The self-help industry is roughly a 13 billion dollar industry in the U.S. right now. Whatever you want to accomplish in life, be it personal or career, there is no shortage of advice, strategies, and yes, even coaches to help you get there. But my biggest issue with this industry, the very industry I work in, is its failure to deliver on its own promises. Let me share a very familiar scenario.
A struggling business owner makes a series of choices in a last ditch effort to save the company. And what do you know, something works, and one year later the company is thriving. So now the business owner thinks, wow, I must have found the secret sauce for success. So after a year of analyzing the steps taken, finding a few anecdotes and catch phrases, and getting a good editor, suddenly the business owner is now the author of the newest how to succeed book. This book gains traction, and a couple million people are drawn into the life lessons and begin to apply the catch phrases as best as they can. Funny thing, though. Nobody seems to be able to claim quite the amount of success as the author.
Sure, some find the advice has helped navigate a few pitfalls. Others have found the lessons have reframed how they think about things. But the end effect of the book is that people fall on a normal distribution curve. A few find the success they want due to circumstances happening just right when paired with the book’s advice, most keep struggling forward in the same way they always have been, and a few find the advice leading to dismal failure and even bankruptcy because of unseen circumstances the book’s author could not have predicted.
And so it goes. Those who keep struggling forward look for the next great success to show them how to do it and repeat the same story with a new book, program, or speaker, as the hero. Do you see yourself anywhere here?
So what’s the problem? Why can’t the success be replicated as well as the first time? Well, it has to do with the process. The process of coming to the conclusions that the author has made was born from great adversity. Each chapter in the book was a result of the author facing difficult personal struggle while treading water in a massive storm. The success of the author was not in the lessons learned, but in the struggle. And this is why the advice falls relatively flat in application for the rest of us. We are using it as a means to avoid the struggle. We are using it as the easy answer. In fact, that’s how it was sold to us. “Do this, and you won’t have to face what I had to face.” That may be true, but we are not the author. So we have our own struggles to face. And whatever degree of success we may or may not find in this life is about facing those head on. True life is found in our confronting Reality and all of the complexities that come with it. It’s about living our own story, not somebody else’s.
So read the books and listen to the TED talks if that helps you. But know that the deepest truths are not going to be found there. They are for inspiration and possibility, not ultimate answers. Your real hope is in stepping into the ring with Reality and learning who you are, what your limits are, and where your trust lies. You may succeed or you may fail, but true life can not be measured by such simplistic metrics.