Self-Help Review:
As A Man Thinketh
1902
By James Allen
In my last review I talked about a book who's message can be summed up in a turn of phrase that the author used in the introduction: "The mind is a terrible thing. Waste it." James Allen would beg to differ. "As A Man Thinketh" is a classic in a certain area of Self-Help which has always been in fashion, but to varying degrees. There's a whole area of Metaphysical Self-Help books which contain the message that our thoughts dictate our circumstances, and that we can get whatever the hell we want just by thinking about it long and hard enough. While the idea of "becoming your thoughts" is by no means a new one (there are instances of it in the Bible), it's popularity in Self-Help comes from it being taken away from being merely a spiritual idea to being a way to gain riches and create a happier life. Apparently Oprah's new Self-Help pet, Rhonda Byrne's "The Secret," continues in this tradition (I will be reading that one much later, as I have no intention of buying it and the number of requests from my library on that fucker extends to at least ten pages). In the course of doing research for these reviews I've stumbled across some fascinating books and authors, and it increasingly becomes clear that most modern Self-Help has just been a rewriting of older books, with the difference being the style it is written in and a taking into account current scientific discoveries to prove their validity.
James Allen didn't need science to prove he was right. All he needed was his Bible and a shitload of metaphors to deliver his message, over and over, in fifty pages. While he uses metaphor to help get his point across, he makes it very clear that a man is LITERALLY what he thinks about, and that every little thought that goes through your mind has a manifestation in your real world. If you think shitty thoughts, you will look shitty, have a shitty character, and be stuck in shitty circumstances. Even if you've somehow managed to attain wealth and be financially well-off, your shitty thoughts will come to life and destroy you. That's it. That's the book. I'm dead serious about this.
OK, so maybe there is more to the book, but not nearly enough that's worth going into here, at least not in great detail. Each chapter of this book offers a different aspect of where thought affects your life, and each chapter is too repetitive for my taste. If one metaphor will work to get his point across, Allen gives you five. Allen also happens to be very good as using metaphors, so you can forgive him for his indulgence, BUT...he promotes self-control as being a necessary virtue to become a better man, so his indulgence also shows that he is every bit as weak as the people he's giving advice to. Going over my notes I was shocked at how many times I wrote down a profound statement, only to find that they all said the same fucking thing, but in different shades. I had two pages of notes, but I could easily condense it down to a paragraph.
Lest you think I'm bashing the book, I want to state right now that I enjoyed this book and think that Allen was absolutely correct about thought and being. There's a story in the "Visions And Ideals" chapter which was so good that I read it twice, and it actually inspired my ass. Yes, it's cheesy, but it was also written in 1902, so go fuck yourself. It's about a guy working a shitty job who has dreams of refinement. His dream becomes so overwhelming that he can no longer stand the petty work he is doing, and his job "falls out of his life as a garment is cast aside." Later, because of how much he has immersed himself in his dream, it shines out of him, and he lives exactly the life he always wanted. Anyone who has known me for more than a month can understand completely why I love that story so much, and my synopsis does it no justice.
"The Power Of Positive Thinking" may be an idea that's far too Pollyannaish for modern readers, but if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Everything that goes on in our lives is open to interpretation, you can either see your circumstances as yet another instance of "The Man" keeping you down, or you can learn a lesson from it and use it to your advantage. I used to think that I was cursed because of certain situations I was in, but when I sit down and analyze it, they have ALL helped me grow up. Even my debts, a pain in my ass that I've regretted for five years now, have forced me to examine some bad habits that I have and change them. This might not have happened otherwise. If I would have continued thinking that life was shit and that everyone's an asshole, I'd probably still be writing off everything as fate. Now I know that you create your fate, and if you build it out of shit, then you get what you deserve. Plus, once you view everything in life as a test and every failure as "feedback," you really can't be all that depressed about life. You just need to think about the good shit and do more research. Is this the end of Bitter Roland???
James Allen didn't think that "As A Man Thinketh" was that great of a book, and it's success shocked him. Today it is still being read, but in modified versions. There are two fucking retarded attempts at changing it's gender-specificness, one called "As You Think" and another called "As A Woman Thinketh." I haven't read these and I'm not going to. They are transparent grabs for cash and it disgusts me. So if you have any desire to read this book, pick it up in it's original, and fuck the new versions. It's a quick read that you can do over a lunch break, so even the laziest sons-of-bitches might finish it. As for this area of Self-Help, I plan to read "Think And Grow Rich" and "The Master Key System," both of which continue in the "thoughts are things" vein. How can I balance this with what I learned from "Radical Honesty"? I have no idea, but I'm not going to think about that now.
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Sunday, March 4, 2007
Self-Help Review 5: Radical Honesty
Self-Help Review:
Radical Honesty
1996
By Brad Blanton, Ph.D.
I have always had an opinion that the smarter someone is, the more miserable they are. This theory has always been nothing more than self-indulgent drivel, and backed by no concrete evidence. My thinking is this: if you're smart, your powers of analysis are more sophisticated than those of dumb people. The more emotional situations are analyzed, the more the results come back negative, since you can always find a problem in any given situation, and emotions are not logical. When using logic to make sense out of something that makes no sense, you fall into a state of total confusion, leading to feelings of sadness and depression. After all these years, I have finally found a book that kinda sorta proves my arrogant assumptions to be true.
"Radical Honesty" is a book with a mission: The author is determined to get you to cut the crap and start telling the truth, no matter how painful you think it is. To Blanton, there is no downside to being totally honest, since holding back the truth can lead to any number of problems, and the anger you hold back will seep out in other forms that you will have no control over. What can this lead to? At this point in history, we are capable of destroying entire countries of people with very little effort, and a nation of angry, passive citizens will find a way to release these pent-up emotions in potentially life-threatening ways.
The strangest thing about this book is that even though the author continuously points out bullshit, he embraces a bizarre, almost New Age idea of who we are as humans. The "being" that we are supposed to get back to in order to be happy is who we were when we were about four or five months in the womb, when we first had the sensation of experience. It came over us slowly, like dawn, and it was a total experience of the senses. His theory is that all major religions are trying to describe this indescribable feeling, always present in our memory but impossible to put into correct words.
The enemy of our being is our mind, and the major idea of this book is that we are trapped in the prisons of our minds, and that the associations we make from life and judgements we place on those associations form our morals, and to Blanton morality is a disease which we all have. The core message is to stop analyzing life and placing judgements on it, and just live. Life doesn't make sense, our emotions don't make sense, we are all petty assholes, and striving for the best possible life is bound to create more disappointments for us. It sounds pessimistic, and Blanton even goes on to call the power of positive thinking "the biggest load of bullshit of our day," but the book's tone is optimistic and sure of it's message. Even though we can't live out our best possible life, we can certainly enjoy the life we have and have fun creating.
I don't know how much I agree with settling for a shit life if it's possible to have a better one, but I do like this book, even if I won't be taking most of it's advice. For example, Blanton promotes "abnormal honesty," which would mean if, for example, your wife/girlfriend asks you if her ass looks fat, you would not only say "yes" if it does, but go on to say, "and that is why I jerk off thinking of you're friend's ass instead of your's. I imagine sticking my tongue in her perfectly-shaped ass and it feels good cumming to that image." Now, that isn't an example from the book, but he actually does want the reader to tell their lover that they jerk off thinking of her friends if he does, and to go into as much detail as possible about what they think of and how it feels. There is no holding back, because we have no good reason for holding back. He even recommends having conversations where the two people tell each other "I resent you for" and giving every detail about the resentments, regardless of how the other person will feel. It's pretty damn hard to argue with telling the truth, and he says that you, the reader, are probably a coward and won't tell the truth in the way that he advocates. Any truth that's colored with nice language will be bullshit, and you'll still be holding back and won't receive the full benefits of telling the truth. For Blanton it's either all or nothing, and the tone of this book is appropriately angry.
Interestingly enough, even if you do tell the truth once, it doesn't matter, because another major point of this book is that the truth is always changing. Loving someone one day doesn't mean you're going to love them later, but that doesn't make your love at the beginning false. Most people I know of who has been in a shit relationship talk about their ex's like they never loved them, and that they only invested all of that time with them because they didn't know better. That's a crock. At the time, it was true that you loved them, and because it's no longer true, it doesn't mean that it was NEVER the truth. It just means that the truth changed, and the truth always changes. I've lied my ass off about my ex, but the fact is that at one point, it was true that I loved her, and no matter how much I bitched about her laziness and just in general her being a worthless cunt, I stuck up for her if anyone else commented because it was true that I loved her. Same for any reader who tries to say they never loved their ex. So we can never be finished telling the truth, because once we speak the truth, it is probably no longer true, and we have an endless amount of fuel because the mind constantly creates more bullshit for us to burn.
There are various tips and rules of thumb for telling the truth, but I won't list all of them because they are just elaborations on the main point of the book. The author recommends a variety of methods for getting back to our being and wiping clean the bullshit that our mind creates. Two recommended methods are the Landmark Education program (a group which has received lawsuits for supposed cult-like behaviors) and Transcendental Meditation, even though he tells you to ignore completely TM's advice on handling anger. He also holds truth-telling workshops, and I would probably attend one if I didn't value my own bullshit and prefer to receive the secondary payoffs I get for feeling shitty and holding back. See? Self-Help HAS helped me, because now I'm admitting my own shortcomings. Let's hear it for being fucked up!
I finished this book a few weeks ago, but I had to reread it in order to write this review. I have been content to tear through books and pump out a review because there are so many different books I want to read, and I sacrificed taking notes in order to get more done. That was a dumb idea, because when I started writing this I realized that there was a lot in this book that I was forgetting, and it was only after the second time around that it became clear. This book is repetitive, but it's a good message to have repeated to you. Even if you don't take the book's advice to the extent that the author would like, your life can only improve if you incorporate at least some of it into your life. That said, at this point this is probably the best Self-Help book I have read, and I recommend it to everyone. Just don't tell me your masturbation fantasies unless I ask.
Radical Honesty
1996
By Brad Blanton, Ph.D.
