YOU BUY ME, I SELL YOU !

Disclaimer: This is written only based on my perceptions and does not completely fit with the readers. So kindly have that in mind and get back to it.

No human being is free from asking for help from anybody. Everyone requires help from someone no matter what. But what if you sort out your problem on your own without seeking help face to face? Are there any ways for it? In what means do you seek help on your own? There are means to attain motivation like through reading books, watching videos, and so on. One among the countless means is the habit of reading self-help books.

I’ve always been an enthusiast of self-help books because I am incessantly jonesing for never-ending motivation and I believe that it is viable by disbursing every penny of mine in buying self-help books. I perceive to conquer all those who hurt me or made me feel dejected after reading self-help books because it is going to transfigure and reconstruct me into an inconceivable being with the verge to attain success. I relate my circumstance with the book I prefer to read. So when I feel betrayed I preferred to read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, when I had a breakup in my relationship I preferred Jen Sincero’s You Are A Badass, when my mind was disturbed and distanced I preferred Joseph Murphy’s The Power of your Subconscious mind, when I planned to mint money and become an entrepreneur I preferred to read Marian Frances’s “A Die to Make a Mint of Money”, and when I planned for a serene and peaceful positivity boosting mood, I read Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. So out of all the ways, I chose to read a book and held it in my hands as a tool to immerse myself in transformation.

So I take my wallet, run to a book store, hunt for the most fascinating title that magnifies my adrenaline rush and then I purchase it. Once I read it I feel enlivened that I am very robust now and can break the mountains into two with my tenacity. What happens next, again I pick my wallet, run to the book store and then hunt for a fancy motivational title and then buy it, get back home and read it and feel the same and this never ends until the consumerist attitude of the seller surfeits my cash. But did all these really pay me with intense motivation that I actually needed for?

Well, the truth is NO. That does not mean the purpose of reading the book was a waste of time.  The book and the words in it made me feel what maya is. I perceived that I am now totally a different person and I am very confident and fearless to attempt something in my life and gives a meaning to it. It did make me wake up early, notice what people say and do, remain silent and become more observant, maintain a routine and look good. But the question here is how long did it go on. To be honest, this went on only for a week until I got another book and adapted to those written on it. So what was the problem here? The problem here is that I forced myself to live with the words written in the book and practice something that I was not familiar with and which worked well for some other person. I felt the presence and the josh until I realized that I am busily engaged with all these lifelessly. All that these books advocate is the tiresome and repetitive life without scrutinizing what is really going on with you. Those who are addicted in getting these books ultimately tend to get them obsessively while the writers simply hook you up with their product and you in turn will tell a whole lot others in dire need of motivation and evince others that you have read this particular person’s product and do not tend to work with it. 

Of course there is a glance of "optimistic movement" observed from the side of the writer to ameliorate the society. Although learned optimism can help you in a way for self development, an individual must also be made to face pessimistic things in his life in order to become a complete being with purpose. Only if there is a negative side, can there be a positive side thought of. So in this case, the self-help books simply motivates the reader making him ignorant of his circumstances and let him do what suits him and succeed with it. These books makes the readers to believe that they can procure their dreams but all that the readers do is to just dream and not do anything else. This mechanism feels to keep you on track but in reality you diverge from yours and meet some other needs that were not at all applicable/ required to you. Having examples is good but that should not be fixated in your mind and glue your mind accordingly instead it has to improvise your thinking and the quality of your life. The self-help books have to make you think and find an answer instead of providing a set of measures to lead your life in this society to reach the position you desire for.

Also the notion of the readers has to be analysed. The main objective of self-help books are to deliver optimistic ways and this is the main reason for readers to have a consistency to buy new books every time they get dissatisfied with one book and resume to buy more and more books on this genre which represents addiction. Some people are interested in understanding the concepts that are basic for succeeding in businesses and earning money in easy ways. There are numerous advertisements made in this case where the buyers are manipulated and are forced to slow pace their curiosity. Each individual is different and not all the steps they mentioned works for you. Okay now let’s look on the process and leave aside my own life.

So, what really happens?

Most self-help books are repetitive and consist of unsophisticated arguments with its content making the writer to sell their dreams to help out the audience by providing ways to seek to become a better person. They literally target their readers and analyse the on-going issue that is their goal to hook up them with their products. These books show how a poor living person transformed into a superhuman with all the luxuries and good life. This method is called “attracting the readers” where they simply attract by using catchy and fancy terms that catches up the minds of the readers to make them think about it, but not broadly. These writers simply funnel the readers into numbers and are not really considerate to fulfill your notions and make you a prey. They fail to provide the exact facts and try to project fake causations for correlations with science just to create a scene that they are providing a shred of evidence, but in reality they demonstrate pseudo-scientific facts. And as I pointed out before, these books showcase easy and concise solutions to the complicated problems that are different with each human being. The obsession over self-help books might trigger to be unproductive and lets the reader to just dream about his ambition instead of literally working for it. Most of them being philosophical do not apply to today’s scenario and leaves the readers to figure out which way they can go towards. All that is accumulated after reading self-help books is nothing but theoretical knowledge that the reader is still clueless about how to apply it practically. One thing that every self-help book fails to say is that success is a result of “TAKING ACTION”.  The words used simply sinks in the minds and the writers take responsibility for these where all they get is money, fame and success. In what and how do I take action remains a mystery for the readers and gets seeded subtly in the reader’s minds. These are the dark sides of the self-help and self-improvement books that have to be investigated before the reader strives to buy a book.

I would like to seed this thought or an opinion to anyone who is reading this blog and would like to conclude with a quote by Robert Harris, “All good books are different but all bad books are exactly the same. I know this to be a fact because in my line of work I read a lot of bad books - books so bad they aren't even published, which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published. And what they all have in common, these bad books, be they novels or memoirs, is this: they don't ring true. I'm not saying that a good book is true necessarily, just that it feels true for the time you're reading it.”