, and on and on it goes.
Market research in this industry finds that
on average a person who buys one self-help book,
will end up buying seven more, and that's on average.
If self-help books worked,
you wouldn't need a dozen fucking books,
you just need the one.
So while self-help starts out as a solution,
it can quickly become another part of the problem,
another way to avoid our struggles
instead of actually dealing with them.
By the way, this is why I built a bunch of courses
based on practical real-world exercises
instead of just me yammering and yammering
for dozens of hours.
And this is why most people would rather read a book,
than actually do those exercises.
This is also why I'd like to eventually move this channel
into more activity, real world-based videos
rather than just simply talking to you.
Because while talking is great, and sharing ideas is great,
it doesn't necessarily help you do anything.
Or if it does, it can only help for so long.
So that is going to be my goal for 2023
to reinvent the personal development genre on YouTube a bit,
to challenge you guys and challenge myself
to do more, to actually get out and do shit.
So stick around,
things are gonna get a little bit spicy around here,
but that's where the best breakthroughs happen.
- All right.
(upbeat music)