I have always had an opinion that the smarter someone is, the more miserable they are. This theory has always been nothing more than self-indulgent drivel, and backed by no concrete evidence. My thinking is this: if you're smart, your powers of analysis are more sophisticated than those of dumb people. The more emotional situations are analyzed, the more the results come back negative, since you can always find a problem in any given situation, and emotions are not logical. When using logic to make sense out of something that makes no sense, you fall into a state of total confusion, leading to feelings of sadness and depression. After all these years, I have finally found a book that kinda sorta proves my arrogant assumptions to be true.
"Radical Honesty" is a book with a mission: The author is determined to get you to cut the crap and start telling the truth, no matter how painful you think it is. To Blanton, there is no downside to being totally honest, since holding back the truth can lead to any number of problems, and the anger you hold back will seep out in other forms that you will have no control over. What can this lead to? At this point in history, we are capable of destroying entire countries of people with very little effort, and a nation of angry, passive citizens will find a way to release these pent-up emotions in potentially life-threatening ways.
The strangest thing about this book is that even though the author continuously points out bullshit, he embraces a bizarre, almost New Age idea of who we are as humans. The "being" that we are supposed to get back to in order to be happy is who we were when we were about four or five months in the womb, when we first had the sensation of experience. It came over us slowly, like dawn, and it was a total experience of the senses. His theory is that all major religions are trying to describe this indescribable feeling, always present in our memory but impossible to put into correct words.
The enemy of our being is our mind, and the major idea of this book is that we are trapped in the prisons of our minds, and that the associations we make from life and judgements we place on those associations form our morals, and to Blanton morality is a disease which we all have. The core message is to stop analyzing life and placing judgements on it, and just live. Life doesn't make sense, our emotions don't make sense, we are all petty assholes, and striving for the best possible life is bound to create more disappointments for us. It sounds pessimistic, and Blanton even goes on to call the power of positive thinking "the biggest load of bullshit of our day," but the book's tone is optimistic and sure of it's message. Even though we can't live out our best possible life, we can certainly enjoy the life we have and have fun creating.
I don't know how much I agree with settling for a shit life if it's possible to have a better one, but I do like this book, even if I won't be taking most of it's advice. For example, Blanton promotes "abnormal honesty," which would mean if, for example, your wife/girlfriend asks you if her ass looks fat, you would not only say "yes" if it does, but go on to say, "and that is why I jerk off thinking of you're friend's ass instead of your's. I imagine sticking my tongue in her perfectly-shaped ass and it feels good cumming to that image." Now, that isn't an example from the book, but he actually does want the reader to tell their lover that they jerk off thinking of her friends if he does, and to go into as much detail as possible about what they think of and how it feels. There is no holding back, because we have no good reason for holding back. He even recommends having conversations where the two people tell each other "I resent you for" and giving every detail about the resentments, regardless of how the other person will feel. It's pretty damn hard to argue with telling the truth, and he says that you, the reader, are probably a coward and won't tell the truth in the way that he advocates. Any truth that's colored with nice language will be bullshit, and you'll still be holding back and won't receive the full benefits of telling the truth. For Blanton it's either all or nothing, and the tone of this book is appropriately angry.
Interestingly enough, even if you do tell the truth once, it doesn't matter, because another major point of this book is that the truth is always changing. Loving someone one day doesn't mean you're going to love them later, but that doesn't make your love at the beginning false. Most people I know of who has been in a shit relationship talk about their ex's like they never loved them, and that they only invested all of that time with them because they didn't know better. That's a crock. At the time, it was true that you loved them, and because it's no longer true, it doesn't mean that it was NEVER the truth. It just means that the truth changed, and the truth always changes. I've lied my ass off about my ex, but the fact is that at one point, it was true that I loved her, and no matter how much I bitched about her laziness and just in general her being a worthless cunt, I stuck up for her if anyone else commented because it was true that I loved her. Same for any reader who tries to say they never loved their ex. So we can never be finished telling the truth, because once we speak the truth, it is probably no longer true, and we have an endless amount of fuel because the mind constantly creates more bullshit for us to burn.
There are various tips and rules of thumb for telling the truth, but I won't list all of them because they are just elaborations on the main point of the book. The author recommends a variety of methods for getting back to our being and wiping clean the bullshit that our mind creates. Two recommended methods are the Landmark Education program (a group which has received lawsuits for supposed cult-like behaviors) and Transcendental Meditation, even though he tells you to ignore completely TM's advice on handling anger. He also holds truth-telling workshops, and I would probably attend one if I didn't value my own bullshit and prefer to receive the secondary payoffs I get for feeling shitty and holding back. See? Self-Help HAS helped me, because now I'm admitting my own shortcomings. Let's hear it for being fucked up!
I finished this book a few weeks ago, but I had to reread it in order to write this review. I have been content to tear through books and pump out a review because there are so many different books I want to read, and I sacrificed taking notes in order to get more done. That was a dumb idea, because when I started writing this I realized that there was a lot in this book that I was forgetting, and it was only after the second time around that it became clear. This book is repetitive, but it's a good message to have repeated to you. Even if you don't take the book's advice to the extent that the author would like, your life can only improve if you incorporate at least some of it into your life. That said, at this point this is probably the best Self-Help book I have read, and I recommend it to everyone. Just don't tell me your masturbation fantasies unless I ask.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Self-Help Review 4: YOU On A Diet
Self-Help Review:
YOU On A Diet
2006
By Michael F. Roizen, M.D.
and Mehmet C. Oz, M.D.
This is one insidiously evil book.
On one hand, I have learned more about how my body works with regard to food by reading this book than I ever have with any other source. The content of this book is fantastic, and if you know nothing about how hunger works, this is a great introduction. That said, it is a book specifically designed to be popular, and as such, is jammed-packed with an equal amount of infuriatingly annoying bullshit. I respect the aim of this book, and I understand completely that if all one is given is a dry medical pamphlet reiterating the same food facts, then no one will ever take their weight seriously. This does not, however, excuse the overuse of what I call "Housewife Humor." These are jokes that seem to specifically appeal to the scores of fat-asses who spend their afternoons eating Thin Mint sugar burritos while watching Oprah. It is no surprise, then, that this book was featured on Oprah as part of it's promotion.
The book is divided up into four parts, in much the same way that those assholes at Taco Bell want to divide up our meals into four parts with their fucking RETARDED "Fourthmeal" campaign. I will describe each part and the ending Appendices in separate sections.
Part one tells us what we all know by now...that diets fail consistently and that yo-yo dieting is bad for us. No surprises here. It then goes on to say that instead of focusing on ideal weight, we need to get our waist size down to an ideal, since that is more of an indicator of health than weight. For the record, the ideal waist size for women is 32 1/2 inches, with 37 inches being the point just before your health dangers increase. For men, the ideal is 35, with 40 being the danger point. My waist size is 34, so I'm even more delicious than the average man. The majority of part one is a "pump up" to get us excited about our "waist management" journey, and it hammers away at the fact that you really need to read the chapters on how your body processes food before skipping straight to the diet and exercise plan. I agree whole-heartedly with this, as part two really fucked my head up and made me think about what the crap I stuff down my throat is doing to my innards.
Part two goes into long, painful detail about what makes us a bunch of fat-asses. I say "painful" specifically because this is the section where the book's attempts at humor are at their most excruciating. Because this part deals with science, the authors feel the need to stuff as many pop culture references as possible into the text, which is distracting and not nearly as cute as they think it is. Here's a sample; "In your brain, you react to actions: You feel love when your spouse holds your hand, mad when he forgets an anniversary, humiliated when he takes off his shirt at the Bears game and thumps his densely forested chest for a shot at being on SportsCenter." Now imagine that on EVERY PAGE. I had to check my temper so I wouldn't throw the damn book across the room, and I guess that fact that I didn't chuck it is a testament that maybe these Self-Help books are working after all. Anyhow...your body has signals you can turn on and off to activate your hunger. When you know what they are and how they work, you can eat the right foods and do the right things to manipulate" them. Also, even though it's hard, the more you actually think about the diet you're on, the more likely you are to break it. So you have to simultaneously pay attention to what you're eating and NOT think about your diet. You can do this by eating the same foods over and over, every day. This is described in more detail later in the book, so I will not go any further into that aspect of this section.
There is a ton of information in this part of the book, and I'm not going to type it all out. However, I will include this one last bit of information: Fucking kills hunger. At least, it lowers your appetite. According to the book, "Sex and hunger are regulated through the brain chemical NPY. Some have observed that having healthy sex could help you control your food intake; by satisfying one appetite center, you seem to satisfy the other." So there you go...fuck for weight loss. Just make sure your partner's clean, because all the dieting in the world wont wipe away any greenish yellow pus or bugs that'll jump and create a home on your pee-pee.
Part three deals with how you mind effects your eating. Most interesting are the "mood foods," and they break down like this: If you're angry, you eat crunchy and/or tough foods; if you're depressed, you eat anything with sugar; if you're anxious, you'll eat soft and sweet foods, such as ice cream; if you're stressed, you're eat salty foods; if you're lonely and/or sexual frustrated, you'll eat bulky foods like crackers and pasta; and if you're jealous, you'll eat anything. Other good tips include getting your seven or eight hours of sleep, eating dark chocolate, and playing video games. The rational behind the last one is that if you're playing video games, both of your hands are on the controller, and you are less likely to be eating food while playing games. This is a much shorter section and not as interesting as the last one, but there was still some good stuff in it. Sadly, the lame jokes continued.
Part four is the diet and activity plan, and the main idea is to walk at least thirty minutes every day, and work out three times a week for twenty minutes each time. They even have an exercise plan that doesn't involve weights, so fuck your gym membership excuse. Also, building muscle makes you lose weight faster, so if you want quick results, you'll have to do some kind of work out that'll tighten you up, and I mean MORE than just doing Kegels. Another good work out is doing the Yoga "Sun Salutation," and it can be good for two things; One, it's a good way to get your body in top shape to start the day; and Two, if you take a Yoga class, the women outnumber the men, so the pussy-to-penis ratio works in favor of horny men who take these classes to pick up chicks.
