Behold the Stars

When did you read your last self help book?  Great stuff, huh?  I’m sure you devoured it, ingesting the great sense of Possibility it gave you. You just knew that if you were to follow author’s instructions, your life would get so much better.  And for a few days, you felt pretty good about things. You can do it! Go you!  Rah! Rah!

But what did you actually do with the material?  Did you work your way, chapter by chapter, through all the exercises? I suspect not. Did you mean to work your way through?  Of course.  So just what did you do? You did the first exercise (which was tougher than you expected), started the second, and intended to do the rest, but…. Yeah, I know. You’re just like me.

The problem with many of those books is that they are a system, and systems are hard to implement.  Fifteen chapters of in-depth writing about yourself is pretty tough.    It worked well for the psychologists who wrote the books; their clients were paying them to come week in and week out. It doesn’t, though, work for most of us, and it didn’t work for many of their patients. Most of us are a little spotty when it comes to self analysis anyway.

We don’t live our lives by systems, any more than we speak and write by grammar. Systems can be handy, but the reality is that life is much more abstract and unpredictable than any system (a simplification of “reality”) can possibly handle. We’ve all met people who live with systems. Not the most flexible people in the world, always trying to force the round peg of life into the square hole of their systems. This is not to say that these books are all bad. On the contrary, they often tools and tips that can make our lives better.

What we’re going to focus on in this blog are things that you can try today – without having to redesign your entire life. We’ll still review books, because many books are filled with great ideas, but it will all be with the purpose of discovering the little tweaks that can make our lives better.

 So try one thing. Read one book.  If it doesn’t resonate with you, pass it by; if it does, give it a try. What can it hurt?