Why You Make the Mistake of Thinking You're Not Good Enough

The Self-Help Trap

Lisboa, Portugal, 2024

Chances are that if you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you have a reasonable interest in the self-improvement genre. It’s got its appeal, and for good reason— it offers a solution to fix your so-called “flaws”, and who couldn’t resist? Wouldn’t life be so much easier if all of our shortcomings and problems could be remedied just by reading a book and getting the answers directly?

But tell me if this sounds familiar: the more you take in, the more this idea of lack enters your head. Maybe your journey of personal development began because you wanted to become a better communicator. Somewhere along the way, you began to realize that you’re not really in tune with your emotions, so you set out to fixing that too. Eventually, you noticed that you could benefit from more effectively organizing your time. Rinse and repeat.

It’s like that psychological phenomenon where if you’re in the market to buy a new car, you see the same car everywhere, or that same color across different makes and models. This is known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, or the frequency illusion. It’s essentially a form of cognitive bias where we are more adept to notice things that we are consciously focused on. Much like the cars, if we have a strong belief that we aren’t good enough, we will seek out evidence to prove that right.

Fortunately, the reverse can be true. Our brains are neuroplastic, meaning that it can adapt and change itself throughout life, which means that you do have the capacity to unlearn unhealthy habits and modes of thinking. This land of potential is where the self-help genre enters. It takes advantage (of course not in a malicious way) of your hope that you can be different than how you are now and offers improvement.

Some Quick Context

I recognize the irony in me discussing the problem of the self-help world while writing you a newsletter that falls into the genre. This self-awareness is a big reason why I started Human+. I wanted to make my mark in an area that I believe in and has the potential to change lives, but in a different way. In an intentional way.

I aim to help shed some light on the questions that we’ve all had on the human experience. Notice I didn’t say “answer”. This is because I don’t have definitive answers to these questions. Depending on your personal beliefs, maybe someone does or someone did. All I can do, genuinely, is provide my own insights on these questions in such a way that I have personally experienced, and that’s all that counts for me. I won’t ever share things that I don’t stand by, and what I do share I make sure is effective and evidence-backed. By sharing my thoughts and experiences with you, it might help give you a spark of some sort to act on or to contemplate.

But enough about why I feel justified in being another voice in the crowd. Let’s talk more about where the need for self-help stems from, and how you can learn to be intentional with it.

Origins and Consequences

Self-help, at its core, aims to sell you something. It knows that you believe yourself to be deficient in something and so it tries to provide solutions to you— for a price. You find yourself convinced that you are broken somehow and in need of fixing. This is how religion has operated for thousands of years. Now, this same attitude has crept its way into everyday life.

Just take this statistic: in the past six years, the number of self-help books published has nearly tripled, going from 30,000 in 2016 to 85,000 in 2022. Now, there’s a fix for everything: eating (“follow THIS diet for maximum results!), sleeping (“why polyphasic sleep will make you a genius”), even breathing (the Wim Hof Method).

Again, do you see the problem here? We’ve been led to believe that every last thing we do, we’re doing wrong, even down to our basic biological functions (how crazy is that when you really think about it?) Doubt sets in and suddenly something that’s worked perfectly fine for us all our lives conveniently turns out to be wrong. Instead of feeling like you’re nearing a goal, the goal just gets farther and farther away until we feel like we are the ones that got farther. Basically, the gap between our present state and our ideal one widens perpetually until it eventually becomes bigger than it was at the start of our journey.

The Black and White Nature of Self-Help

Another problem with the self-help industry is that it lacks nuance. You either are something or you aren’t, and if you were that thing, then you wouldn’t be seeking out fixes in the first place, so you’re constantly reminded of your non-beingness of that thing.

When people first get into self-help, they tend to adopt an all-or-nothing mentality: “I HAVE to get up at 5 AM”, “I HAVE to read one book a week”, I HAVE to meditate for 20 minutes a day”, “I HAVE to go to the gym four days a week for at least one hour and lose/gain 10 pounds by the end of the month”, ad nauseam. We implement such rigid goals for ourselves that anything less than 100% success is an automatic failure. But in what world is losing or gaining 5 pounds or waking up at 6 AM consistently a failure? Going back to what I said earlier, we don’t see results, we see what we fell short of. And there’s no quicker way to poor mental health than seeing what we lack instead of what we have.