The diet itself, which is what everyone will be buying it for in the first place, emphasizes eating the same foods over and over again. The reason is that if you make what you eat automatic, you won't deviate and eat random shit that'll fuck up your insides. Plus, even if you eat healthy, varying your foods drastically all the time hinders your weight-loss goals, because of the extra effort that it takes inside of you to sort all that shit out. A major point in this plan that I can vouch for is eating nuts as a snack throughout the day to manage your hunger. I've been using peanuts, and because it takes longer for your body to break them down and digest them, they prevent you from being hungry all day. So eat nuts as snacks. The foods they suggest you purchase are nice, but I suspect that if you live in a small town, they're completely unreasonable. Some of the recipes look alright, though. I'll let YOU be the guinea pig and tell me how they taste.
The book ends with a look at pills and medical procedures that can be used to lose weight. Biggest news to me: You can't lose cellulite, and liposuction only works to shape areas. Something which struck me as funny was that certain antidepressants cause weight gain, so if you're depressed about being fat and take these, you'll gain more weight, get more depressed about being fat, take some more, etc. Also mentioned are the three major surgeries for fucking with your innards in order to kill your appetite. I'd go into more detail, but I don't feel like it.
Overall, I think that for what it is, it's a good book. It's fucking annoying, and you won't be reading it for pleasure, but the advice inside is worth the time. There is one major problem with the book that needs to be addressed, and it's this: The book spends way too much time going into loving detail about foods that you can't eat. It mentions donuts, cookie dough, chips, french fries, etc., all the while trying to get you to forget about them. This is just as bad as those affirmations that Wayne Dyer has in his "Inspiration" book which will have the opposite effect on you. Instead of talking about how delicious carrots and other veggies and fruits taste, they constantly mention in a joking fashion junk food. Every fucking time I read this book I wanted to eat candy, and it pissed me off. To show you how bad it got, when I was reading this book at work I decided to eat a huge slice of ice cream pie in the freezer, and I wasn't even hungry. It's pretty goddamn astounding that, with as much time as they put into studying how the mind works with regard to hunger, they would disregard that crucial piece of information.
This book is a quick read, but I suspect that if you read it at all, it won't be cover-to-cover. That said, I strongly advise you to read parts two and three, which deal with the science of hunger. These parts are filled with good information, even if the pop culture references are as annoying as Simon Cowell and Paris Hilton running a Swiffer over your face while you're trying to prevent Eva Longoria from stealing your DVD collection of Friends, Season 2. So read it, but ideally get it for free at your local library. I say this because I think you should read it, but I don't think it's worth your money.
YOU On A Diet
2006
By Michael F. Roizen, M.D.
and Mehmet C. Oz, M.D.
This is one insidiously evil book.
On one hand, I have learned more about how my body works with regard to food by reading this book than I ever have with any other source. The content of this book is fantastic, and if you know nothing about how hunger works, this is a great introduction. That said, it is a book specifically designed to be popular, and as such, is jammed-packed with an equal amount of infuriatingly annoying bullshit. I respect the aim of this book, and I understand completely that if all one is given is a dry medical pamphlet reiterating the same food facts, then no one will ever take their weight seriously. This does not, however, excuse the overuse of what I call "Housewife Humor." These are jokes that seem to specifically appeal to the scores of fat-asses who spend their afternoons eating Thin Mint sugar burritos while watching Oprah. It is no surprise, then, that this book was featured on Oprah as part of it's promotion.
The book is divided up into four parts, in much the same way that those assholes at Taco Bell want to divide up our meals into four parts with their fucking RETARDED "Fourthmeal" campaign. I will describe each part and the ending Appendices in separate sections.
Part one tells us what we all know by now...that diets fail consistently and that yo-yo dieting is bad for us. No surprises here. It then goes on to say that instead of focusing on ideal weight, we need to get our waist size down to an ideal, since that is more of an indicator of health than weight. For the record, the ideal waist size for women is 32 1/2 inches, with 37 inches being the point just before your health dangers increase. For men, the ideal is 35, with 40 being the danger point. My waist size is 34, so I'm even more delicious than the average man. The majority of part one is a "pump up" to get us excited about our "waist management" journey, and it hammers away at the fact that you really need to read the chapters on how your body processes food before skipping straight to the diet and exercise plan. I agree whole-heartedly with this, as part two really fucked my head up and made me think about what the crap I stuff down my throat is doing to my innards.
Part two goes into long, painful detail about what makes us a bunch of fat-asses. I say "painful" specifically because this is the section where the book's attempts at humor are at their most excruciating. Because this part deals with science, the authors feel the need to stuff as many pop culture references as possible into the text, which is distracting and not nearly as cute as they think it is. Here's a sample; "In your brain, you react to actions: You feel love when your spouse holds your hand, mad when he forgets an anniversary, humiliated when he takes off his shirt at the Bears game and thumps his densely forested chest for a shot at being on SportsCenter." Now imagine that on EVERY PAGE. I had to check my temper so I wouldn't throw the damn book across the room, and I guess that fact that I didn't chuck it is a testament that maybe these Self-Help books are working after all. Anyhow...your body has signals you can turn on and off to activate your hunger. When you know what they are and how they work, you can eat the right foods and do the right things to manipulate" them. Also, even though it's hard, the more you actually think about the diet you're on, the more likely you are to break it. So you have to simultaneously pay attention to what you're eating and NOT think about your diet. You can do this by eating the same foods over and over, every day. This is described in more detail later in the book, so I will not go any further into that aspect of this section.
There is a ton of information in this part of the book, and I'm not going to type it all out. However, I will include this one last bit of information: Fucking kills hunger. At least, it lowers your appetite. According to the book, "Sex and hunger are regulated through the brain chemical NPY. Some have observed that having healthy sex could help you control your food intake; by satisfying one appetite center, you seem to satisfy the other." So there you go...fuck for weight loss. Just make sure your partner's clean, because all the dieting in the world wont wipe away any greenish yellow pus or bugs that'll jump and create a home on your pee-pee.
Part three deals with how you mind effects your eating. Most interesting are the "mood foods," and they break down like this: If you're angry, you eat crunchy and/or tough foods; if you're depressed, you eat anything with sugar; if you're anxious, you'll eat soft and sweet foods, such as ice cream; if you're stressed, you're eat salty foods; if you're lonely and/or sexual frustrated, you'll eat bulky foods like crackers and pasta; and if you're jealous, you'll eat anything. Other good tips include getting your seven or eight hours of sleep, eating dark chocolate, and playing video games. The rational behind the last one is that if you're playing video games, both of your hands are on the controller, and you are less likely to be eating food while playing games. This is a much shorter section and not as interesting as the last one, but there was still some good stuff in it. Sadly, the lame jokes continued.
Part four is the diet and activity plan, and the main idea is to walk at least thirty minutes every day, and work out three times a week for twenty minutes each time. They even have an exercise plan that doesn't involve weights, so fuck your gym membership excuse. Also, building muscle makes you lose weight faster, so if you want quick results, you'll have to do some kind of work out that'll tighten you up, and I mean MORE than just doing Kegels. Another good work out is doing the Yoga "Sun Salutation," and it can be good for two things; One, it's a good way to get your body in top shape to start the day; and Two, if you take a Yoga class, the women outnumber the men, so the pussy-to-penis ratio works in favor of horny men who take these classes to pick up chicks.
The diet itself, which is what everyone will be buying it for in the first place, emphasizes eating the same foods over and over again. The reason is that if you make what you eat automatic, you won't deviate and eat random shit that'll fuck up your insides. Plus, even if you eat healthy, varying your foods drastically all the time hinders your weight-loss goals, because of the extra effort that it takes inside of you to sort all that shit out. A major point in this plan that I can vouch for is eating nuts as a snack throughout the day to manage your hunger. I've been using peanuts, and because it takes longer for your body to break them down and digest them, they prevent you from being hungry all day. So eat nuts as snacks. The foods they suggest you purchase are nice, but I suspect that if you live in a small town, they're completely unreasonable. Some of the recipes look alright, though. I'll let YOU be the guinea pig and tell me how they taste.
The book ends with a look at pills and medical procedures that can be used to lose weight. Biggest news to me: You can't lose cellulite, and liposuction only works to shape areas. Something which struck me as funny was that certain antidepressants cause weight gain, so if you're depressed about being fat and take these, you'll gain more weight, get more depressed about being fat, take some more, etc. Also mentioned are the three major surgeries for fucking with your innards in order to kill your appetite. I'd go into more detail, but I don't feel like it.
Overall, I think that for what it is, it's a good book. It's fucking annoying, and you won't be reading it for pleasure, but the advice inside is worth the time. There is one major problem with the book that needs to be addressed, and it's this: The book spends way too much time going into loving detail about foods that you can't eat. It mentions donuts, cookie dough, chips, french fries, etc., all the while trying to get you to forget about them. This is just as bad as those affirmations that Wayne Dyer has in his "Inspiration" book which will have the opposite effect on you. Instead of talking about how delicious carrots and other veggies and fruits taste, they constantly mention in a joking fashion junk food. Every fucking time I read this book I wanted to eat candy, and it pissed me off. To show you how bad it got, when I was reading this book at work I decided to eat a huge slice of ice cream pie in the freezer, and I wasn't even hungry. It's pretty goddamn astounding that, with as much time as they put into studying how the mind works with regard to hunger, they would disregard that crucial piece of information.
This book is a quick read, but I suspect that if you read it at all, it won't be cover-to-cover. That said, I strongly advise you to read parts two and three, which deal with the science of hunger. These parts are filled with good information, even if the pop culture references are as annoying as Simon Cowell and Paris Hilton running a Swiffer over your face while you're trying to prevent Eva Longoria from stealing your DVD collection of Friends, Season 2. So read it, but ideally get it for free at your local library. I say this because I think you should read it, but I don't think it's worth your money.
Thursday, February 8, 2007
Self-Help Review 3: How To Fall Out Of Love
Self-Help Review:
How To Fall Out Of Love
1978
By Dr. Debora Phillips
with Robert Judd.
