I used to really be into self-improvement, self-help, positive psychology, etc. Now not so much. What changed?
My model is that I learned all I could from the genre. There's a lot of great stuff in there to learn, and I still pick up little bits from folks all the time. But there's a broad set of skills self-improvement stuff is trying to teach you, and you have to see a lot of it before the big deep insights really seep into your bones.
I was on a self-help kick for something like 12 years before I was really done with it, and probably the last 4 of those years were the most intense. Started because my life was a bit of a mess and GTD offered some solutions. It helped, and then I kept doing things that helped more until I discovered that the literature was out of stuff it hadn't already taught me, and I had to go look elsewhere to continue down whatever path I was on (this is what ultimately led me to zen).
I'm not so sure you need to worry so much about self-help being a trap. It can be for some people, but the very act of questioning whether you're in some kind of local maxima is itself evidence of doing the work needed to find your way off the current peak and onto a higher one.
Thanks for the thoughts, that all makes sense.
I especially like the point about it being a sort of genre with overarching, big-picture ideas that starts to become less useful once you've picked up those big-picture ideas. In that Chris Voss episode of the Lex Friedman podcast some of the big-picture ideas I was hearing were the power of empathy, paraphrasing, and the idea that people are the hero of their own story.
It's a little hard to remember and pick out which things I got from self-help vs. other places, but here's a quick guess at what some of the big ideas are:
There's probably more stuff. I wrote a lot about it on my blog and Facebook as I was going through it. That's all here now on Less Wrong. It's probably not everything but I've got some stuff I left behind for folks.
I spend a lot of time on self-improvement related things. For example, I listen to a lot of podcasts like Lex Friedman, Peter Attia and Andrew Huberman. In fact, I just finished listening to Lex's episode with expert negotiator Chris Voss.
Why do I do this? Well, it feels good. Why does it feel good? Because it feels productive. I learn new things.
For example, in the episode with Chris Voss I learned that it is good to get the other side in a negotiation to say "that's right". It means that they feel listened to. Understood. You've passed the intellectual turing test. Once they reach this point, they'll be more flexible. And it goes beyond negotiating. Voss mentioned that when Trump speaks, he evokes a very strong sense of "that's right" from his supporters.
Learning about this concept made me feel pretty good. It gave me that dopamine hit. But I am a little skeptical that it, for lack of a better term, should have.
Basically, I don't actually think that it will help me achieve better outcomes. Maybe it will prove useful a few times[1], but I just don't think it'll do that much for me. And yet it generates a pretty strong feeling of satisfaction.
Why is this feeling of satisfaction stronger than what my prediction of the concepts usefulness would imply? I can think of a few reasons that apply, to varying degrees, to both myself and others.
For myself, 4 screams out as being the dominant factor. It seems to be composed mostly of 3, some 1 and a small amount of 2. For others, the sense I get is that 1 > 2 > 3 > 4 but I don't feel too strongly about it.
It goes beyond just using it in a negotiation of course. It improves my model of the world and this improved model may prove useful in some other context. Still, I'm skeptical. ↩︎
To the extent that this is true, self-improvement should probably be viewed more conspicuously. ↩︎