Eventually, the gap between where we are and where we want to be widens and ends up leaving us in a worse spot than when we started. Going back to the waking up early example, perhaps our starting wake up time was 7 AM and we wanted to push it back to 5 AM. Life happens, we lost motivation, whatever— but we just could not consistently achieve that desired wake up time. Because we seemingly “failed” our goal, we just say “fuck it, what’s the point anyway” and then we start waking up at 7:30, 8, 8:30. Ultimately worse off than the start and now with diminished self-esteem.

The Ego Trap

After a while, maybe we come around to putting in a little work in improving ourselves, but then the ego steps in. Through virtue signaling, we proudly announce our superiority, thereby widening the supposed gap yet again, but this time between ourselves and everyone else (“I wake up at 5 AM because I’m such a big achiever!”) So in the end, self-help here doesn’t feed insecurity, it feeds arrogance.

Self-help can also be a source of power, but not necessarily a beneficial one. Essentially, it can act as a refuge for us. It tells us what we want to to hear without any real work on our part. The book might reinforce the ideas of worthiness, inner beauty, and empowerment, but these are just free compliments. There’s no need to take action if you can receive infinite amounts of praise from a book.

Along these lines, another trap that I fell into was that my consumption of self-help content acted as a substitute for the real-world experience. For example, I would read some books about dating, understanding the other sex, and familiarizing myself with compatibility, for I thought that by having this information, I would be a better partner when the time came because I was equipped with the knowledge of how relationships worked. I was essentially burying my insecurities from not dating and replacing them with “competencies” that came from a book.

This is what I call the loss of action. Basically, because you know so much about something, you don’t apply it. We substitute action for knowledge. This is because we fear actually implementing the advice we’re given, so we do the next best thing and just learn as much as we can about it. It’s like spending hundreds of hours reading about how to drive a car, what each knob and button does, the fundamentals of defensive driving, how to merge onto the interstate, and every last rule of the road. Just go out and do it! Experience is a much better teacher than a classroom.

It’s All Paradoxical

Synthesizing the last two points, we reach the conclusion that it’s all a vicious cycle. Either we consume so much self-help that we end up feeling worse about ourselves, or so much that we think we think we’re better than everyone else. The original goal of being a better version of ourselves gets lost and we end up falling into either extreme of the spectrum. Or we conceptualize something way too much and never put it into action.

Note that not everyone who consumes self-help falls into these traps. It’s perfectly possible to consume it with positive ambitions. Again, this is what I aim to help with in writing for you, and I trust that you are able to establish appropriate boundaries.

The Solution

Now, I don’t want to bash on the self-help industry as a whole at all. There are legitimate books that have been so impactful and contained advice that has truly changed my life.

But the key is to be intentional. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that more solutions must mean there are more problems. If you take nothing else from this essay, please remember that the biggest things that self-help promises— wisdom, competency, self-love, and acceptance— are all gained exponentially more in the real world and by living than from a bunch of pages. I get it, knowledge can be addicting— it just feels good to learn more and more. But I’m learning that experience is the best teacher.

So go out and live! In your search to be a better human, don’t forget to be human in the first place.

And remember to implement what you learned. Again, some things are good to learn from a book (such as philosophical and spiritual ideas), but most things are best learned from life itself (like how to deal with people).

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Something that I’ve been doing is being honest and asking myself what’s really important for me at this point in my life. I narrow it down to three items and take as much time as I need on each one before becoming skilled at it, moving on to the next, and finally creating a new list of priorities (I realize that this still reads a lot like traditional self-help, but I’ve found that it’s a happy compromise with my productivity-wired brain.)

However, the moment I start to feel like a machine, or I lose sight of why I started learning that skill in the first place, I stop and take some time to just be me— not adding anything, just pausing and reflecting on who I am in that moment or stage of life. It’s about progress, not perfection, and progress can come just as much from rest as it can from action.

For example, my list might look something like this:

1. Emotional intelligence

2. Coping with anxiety

3. Time management

Like I wrote previously, the most important thing to do is to actually do these things. Improving my emotional intelligence might look like being more vulnerable and sharing my feelings instead of just saying “Good” when someone asks me how I’ve been doing. Coping with anxiety might look like being more proactive and taking action to combat whatever is causing my anxiety as opposed to spiritually bypassing everything. And managing my time better might be deleting my social media apps to cut out hours of doomscrolling.

Since these are the three most pressing issues, it makes no sense to dip my feet in 10 different things at once. This is where overstimulation is born- in the need to consume more, more, more. Though it might feel like I could be achieving more by intaking more, that is not the case. In fact, I find that being 100% successful at a skill (or as close to it as you can get) is so much more rewarding than being 10% successful in 10 skills.

Thank you so much for reading,

Alan

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