Love. It's that big, thick prick of an emotion that slides into your most sensitive areas and gives you the most amazing pleasures imaginable. Take that same prick and ram it into your piss-hole, and you will know how badly it can hurt you, too. We have all felt some kind of love, or some approximation of it, and have also felt the pain of it being yanked away from us. Those moments after love disappears can be the most emotionally painful times you will experience. So what do you do?
Dr. Debora Phillips and Robert Judd appear to have an answer to that question. At 127 pages, "How To Fall Out Of Love" stands as one of the shortest books that I have read in recent years. It is based on behavior therapy, and treats love as something that is learned, and therefore can be un-learned. It teaches different tricks for fucking around with your thoughts of your loved one, from blocking those thoughts entirely to imagining this sexy creature with lumps of excrement tumbling out of their mouth. The most important idea is that once you take a thought and examine it, it immediately becomes less powerful, because once it's objectified it loses some of that emotional juice. Unfortunately, I am currently not madly in love with anybody, and I cannot test these ideas out to their full extent. But, there are a couple of people who I have wanted to slip it to, and I would like to get those thoughts out of my head, so I will be using the techniques for that.
This book is divided into two sections. The first is the "How To Fall Out Of Love" section, and the second is the "...And In Again" section. The second section describes interesting ways of becoming intimate with a new person, but most of this review will deal with the first half.
There are five techniques you can use to get over someone. They are:
Thought Stopping
Silent Ridicule
Techniques For Developing Strength To Stand Alone
Desensitization For Dealing With Jealousy And Rejection
Covert Sensitization (Repulsion)
Thought stopping takes the most common advice given after a break-up ("just stop thinking about her/him!"), and gives you a technique to actually do it. How this works is, you list the best, most positive scenes and pleasures that you can imagine that do not involve the person you are trying to get over. These can be either real or imagined, or both. Then, as soon as a thought about this person pops into your head, you yell "STOP" and immediately think of one of those things. This works because of an action/inhibition double link in our neurology. You can't laugh AND be sad at the same time, you can't tighten one muscle without another relaxing, and so forth. It may take a long ass time for this to work, but after a few weeks of yelling "STOP" and thinking of the good shit, you'll start thinking of the person less frequently.
Just so you know, here's my list of "good shit":
1. The moment when, while dancing at Par Avion, France Gall's "A Banda" starts and I grab Sofia and jump around, almost in a circle, with her.
2. Reading the last page of James Joyce's "Ulysses."
3. Singing English-language songs with a French band at a restaurant in Brittany.
4. Eating out and then giving a nice hard fucking to Cecilia Gallerani, aka the "Lady with an Ermine" in Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting.
5. Making a baby laugh.
The second technique I didn't find all that interesting. Silent Ridicule means you imagine your former lover looking like a jack-ass in some way. It's pretty goofy and meant to make you laugh. What you do is take a minor fault or habit of theirs, and either exaggerate it or make something else up. Like if they are dressed in suits, you imagine them in a tutu, or if they have a slightly large ass, you imagine that it's so big they can't fit through the door, etc. By the way, if any of you dickheads start thinking of MY ass in that way, I'll be sure to ram a baseball bat in yours. This technique is to see them as a regular person and not some faultless God, where even their shit-stains were once charming to you.
The strength building techniques were some basic things which seem to apply mainly to "the fairer sex." One thing is to list, every day, at least two positive things. They can be either your personality traits or positive things you've done.
Here's two of mine from yesterday:
Monday: Finished my book. Kicked three little bastards out of the library.
There's a lot of tips and tricks for building assertiveness and self-esteem, much of it boiling down to being independent, doing things on your own, finding ways to eliminate anxiety without another person, etc. Best advice? Buy something and return it, saying you don't want it anymore. Also of note...the Thought-Stopping technique can also be used for when you insult yourself, or think that you're worthless, or get hit with a depressing thought. You just yell "STOP" when the thought pops into your head and think of some good shit. For example, while shelving some videos yesterday I was filled suddenly with the overwhelming urge to weep. This is because I saw a No Doubt concert DVD and realized that some asshole would probably be checking it out later that day, and I wished that people didn't have such crap taste. So immediately I muttered "STOP" (I was in a library, so I can't just yell it) and heard the jumping girly beat of my favorite France Gall song in my head, and saw Sofia and I swirling around in a Carrie-esque manner. Dancing, I was never happier, and so there it is. I went back to the desk feeling great, until, of course, I had to deal with a yelling Chinese lady.
The Desensitization chapter appealed to me because of my fling with hypnosis. There's a Deep Muscle Relaxation technique which is pretty much self-hypnosis, but to get you to the point where every muscle in your body is completely relaxed. After you learn how to do this you make a list of things that get you jealous (your "Jealousy Hierarchy"), on a scale of zero to one hundred. Then, relax your ass and think of something that gets you slightly jealous. Keep that thought in your head while you're in the relaxed state until it no longer bothers you. You keep doing this over the span of weeks or months until the thought that got you the most jealous...I'm talking screaming and putting your fist through walls jealous...no longer bothers you. Apparently every time a low-jealousy thought gets destroyed, everything else moves down the ladder, so whatever registered at one hundred on your jealousy scare would drop to a ninety after some work, and so on until it went to ten, then zero.
Repulsion was my favorite. The author doesn't recommend this one unless the other techniques have not entirely wiped out your sexual attraction to this person. What you do is, you think of the most disgusting thing you can, then imagine you are about to kiss your former love. When you get close enough to kiss you see/smell this vile thing, then immediately turn away and see something pleasant. An example: There's a slightly chubby woman who I have long wanted to stick myself into. No one finds her attractive but me, and because her personality is extremely odious I want to stop lusting after her. So I imagined the following. I see her in front of me, and just stand there staring at her gigantic, beautiful breasts. I move towards her and go to kiss her, but my hands grab her dirty pillows first. Once they make contact and press in, I feel a thick, sticky fluid. I move back and see pus and guacamole leaking out of her nipples, and smell the distinct odor of eggs. She cocks her head back and starts laughing, and her laughter alternates between a penis-shriveling cackle and violent coughing. While coughing gobs of phlegm and shit shoot out, either flopping over and landing on her tits or flying in my direction. I turn away and immediately see a bright summer morning. I am in a room, and the warm rays of sunlight embrace my naked body. I look down, and both Anna Nicole Smith and the chick from Super Nanny are taking turns blowing me and licking my nuts. Two sparrows flutter down holding baskets of burgers and fries. I bite into my burger, and can taste the delicious hint of grilled onions. It goes on like this until both Anna Nicole and Super Nanny French kiss with my baby batter in their mouths, then spit it into a cup of coffee, then take turns sipping it while discussing the finer points of Modernist literature. Suddenly, I am no longer attracted to the other woman. It works!
The end of the book deals with how to love someone else. There are scores of pages telling you that masturbation is both healthy and normal, and the author seems to be on a mission to get everyone jerking and flicking themselves off. There are interesting bits here and there, such as the "Sensual Holiday," but the only one I will describe here is Orgasmic Reconditioning. This is for people who have a hard time imagining sex with someone other than their former lover. Before I go into this, I must describe an interesting thing this book points out about the male orgasm. For men, there is a "point of inevitability," which is around five seconds before you shoot your junk out. What this means is that when you reach that point, there is absolutely nothing that can prevent you from having an orgasm. A police officer smashing down your door, a baseball shattering your window, or a rottweiler jumping on you and biting your face...you will STILL get off. So, what a guy needs to do is jerk off to whatever turns him on until he reaches that point. When he gets to the point of inevitability, he needs to immediately think of his new lover until he has an orgasm. Then, next time, try to imagine the same person a few seconds before the point of inevitability. Gradually do this until you can jerk it while only thinking of your new lover.
For women, there is no point of inevitability. According to this book, a woman can be turned off even during an orgasm if something happens which is distracting. But anyhow, here's how a woman can be orgasmically reconditioned. Take notes:
Masturbate thinking of whatever gets you going.
Be sure to have your Myspace page on "Roland Saint-Laurent's" picture section, but KEEP YOUR EYES CLOSED.
The second you start having an orgasm, immediately open your eyes and stare at a picture of Roland. Keep looking at this until you are finished.
Next time you masturbate, open your eyes just before orgasm, then continue.
Each time you masturbate go back earlier and earlier, until you're able to flick yourselves off entirely to those pictures of Roland. You know, the way normal, SANE people do.
Overall this was a nice, short book. It was written in 1978 and references to the "swinging" scene do date the book, but there is still good advice inside. One thing to note is that the author makes it clear that these techniques will not work unless you have a legitimate desire to fall out of love with someone. You can't be a idiot and decide to use these just because the two of you are having a "spat" and you're mad at each other. Also, they are reversible, in the slim chance that the couple gets back together. What I like is that it hails from the behavioral school of psychology, which I tend to agree with. There is ample proof that every emotional response we have is learned to some extent, and if you want to fix yourself, you need to right tools. So in effect, this book is a love toolbox. I recommend it to anyone who has just come out of a disastrous relationship and is looking to move on, or anyone interested in the love process in general. While it may or may not work for you, it's at least better to try something different than to sit down and cry over "good times" that you're no longer experiencing. At the very least, objectifying your loneliness will take some of the sting out of it, even if it doesn't remove the pain entirely.
How To Fall Out Of Love
1978
By Dr. Debora Phillips
with Robert Judd.
Love. It's that big, thick prick of an emotion that slides into your most sensitive areas and gives you the most amazing pleasures imaginable. Take that same prick and ram it into your piss-hole, and you will know how badly it can hurt you, too. We have all felt some kind of love, or some approximation of it, and have also felt the pain of it being yanked away from us. Those moments after love disappears can be the most emotionally painful times you will experience. So what do you do?
Dr. Debora Phillips and Robert Judd appear to have an answer to that question. At 127 pages, "How To Fall Out Of Love" stands as one of the shortest books that I have read in recent years. It is based on behavior therapy, and treats love as something that is learned, and therefore can be un-learned. It teaches different tricks for fucking around with your thoughts of your loved one, from blocking those thoughts entirely to imagining this sexy creature with lumps of excrement tumbling out of their mouth. The most important idea is that once you take a thought and examine it, it immediately becomes less powerful, because once it's objectified it loses some of that emotional juice. Unfortunately, I am currently not madly in love with anybody, and I cannot test these ideas out to their full extent. But, there are a couple of people who I have wanted to slip it to, and I would like to get those thoughts out of my head, so I will be using the techniques for that.
