For gods' sake

[cyrano]

I've been reading a lot of self help books lately, because I need a lot of help.
One of the commonly recurring themes is that they ask you to think of the universe as an orderly directed plan instead of a cold place that doesn't care about you and will crush you if you step into its path.
Which is all good and fine, except that (a) most of the reasons why they tell you to do this boil down to 'because it makes you feel better' rather than 'because it might be true'. A lot of their support is full of confirmation bias and the 'cold reading' skills that get used by people talking to your dead relatives from beyond the grave. (Example: Have you ever been thinking of somebody and had them call you at that moment? That's proof that there's a god or something. Except, how many times have you been thinking of somebody and they *didn't* call you?)
I know that, in theory, I'm reading these books and I can take what's useful and leave the rest. But it gets underneath my saddle and irritates me. I Will Try Harder.

Comments

[gconnor.livejournal.com]

One that I really liked and keep coming back to is Seven Habits of Effective People (Steven Covey). He writes near the beginning that there is a huge difference in self-help literature in the US, between the first two hundred years, and the last 50 years. Something like, the older ones are all about hard work, building character, and doing something you can take pride in, and the more recent stuff is more focused on the cult of personality and how to win friends and influence people (basically manipulation).

There is a lot of cult recently around this "visualization is creation". It's true that fortune favors the prepared, but I think wild success requires many things to go right and be executed correctly in order to come together. But I don't plan on spending more time visualizing an improbable success than actually working on stuff. I will put faith in my own skills and work to improve them, and I will spend time cultivating great relationships with living people. I'm not planning to spend cycles on imaginary friends or dead relatives :)

[missroserose]

^^Seconding the recommendation on Seven Habits. I read the "for teens" version back when I was in the target audience, and a lot of what it had to say about taking responsibility and being proactive rather than reactive has resonated with me throughout the years.

I'm genuinely torn on "The Secret" and other similar 'visualization is creation' books. It's a very real human tendency to focus on one particular solution (often an improbable one), and completely ignore other possible options despite there being plenty of them; like your friend on LJ said, there's a lot of value in learning to clearly define what you want and open your mind to alternative possibilities. But the cultish level to which a lot of people take it (up to and including the "The Universe Loves You And Wants You To Be Happy" paradigm) turns me off more than a bit. I don't know if the universe is cold and uncaring, but it definitely has a sense of inertia, and fighting against it will get you pretty much nowhere. Most of my life successes, in the shorter term, have come from examining my personal tendencies and my surrounding environment and figuring out how to align myself with that inertia rather than against it; in the longer term, from finding ways to change my environment (social environment, physical environment) to one that suits me better and will support me in things I want to do.