A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

I have what Bryon and I refer to as Self Improvement Psychosis, SIP for short. It’s this bizarre obsession with products and services in vaguely bordered realms of self-help and personal effectiveness.

It means that if I go to levengers.com I start drooling with all the notebooks, pens, 3×5 card systems, circa notebooks, desk organizers, instantpocketcardwalletpad things. I love it. I love it all. Stationary, pens, notebooks, folders, file cards, whiteboards and markers. More more more more more.

It means that if Tony Robbins comes out with another book, I’ll buy it (on the kindle if possible so I can read it in public without baiting someone to ask me about it) and eyerollingly, I’ll read it. After hundreds of these things I can wade through the patronizing tone of a lot of it (Tony’s less bad than most actually) and sift through the “Meet Grady, a 29 year old construction worker…” bullshit to find the actual juice in the book. I even have a little routine where I read the thing full through once, then go back and extract the “do this” bits.

It turns out that I have a limited threshold for the rah rah “You’re a great you!” nonsense. It’s just so bloody insincere and frankly, if “being a great me” was the goal why would I be picking up the fucking self help book there squeevis? Frankly being a better me would mean living my life in a strangely hollow stagnation for my second 40 years or so. But I digress ;-) (relax, this isn’t going to be one of THOSE posts.)

I got a recommendation for a book by Sean Stephenson called ‘Get Off your “But”‘ from… damned if I know where. The Amazon page has a half dozen 5-star reviews and I recall that they seemed to indicate it was “different.”

I glompfed it a couple nights ago for the first time through in a little less than two hours. I’ve got to say, while it fits the template of self-help book a little too well (massive proliferation of “Meet Jenny, she was stuck on her ‘but’ until she learned…”, numbered list of “steps”, big type & narrow columns for maximizing page count, etc.) In fact there really was a lot of fluff in here.

If you’re someone who hasn’t spent TOO much time in this genre (or frankly, if you’re insufficiently metacognitive) than these may all be useful devices to help get someone in the right headspace, associate with the problem that this or that technique is addressing. So I can’t ride it down too much. It does get a bit hackneyed though.

This coming week I’m going to go through and tear out the meat of it, digest it and then pick what I find useful and nonthreatening about it (which if you’ve been paying attention is why I still feel compelled to consume these things, SOME progress is fun but let’s not get crazy now.)

The actual meat in here is solid. It’s different than a lot of what I’ve read and while very little of it is news, the telling of it is quite well done.

The 6 “Lesson” chapters are:

1. Start Connecting
2. Watch What You Say To Yourself
3. Master Your Physical Confidence
4. Focus Your Focus
5. Choose Your Friends Wisely
6. Take Full Responsibility

Far better than most in this category.  Simple, practical, sometimes tough to hear advice on how to deal with self sabotage.  Yes, it’s peppered in cliche’ and deep-fried in schlock.  But the good of it is accessible and exceptionally insightful.

Yep.  4/5.  Highly recommended.

It’ll take ya 10 minutes to read it.  Good stuff.