This book is divided into two sections. The first is the "How To Fall Out Of Love" section, and the second is the "...And In Again" section. The second section describes interesting ways of becoming intimate with a new person, but most of this review will deal with the first half.
There are five techniques you can use to get over someone. They are:
Thought Stopping
Silent Ridicule
Techniques For Developing Strength To Stand Alone
Desensitization For Dealing With Jealousy And Rejection
Covert Sensitization (Repulsion)
Thought stopping takes the most common advice given after a break-up ("just stop thinking about her/him!"), and gives you a technique to actually do it. How this works is, you list the best, most positive scenes and pleasures that you can imagine that do not involve the person you are trying to get over. These can be either real or imagined, or both. Then, as soon as a thought about this person pops into your head, you yell "STOP" and immediately think of one of those things. This works because of an action/inhibition double link in our neurology. You can't laugh AND be sad at the same time, you can't tighten one muscle without another relaxing, and so forth. It may take a long ass time for this to work, but after a few weeks of yelling "STOP" and thinking of the good shit, you'll start thinking of the person less frequently.
Just so you know, here's my list of "good shit":
1. The moment when, while dancing at Par Avion, France Gall's "A Banda" starts and I grab Sofia and jump around, almost in a circle, with her.
2. Reading the last page of James Joyce's "Ulysses."
3. Singing English-language songs with a French band at a restaurant in Brittany.
4. Eating out and then giving a nice hard fucking to Cecilia Gallerani, aka the "Lady with an Ermine" in Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting.
5. Making a baby laugh.
The second technique I didn't find all that interesting. Silent Ridicule means you imagine your former lover looking like a jack-ass in some way. It's pretty goofy and meant to make you laugh. What you do is take a minor fault or habit of theirs, and either exaggerate it or make something else up. Like if they are dressed in suits, you imagine them in a tutu, or if they have a slightly large ass, you imagine that it's so big they can't fit through the door, etc. By the way, if any of you dickheads start thinking of MY ass in that way, I'll be sure to ram a baseball bat in yours. This technique is to see them as a regular person and not some faultless God, where even their shit-stains were once charming to you.
The strength building techniques were some basic things which seem to apply mainly to "the fairer sex." One thing is to list, every day, at least two positive things. They can be either your personality traits or positive things you've done.
Here's two of mine from yesterday:
Monday: Finished my book. Kicked three little bastards out of the library.
There's a lot of tips and tricks for building assertiveness and self-esteem, much of it boiling down to being independent, doing things on your own, finding ways to eliminate anxiety without another person, etc. Best advice? Buy something and return it, saying you don't want it anymore. Also of note...the Thought-Stopping technique can also be used for when you insult yourself, or think that you're worthless, or get hit with a depressing thought. You just yell "STOP" when the thought pops into your head and think of some good shit. For example, while shelving some videos yesterday I was filled suddenly with the overwhelming urge to weep. This is because I saw a No Doubt concert DVD and realized that some asshole would probably be checking it out later that day, and I wished that people didn't have such crap taste. So immediately I muttered "STOP" (I was in a library, so I can't just yell it) and heard the jumping girly beat of my favorite France Gall song in my head, and saw Sofia and I swirling around in a Carrie-esque manner. Dancing, I was never happier, and so there it is. I went back to the desk feeling great, until, of course, I had to deal with a yelling Chinese lady.
The Desensitization chapter appealed to me because of my fling with hypnosis. There's a Deep Muscle Relaxation technique which is pretty much self-hypnosis, but to get you to the point where every muscle in your body is completely relaxed. After you learn how to do this you make a list of things that get you jealous (your "Jealousy Hierarchy"), on a scale of zero to one hundred. Then, relax your ass and think of something that gets you slightly jealous. Keep that thought in your head while you're in the relaxed state until it no longer bothers you. You keep doing this over the span of weeks or months until the thought that got you the most jealous...I'm talking screaming and putting your fist through walls jealous...no longer bothers you. Apparently every time a low-jealousy thought gets destroyed, everything else moves down the ladder, so whatever registered at one hundred on your jealousy scare would drop to a ninety after some work, and so on until it went to ten, then zero.
Repulsion was my favorite. The author doesn't recommend this one unless the other techniques have not entirely wiped out your sexual attraction to this person. What you do is, you think of the most disgusting thing you can, then imagine you are about to kiss your former love. When you get close enough to kiss you see/smell this vile thing, then immediately turn away and see something pleasant. An example: There's a slightly chubby woman who I have long wanted to stick myself into. No one finds her attractive but me, and because her personality is extremely odious I want to stop lusting after her. So I imagined the following. I see her in front of me, and just stand there staring at her gigantic, beautiful breasts. I move towards her and go to kiss her, but my hands grab her dirty pillows first. Once they make contact and press in, I feel a thick, sticky fluid. I move back and see pus and guacamole leaking out of her nipples, and smell the distinct odor of eggs. She cocks her head back and starts laughing, and her laughter alternates between a penis-shriveling cackle and violent coughing. While coughing gobs of phlegm and shit shoot out, either flopping over and landing on her tits or flying in my direction. I turn away and immediately see a bright summer morning. I am in a room, and the warm rays of sunlight embrace my naked body. I look down, and both Anna Nicole Smith and the chick from Super Nanny are taking turns blowing me and licking my nuts. Two sparrows flutter down holding baskets of burgers and fries. I bite into my burger, and can taste the delicious hint of grilled onions. It goes on like this until both Anna Nicole and Super Nanny French kiss with my baby batter in their mouths, then spit it into a cup of coffee, then take turns sipping it while discussing the finer points of Modernist literature. Suddenly, I am no longer attracted to the other woman. It works!
The end of the book deals with how to love someone else. There are scores of pages telling you that masturbation is both healthy and normal, and the author seems to be on a mission to get everyone jerking and flicking themselves off. There are interesting bits here and there, such as the "Sensual Holiday," but the only one I will describe here is Orgasmic Reconditioning. This is for people who have a hard time imagining sex with someone other than their former lover. Before I go into this, I must describe an interesting thing this book points out about the male orgasm. For men, there is a "point of inevitability," which is around five seconds before you shoot your junk out. What this means is that when you reach that point, there is absolutely nothing that can prevent you from having an orgasm. A police officer smashing down your door, a baseball shattering your window, or a rottweiler jumping on you and biting your face...you will STILL get off. So, what a guy needs to do is jerk off to whatever turns him on until he reaches that point. When he gets to the point of inevitability, he needs to immediately think of his new lover until he has an orgasm. Then, next time, try to imagine the same person a few seconds before the point of inevitability. Gradually do this until you can jerk it while only thinking of your new lover.
For women, there is no point of inevitability. According to this book, a woman can be turned off even during an orgasm if something happens which is distracting. But anyhow, here's how a woman can be orgasmically reconditioned. Take notes:
Masturbate thinking of whatever gets you going.
Be sure to have your Myspace page on "Roland Saint-Laurent's" picture section, but KEEP YOUR EYES CLOSED.
The second you start having an orgasm, immediately open your eyes and stare at a picture of Roland. Keep looking at this until you are finished.
Next time you masturbate, open your eyes just before orgasm, then continue.
Each time you masturbate go back earlier and earlier, until you're able to flick yourselves off entirely to those pictures of Roland. You know, the way normal, SANE people do.
Overall this was a nice, short book. It was written in 1978 and references to the "swinging" scene do date the book, but there is still good advice inside. One thing to note is that the author makes it clear that these techniques will not work unless you have a legitimate desire to fall out of love with someone. You can't be a idiot and decide to use these just because the two of you are having a "spat" and you're mad at each other. Also, they are reversible, in the slim chance that the couple gets back together. What I like is that it hails from the behavioral school of psychology, which I tend to agree with. There is ample proof that every emotional response we have is learned to some extent, and if you want to fix yourself, you need to right tools. So in effect, this book is a love toolbox. I recommend it to anyone who has just come out of a disastrous relationship and is looking to move on, or anyone interested in the love process in general. While it may or may not work for you, it's at least better to try something different than to sit down and cry over "good times" that you're no longer experiencing. At the very least, objectifying your loneliness will take some of the sting out of it, even if it doesn't remove the pain entirely.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Self-Help Review 2: Inspiration: Your Ultimate Calling.
Self-Help Review:
Inspiration: Your Ultimate Calling
2006
By Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
This book was, for the span of a few months, the biggest joke in the library to me. Every time I would see it I would hold it up and show it to people and laugh my ass off. The picture on the cover of the book seemed to represent everything that turned me off about the Self-Help genre: The "enlightened guru," the blue waves in the background, that fucking butterfly. After the laughter I would ask myself, "How seriously do people take this shit?"
Apparently, the answer to that is: VERY. This man is exceedingly wealthy, and even though he encourages the reader to forget about money and get back in touch with our creator, he also frequently mentions his home in Maui, how money has somehow always found it's way to him, how he purchased a brand new car for someone who works for him, and he actually encourages the reader at one point to buy a horse as a way of feeling good about life. Throughout the book he hammers away at the idea that we need to destroy ego (which he constantly says is an acronym for "edging God out"), yet his own ego is so enormous that he throws in the reader's face what a great guy he is on practically every other page. There are pages and pages of his good deeds, and I can safely say that half of the book is dedicated to what a great guy Dr. Wayne W. Dyer is.
In addition to the annoying "edging God out" acronym, he also says that feeling good is akin to feeling "God," and there are several occasions of him mentioning something being or feeling "good" and then right next to it having "God" in parenthesis, as if we didn't get the point already.
To feel good (God), we need to eliminate harmful things from our lives, such as violent movies and music. In one chapter he rails against advertisers as being a negative influence on our lives, yet he recommends several books which are conveniently available through his publisher. These books aren't just the ones mentioned in ads at the back of the book...they are actually in the text itself, along with web addresses. If you're seeking enlightenment, you don't need someone trying to sell you something in the middle of a spiritual moment. Imagine floating up towards the heavens and some asshole screaming "DRINK SPRITE!!!!" in your ears right before you reach the clouds, and that's the feeling you get with these little ads interspersed in the text.
If it sounds like I read this book simply to bash it, you're half right. I will admit that there were some good points in the book, and interesting outlooks to take on life. For example, I really liked the idea of viewing your life and everything that has happened in it as a plan that you and God came up with before your birth. It gets you out of the victim mind set and thinking that no matter how shitty things have been, there has been a reason for all of it and it has been a necessary step toward your development. He also has good quotes sprinkled throughout the book, my favorite being this one by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: "If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." He also has several techniques for monitoring your thoughts for "negative energy," but I have seen these ideas elsewhere, and without the fruitiness that Wayne feels the need to inject into them. Nonetheless, thinking about thinking is always a great thing, and a necessary skill for anyone trying to better themselves.
One of the funniest things in this book are his suggestions for affirmations. I have actually read the book "What To Say When You Talk To Yourself," by Shad Helmstetter, which deals exclusively with affirmations, and I know how they work and how they don't work. The main idea is, in order for an affirmation to have any kind of effect whatsoever, it has to both be in the present tense, and also NOT CONTAIN A NEGATIVE. You can't say "I will not feel anxiety in the future" because the future is a vague concept and the brain automatically discounts negatives. So what you're actually telling your brain is "I will feel anxiety..." The correct way to do an affirmation is "I feel calm and relaxed all the time" or something to that extent. In the present and positive. With that in mind, check out Wayne's groovy affirmation for sickness:
"I won't attract any further illness to my life. I'll never allow myself to feel old, feeble, or frail; and I refuse to allow Alzheimer's, cancer, or any other infirmity into my life. I don't vibrate to frequencies that are designed to keep me from being in-Spirit."
With what I know about affirmations, what Wayne is telling you to tell your brain is the following:
"I...attract...illness to my life. I...allow myself to feel old, feeble, or frail; I...allow Alzheimer's, cancer, or any other infirmity into my life. I...vibrate to frequencies that are designed to keep me from being in-Spirit."
Thanks for the cancer, Dr. Dickhead. Hope you can sell off some of your dolphins to pay my medical bills.
But wait, Wayne doesn't work that way. Even though he bought a new car for someone who works for him, he won't chip in the cash to buy a home for his fucking mentor, who had a crippling stroke and desperately needs a home. Read the Chapter 9 story about Ram Dass, who was apparently an incredible, inspirational man. Wayne pours gallon after gallon of praise on this man, making sure that each and every one of us understands his importance in the world, then proceeds to solicit money from the reader to buy Ram Dass a home in Maui! So let me get this straight...Dr. Wayne W. Dyer makes millions upon millions of dollars, owns a home in Maui, makes it a point to tell the reader that he has never had an issue with money and that it always just seems to fall into his hands, mentions celebrities handing him thousand dollar checks for no reason, yet he has the audacity to beg the reader for cash to buy a home for his hero? Listen Wayne. People are buying your books because they can't afford real psychiatric care. They don't have the thousands of dollars to dump into someone to sit there and listen to their problems and help them along, so they come to people like you, and hope that maybe you can give them some advice to take the pain out of their lives. You may hobnob with scores of celebs, but your readership is made up primarily of ordinary, middle class folks...you know, the kinds of people who can't just up and buy a fucking horse so they can feel good. You have a lot of nerve asking these people for cash to buy YOUR mentor a home. You're scum, Wayne.
However, he did clean up the burger and fries that some kid accidentally dropped on the floor at McDonalds, so he's a good example for his kids. No, I'm not making that up and yes, that is one of his examples of how great and enlightened he is.
That said, I did send in a purchase for his lovely CD set, "How To Be A No-Limit Person." I hear that this, "Your Erroneous Zones," and "Pulling Your Own Strings" are practical, good books with advice that will help you immensely to get over your own shit. A contradiction? Maybe, but fuck it.
I would like to end this with a quote from an author who stands directly opposite Dyer, and who's philosophy I both agree and disagree with. It's from "Anthem," by Ayn Rand, an author who has written some of the most hate-filled works I have ever laid eyes on. Sometimes she's way off the mark in her assumptions, but other times, she hits them dead-on. Here's the quote:
"And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner. The word which will not die, should we all perish in battle. The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory. The sacred word: EGO."
As much as he rails against it in his book, as much as he points to it as being the one thing that we need to destroy in order to reach true inspiration, deep in his own heart, Dr. Wayne W. Dyer screams; "I concur."
Inspiration: Your Ultimate Calling
2006
By Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
This book was, for the span of a few months, the biggest joke in the library to me. Every time I would see it I would hold it up and show it to people and laugh my ass off. The picture on the cover of the book seemed to represent everything that turned me off about the Self-Help genre: The "enlightened guru," the blue waves in the background, that fucking butterfly. After the laughter I would ask myself, "How seriously do people take this shit?"
Apparently, the answer to that is: VERY. This man is exceedingly wealthy, and even though he encourages the reader to forget about money and get back in touch with our creator, he also frequently mentions his home in Maui, how money has somehow always found it's way to him, how he purchased a brand new car for someone who works for him, and he actually encourages the reader at one point to buy a horse as a way of feeling good about life. Throughout the book he hammers away at the idea that we need to destroy ego (which he constantly says is an acronym for "edging God out"), yet his own ego is so enormous that he throws in the reader's face what a great guy he is on practically every other page. There are pages and pages of his good deeds, and I can safely say that half of the book is dedicated to what a great guy Dr. Wayne W. Dyer is.
In addition to the annoying "edging God out" acronym, he also says that feeling good is akin to feeling "God," and there are several occasions of him mentioning something being or feeling "good" and then right next to it having "God" in parenthesis, as if we didn't get the point already.
To feel good (God), we need to eliminate harmful things from our lives, such as violent movies and music. In one chapter he rails against advertisers as being a negative influence on our lives, yet he recommends several books which are conveniently available through his publisher. These books aren't just the ones mentioned in ads at the back of the book...they are actually in the text itself, along with web addresses. If you're seeking enlightenment, you don't need someone trying to sell you something in the middle of a spiritual moment. Imagine floating up towards the heavens and some asshole screaming "DRINK SPRITE!!!!" in your ears right before you reach the clouds, and that's the feeling you get with these little ads interspersed in the text.
If it sounds like I read this book simply to bash it, you're half right. I will admit that there were some good points in the book, and interesting outlooks to take on life. For example, I really liked the idea of viewing your life and everything that has happened in it as a plan that you and God came up with before your birth. It gets you out of the victim mind set and thinking that no matter how shitty things have been, there has been a reason for all of it and it has been a necessary step toward your development. He also has good quotes sprinkled throughout the book, my favorite being this one by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: "If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." He also has several techniques for monitoring your thoughts for "negative energy," but I have seen these ideas elsewhere, and without the fruitiness that Wayne feels the need to inject into them. Nonetheless, thinking about thinking is always a great thing, and a necessary skill for anyone trying to better themselves.
One of the funniest things in this book are his suggestions for affirmations. I have actually read the book "What To Say When You Talk To Yourself," by Shad Helmstetter, which deals exclusively with affirmations, and I know how they work and how they don't work. The main idea is, in order for an affirmation to have any kind of effect whatsoever, it has to both be in the present tense, and also NOT CONTAIN A NEGATIVE. You can't say "I will not feel anxiety in the future" because the future is a vague concept and the brain automatically discounts negatives. So what you're actually telling your brain is "I will feel anxiety..." The correct way to do an affirmation is "I feel calm and relaxed all the time" or something to that extent. In the present and positive. With that in mind, check out Wayne's groovy affirmation for sickness:
"I won't attract any further illness to my life. I'll never allow myself to feel old, feeble, or frail; and I refuse to allow Alzheimer's, cancer, or any other infirmity into my life. I don't vibrate to frequencies that are designed to keep me from being in-Spirit."
With what I know about affirmations, what Wayne is telling you to tell your brain is the following:
"I...attract...illness to my life. I...allow myself to feel old, feeble, or frail; I...allow Alzheimer's, cancer, or any other infirmity into my life. I...vibrate to frequencies that are designed to keep me from being in-Spirit."
Thanks for the cancer, Dr. Dickhead. Hope you can sell off some of your dolphins to pay my medical bills.
But wait, Wayne doesn't work that way. Even though he bought a new car for someone who works for him, he won't chip in the cash to buy a home for his fucking mentor, who had a crippling stroke and desperately needs a home. Read the Chapter 9 story about Ram Dass, who was apparently an incredible, inspirational man. Wayne pours gallon after gallon of praise on this man, making sure that each and every one of us understands his importance in the world, then proceeds to solicit money from the reader to buy Ram Dass a home in Maui! So let me get this straight...Dr. Wayne W. Dyer makes millions upon millions of dollars, owns a home in Maui, makes it a point to tell the reader that he has never had an issue with money and that it always just seems to fall into his hands, mentions celebrities handing him thousand dollar checks for no reason, yet he has the audacity to beg the reader for cash to buy a home for his hero? Listen Wayne. People are buying your books because they can't afford real psychiatric care. They don't have the thousands of dollars to dump into someone to sit there and listen to their problems and help them along, so they come to people like you, and hope that maybe you can give them some advice to take the pain out of their lives. You may hobnob with scores of celebs, but your readership is made up primarily of ordinary, middle class folks...you know, the kinds of people who can't just up and buy a fucking horse so they can feel good. You have a lot of nerve asking these people for cash to buy YOUR mentor a home. You're scum, Wayne.
However, he did clean up the burger and fries that some kid accidentally dropped on the floor at McDonalds, so he's a good example for his kids. No, I'm not making that up and yes, that is one of his examples of how great and enlightened he is.
That said, I did send in a purchase for his lovely CD set, "How To Be A No-Limit Person." I hear that this, "Your Erroneous Zones," and "Pulling Your Own Strings" are practical, good books with advice that will help you immensely to get over your own shit. A contradiction? Maybe, but fuck it.
I would like to end this with a quote from an author who stands directly opposite Dyer, and who's philosophy I both agree and disagree with. It's from "Anthem," by Ayn Rand, an author who has written some of the most hate-filled works I have ever laid eyes on. Sometimes she's way off the mark in her assumptions, but other times, she hits them dead-on. Here's the quote:
"And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner. The word which will not die, should we all perish in battle. The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory. The sacred word: EGO."
As much as he rails against it in his book, as much as he points to it as being the one thing that we need to destroy in order to reach true inspiration, deep in his own heart, Dr. Wayne W. Dyer screams; "I concur."
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Self-Help Review 1: All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten.
Self-Help Review:
All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten
1986
By Robert Fulghum
I promised to kick off my Self-Help Review with Wayne Dyer's "Inspiration, Your Ultimate Calling," but as it turned out, two library patrons decided that they needed a dash of inspiration in their lives, and checked out our two copies. Set back, I decided to request a copy from another library and in the meantime quickly go through another book. I had mentioned "All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten" as one of the questionable books that I would be reading, and to my delight, the library had a copy. Since I wanted to feel better about not finishing college, I grabbed it. For years I have heard of Fulghum's book, and have even seen posters with the "wisdom" of his opus enclosed in glass and hung in clinics, schools, and various other spots in need of homey cosiness. The book was shelved in an area of the library just before the Self-Help section, and when I checked it out I expected it to be a Self-Help book. As it turns out, it is so different from what I expected that I hesitate to even include it on this review site.
The book starts off with a letter from the author to YOU. He talks about why the book was written and that many of the stories have been embellished to be more interesting and that you're just going to have to deal with it. Not a bad introduction, admittedly, but what follows makes me regret undertaking this endeavor.
The famous chapter, the one that the book is named after, is a whopping four pages long. I'm being generous by saying "four pages" because it's really more like three, and actually two if it were single-spaced and with slightly smaller type. There are sixteen of these sandbox "gems," some cute, some retarded, some just bad advice. I'm sure some diabetics would disagree with "Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you." I come from a bloodline where diabetes is almost a guarantee, and if I drink milk my stomach snarls and my ass belches out the kind of nauseating fumes that you wouldn't wish on someone who raped your grandma, so that little nugget of wisdom doesn't exactly work for me. Also, "Take a nap every afternoon" is the active encouragement of sloth, a biblical sin. So by following some of these rules, you might end up roasting in hell for all eternity. Don't say I didn't warn you. The last rule that I'll tear apart is "Share everything." Sorry, but when I get married, I'm not going to let everyone take turns banging my wife, and I have no intention of banging Mr. Fulghum's wife, either.
What's in the rest of the book? Many, many short stories. The maximum length is around four to five pages, and the vast majority are three. The common theme is taking memories the author has, stuffing as much importance into the little things as possible, and then presenting them as a gift to the reader, which you can either take or leave. Here are some ideas the author has to make the world a better place:
Drop a bomb of crayolas over countries on the verge of war, since everyone finds coloring irresistible.
Stop handing out shitty gifts at potlucks.
Instead of being tidy and neat, spend just one week polishing a stick, and that will be the only job you'll need to finish for the rest of your life. I'm not making this up.
We should spell "hors d'oeuvres" this way: "orderves."
Everything you could ever wish to know about a person you can discover by snooping around their bathroom.
Weeds are flowers.
Chicken-fried steak will give you a sense of well-being, and the best place to get one is at Maud Owens' Cafe in Payette, Idaho.
Then there are stories which as supposed to put our lives into perspective, and to keep alive the wonder of a child within us. The entire book is laced with aging, baby boomer bullshit humor. I don't give a rat's ass how many of our parents were boomers...they were the shitty generation, and as much as they'd like to take credit for everything good in the country and world, they still fail to earn my respect or make me laugh. I'm talking about the generation as a whole, not individual people. I love my mama just as much as I love yours.
It's also a poorly written book, which desperately needed an editor's touch to clean it up. Don't give me crap about the grammar in my blog...anyone who says "unless you can create, don't criticize" is copping out with the oldest and lamest excuse out there. This book is supposed to help people, and it helps if your grammar isn't shitty.
What's good about it? Well, he does mention Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" in the last chapter and pays tribute to it by ending in mid-sentence, but he also knows jack shit about FW, so his tribute is only half-assed. I appreciate his praising of chicken-fried steak, and yes, one chapter actually touched me. It was one of those chapters that is so obviously trying to tug at your heart, like many of the others, but because I could actually relate to the situation described, it worked. Like that old saying goes...if you throw enough shit against the wall, some of it is bound to stick. The best thing I can say about this book is that it's a very quick read. I went through half of it solely on fifteen minute breaks at work, and finished the rest over an hour.
Just for the record, here's a list of lessons that I learned in Kindergarten, and which continue to do me good to this day:
If you eat your boogers, worms will grow in your stomach.
Stay away from the "pee pee boy."
Johnny Appleseed, Pecos Bill, and Paul Bunyon are the greatest heroes a boy could look up to, because they taught us the basics on how to be a man. How's that? Plant your seed far and wide, ride a few cyclones, and when you're finished go around destroying nature with a big blue beautiful Babe by your side.
If you walk around in the Big Kids side of the school, everyone will think you're a bad-ass and respect you more.
Ditch the slides and go for the swing.
It's always OK to laugh at dumb kids for doing dumb things.
Those Chow Mein Noodle haystacks are fucking awesome, and will continue to be fucking awesome till the day you die.
Don't throw your box of milk at someone, or you'll get into trouble.
If you have a really cool dinosaur book, girls will want to be around you.
My verdict? If you like sentimental crap and never mentally grew past age 5, you'll love it.
All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten
1986
By Robert Fulghum
I promised to kick off my Self-Help Review with Wayne Dyer's "Inspiration, Your Ultimate Calling," but as it turned out, two library patrons decided that they needed a dash of inspiration in their lives, and checked out our two copies. Set back, I decided to request a copy from another library and in the meantime quickly go through another book. I had mentioned "All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten" as one of the questionable books that I would be reading, and to my delight, the library had a copy. Since I wanted to feel better about not finishing college, I grabbed it. For years I have heard of Fulghum's book, and have even seen posters with the "wisdom" of his opus enclosed in glass and hung in clinics, schools, and various other spots in need of homey cosiness. The book was shelved in an area of the library just before the Self-Help section, and when I checked it out I expected it to be a Self-Help book. As it turns out, it is so different from what I expected that I hesitate to even include it on this review site.
The book starts off with a letter from the author to YOU. He talks about why the book was written and that many of the stories have been embellished to be more interesting and that you're just going to have to deal with it. Not a bad introduction, admittedly, but what follows makes me regret undertaking this endeavor.
The famous chapter, the one that the book is named after, is a whopping four pages long. I'm being generous by saying "four pages" because it's really more like three, and actually two if it were single-spaced and with slightly smaller type. There are sixteen of these sandbox "gems," some cute, some retarded, some just bad advice. I'm sure some diabetics would disagree with "Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you." I come from a bloodline where diabetes is almost a guarantee, and if I drink milk my stomach snarls and my ass belches out the kind of nauseating fumes that you wouldn't wish on someone who raped your grandma, so that little nugget of wisdom doesn't exactly work for me. Also, "Take a nap every afternoon" is the active encouragement of sloth, a biblical sin. So by following some of these rules, you might end up roasting in hell for all eternity. Don't say I didn't warn you. The last rule that I'll tear apart is "Share everything." Sorry, but when I get married, I'm not going to let everyone take turns banging my wife, and I have no intention of banging Mr. Fulghum's wife, either.
What's in the rest of the book? Many, many short stories. The maximum length is around four to five pages, and the vast majority are three. The common theme is taking memories the author has, stuffing as much importance into the little things as possible, and then presenting them as a gift to the reader, which you can either take or leave. Here are some ideas the author has to make the world a better place:
Drop a bomb of crayolas over countries on the verge of war, since everyone finds coloring irresistible.
Stop handing out shitty gifts at potlucks.
Instead of being tidy and neat, spend just one week polishing a stick, and that will be the only job you'll need to finish for the rest of your life. I'm not making this up.
We should spell "hors d'oeuvres" this way: "orderves."
Everything you could ever wish to know about a person you can discover by snooping around their bathroom.
Weeds are flowers.
Chicken-fried steak will give you a sense of well-being, and the best place to get one is at Maud Owens' Cafe in Payette, Idaho.
Then there are stories which as supposed to put our lives into perspective, and to keep alive the wonder of a child within us. The entire book is laced with aging, baby boomer bullshit humor. I don't give a rat's ass how many of our parents were boomers...they were the shitty generation, and as much as they'd like to take credit for everything good in the country and world, they still fail to earn my respect or make me laugh. I'm talking about the generation as a whole, not individual people. I love my mama just as much as I love yours.
It's also a poorly written book, which desperately needed an editor's touch to clean it up. Don't give me crap about the grammar in my blog...anyone who says "unless you can create, don't criticize" is copping out with the oldest and lamest excuse out there. This book is supposed to help people, and it helps if your grammar isn't shitty.
What's good about it? Well, he does mention Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" in the last chapter and pays tribute to it by ending in mid-sentence, but he also knows jack shit about FW, so his tribute is only half-assed. I appreciate his praising of chicken-fried steak, and yes, one chapter actually touched me. It was one of those chapters that is so obviously trying to tug at your heart, like many of the others, but because I could actually relate to the situation described, it worked. Like that old saying goes...if you throw enough shit against the wall, some of it is bound to stick. The best thing I can say about this book is that it's a very quick read. I went through half of it solely on fifteen minute breaks at work, and finished the rest over an hour.
Just for the record, here's a list of lessons that I learned in Kindergarten, and which continue to do me good to this day:
If you eat your boogers, worms will grow in your stomach.
Stay away from the "pee pee boy."
Johnny Appleseed, Pecos Bill, and Paul Bunyon are the greatest heroes a boy could look up to, because they taught us the basics on how to be a man. How's that? Plant your seed far and wide, ride a few cyclones, and when you're finished go around destroying nature with a big blue beautiful Babe by your side.
If you walk around in the Big Kids side of the school, everyone will think you're a bad-ass and respect you more.
Ditch the slides and go for the swing.
It's always OK to laugh at dumb kids for doing dumb things.
Those Chow Mein Noodle haystacks are fucking awesome, and will continue to be fucking awesome till the day you die.
Don't throw your box of milk at someone, or you'll get into trouble.
If you have a really cool dinosaur book, girls will want to be around you.
My verdict? If you like sentimental crap and never mentally grew past age 5, you'll love it.
Monday, January 15, 2007
An Introduction.
We are invincible. We are in control of the world. The prize is right in front of our eyes, we only have to claim it. We are so great, in fact, that we were Time Magazine's "Person Of The Year" for 2006. We own the marketplace. Everything we want is at our fingertips. Filters no longer exist, and anything we desire we can acquire, from vintage lunch boxes to rare Japanese cartoon dildos. Truly, there is nothing that we cannot do.
So why are so many of us fucked-up, needy, pill-popping, depressed, frowny sons-of-bitches?
Hard labor will always exist, but here in the States, the vast majority of people work in offices, at computers, or from home. We have an overabundance of free time on our hands, time that can ideally lead to doing things for us, like reading, watching a movie, or knitting. Instead, the vast majority of Americans sit around and think about how miserable they are, and watch TV shows that reiterate how shitty life is. Daytime talk shows more often than not show fucked-up people leading fucked-up lives, or how crappy things are in certain areas of the world. After that the news comes on, which is story after story of crime, sadness, foods that will kill you, people embarrassing themselves, and a bear that wandered into a hot tub. Then at night we have reality shows which display just how low a person will go to possibly win some cash, sitcoms with sarcastic assholes as the "loveable" main characters, or competitions where the more a person is degraded or told that they suck, the more people are entertained by it.
Then, after some unfunny late night talk shows, the airwaves are handed over to people who take it upon themselves to undo the damage created by the previous several hours of television viewing. These brave souls are the prophets of the Frowny Generation. They are The Self-Help Gurus.
Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyer, Dr. Phil, Dr. Laura, Stephen Covey...they are here to help you awaken the giants within, build seven (or is it eight?) habits to make you successful, create changing days in your life, be a no-limit person, and stop doing those stupid things which are screwing up your life and everyone else's. They know the answers, and they have the millions of dollars in sales to back it up. According to my favorite questionable source on the Internet, Wikipedia, the self-help market was worth $8.5 billion dollars in 2003, and by next year (2008) it is estimated to be worth over $11 billion.
The Self-Help Marketplace is the psychological equivalent to the romance novel. People who lack romance seek it in a book, and likewise, people who refuse (rightfully, I might add) psychiatric help, seek it in the Self-Help movement. And just like the romance novel, the Self-Help book is not something entirely new. Though there is an explosion of interest that constantly grows each year, there are predecessors to it starting with Ben Franklin's classic "Poor Richard's Almanac." The first real Self-Help book was written by a man with the delightful name Samuel Smiles, and it was titled..."Self-Help." (1859) I do not know how many copies it sold, or if it was a sensation upon release, but according to my "source," it was the first. Smiles wrote many more books, which apparently showcased Victorian values and emphasized individual achievement, for which Smiles was criticized by his contemporaries. Since that time we have had Alcoholics Anonymous (1935) to help people kick their liquor habit, Napoleon Hill to teach people how to get rich with their minds (1937), and Dale Carnegie to teach people how to expand their social circles and influence those in it (1936).
The main question here is...if these books have been around for decades, and hold the secrets to being a rich, happy, healthy person, why are so many people broke, miserable, and out-of-shape? My guess is that either these books do not work, or people are too lazy to apply the lessons taught in them. Much of what is covered in these books is of questionable scientific merit, and a lot of research into them say that the success rate is probably more of a placebo effect than anything else.
Can these books be trusted, then? Where can we find reliable reviews to help us sort out the empowering from the bullshit?
This, dear reader, is where I come in.
I am a voracious reader, and constantly stuff my mind with as much information as possible. For years I have read some of the deepest, most intellectually challenging books ever written (well, maybe just a couple of them). Well, it's time to take a break from all that. It's time for me to help YOU. Enough with The Canon. It's time for me to go slumming with Dr. Phil, find out why He's Just Not That Into You, and seek out that fucker Who Moved My Cheese.
I will be reading it all...the classics (How To Win Friends And Influence People, Think And Grow Rich, The AA "Big Book", The Strangest Secret, Psycho-Cybernetics), the questionable (I'm OK You're OK, Dianetics, All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten) and the fashionable (Awaken The Giant Within, Rich Dad Poor Dad, The Purpose Driven Life, Men Are From Mars Women Are From Venus). By the end of this experiment I will either be a fulfilled, wealthy, powerful man with a wife who blows me five times a day, or I'll need years of psychiatric help to undo the damage. Either way, I'm sure it'll be entertaining for YOU, the reader.
Rather than start at the beginning, I will be starting this experiment with the most embarrassing book I've ever seen. A book which I will carry around and read everywhere I go, and will undoubtedly lead to snickers from bystanders and people in general thinking I'm a fruity bastard. It is this book:
After that, let me know what you want me to read. Depending on the book, I may spend more time with some over others, and actually try to apply the "techniques" they require. One book promises fulfillment after a week...I will read that one and if I am not totally satisfied with life at the end of that week, I will let you know that the author was a lying, manipulative cocksucker who should have his balls wrapped in barbed wire.
Wish me luck, and help me help you with your recommendations!
So why are so many of us fucked-up, needy, pill-popping, depressed, frowny sons-of-bitches?
Hard labor will always exist, but here in the States, the vast majority of people work in offices, at computers, or from home. We have an overabundance of free time on our hands, time that can ideally lead to doing things for us, like reading, watching a movie, or knitting. Instead, the vast majority of Americans sit around and think about how miserable they are, and watch TV shows that reiterate how shitty life is. Daytime talk shows more often than not show fucked-up people leading fucked-up lives, or how crappy things are in certain areas of the world. After that the news comes on, which is story after story of crime, sadness, foods that will kill you, people embarrassing themselves, and a bear that wandered into a hot tub. Then at night we have reality shows which display just how low a person will go to possibly win some cash, sitcoms with sarcastic assholes as the "loveable" main characters, or competitions where the more a person is degraded or told that they suck, the more people are entertained by it.
Then, after some unfunny late night talk shows, the airwaves are handed over to people who take it upon themselves to undo the damage created by the previous several hours of television viewing. These brave souls are the prophets of the Frowny Generation. They are The Self-Help Gurus.
Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyer, Dr. Phil, Dr. Laura, Stephen Covey...they are here to help you awaken the giants within, build seven (or is it eight?) habits to make you successful, create changing days in your life, be a no-limit person, and stop doing those stupid things which are screwing up your life and everyone else's. They know the answers, and they have the millions of dollars in sales to back it up. According to my favorite questionable source on the Internet, Wikipedia, the self-help market was worth $8.5 billion dollars in 2003, and by next year (2008) it is estimated to be worth over $11 billion.
The Self-Help Marketplace is the psychological equivalent to the romance novel. People who lack romance seek it in a book, and likewise, people who refuse (rightfully, I might add) psychiatric help, seek it in the Self-Help movement. And just like the romance novel, the Self-Help book is not something entirely new. Though there is an explosion of interest that constantly grows each year, there are predecessors to it starting with Ben Franklin's classic "Poor Richard's Almanac." The first real Self-Help book was written by a man with the delightful name Samuel Smiles, and it was titled..."Self-Help." (1859) I do not know how many copies it sold, or if it was a sensation upon release, but according to my "source," it was the first. Smiles wrote many more books, which apparently showcased Victorian values and emphasized individual achievement, for which Smiles was criticized by his contemporaries. Since that time we have had Alcoholics Anonymous (1935) to help people kick their liquor habit, Napoleon Hill to teach people how to get rich with their minds (1937), and Dale Carnegie to teach people how to expand their social circles and influence those in it (1936).
The main question here is...if these books have been around for decades, and hold the secrets to being a rich, happy, healthy person, why are so many people broke, miserable, and out-of-shape? My guess is that either these books do not work, or people are too lazy to apply the lessons taught in them. Much of what is covered in these books is of questionable scientific merit, and a lot of research into them say that the success rate is probably more of a placebo effect than anything else.
Can these books be trusted, then? Where can we find reliable reviews to help us sort out the empowering from the bullshit?
This, dear reader, is where I come in.
I am a voracious reader, and constantly stuff my mind with as much information as possible. For years I have read some of the deepest, most intellectually challenging books ever written (well, maybe just a couple of them). Well, it's time to take a break from all that. It's time for me to help YOU. Enough with The Canon. It's time for me to go slumming with Dr. Phil, find out why He's Just Not That Into You, and seek out that fucker Who Moved My Cheese.
I will be reading it all...the classics (How To Win Friends And Influence People, Think And Grow Rich, The AA "Big Book", The Strangest Secret, Psycho-Cybernetics), the questionable (I'm OK You're OK, Dianetics, All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten) and the fashionable (Awaken The Giant Within, Rich Dad Poor Dad, The Purpose Driven Life, Men Are From Mars Women Are From Venus). By the end of this experiment I will either be a fulfilled, wealthy, powerful man with a wife who blows me five times a day, or I'll need years of psychiatric help to undo the damage. Either way, I'm sure it'll be entertaining for YOU, the reader.
Rather than start at the beginning, I will be starting this experiment with the most embarrassing book I've ever seen. A book which I will carry around and read everywhere I go, and will undoubtedly lead to snickers from bystanders and people in general thinking I'm a fruity bastard. It is this book:
After that, let me know what you want me to read. Depending on the book, I may spend more time with some over others, and actually try to apply the "techniques" they require. One book promises fulfillment after a week...I will read that one and if I am not totally satisfied with life at the end of that week, I will let you know that the author was a lying, manipulative cocksucker who should have his balls wrapped in barbed wire.
Wish me luck, and help me help you with your recommendations!
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