Self-Help Means Help Yourself

For a moment in my life, you couldn't see me without a book in hand. A self-help book to be precise. I felt like the world was moving, changing, and I was being left behind. Being raised to look at the mirror before I blame others, I decided if there was something to improve, it was my very own self.

I picked up Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. Now I can admit it, I never finished reading the book. But I read plenty of others. I devoured all of Robert Kiyosaki's books and felt inspired. If only I had a rich dad. I read the one he wrote with Donald Trump. I was pumped. I was still learning English; I may have misunderstood the whole thing (I can assure you, none of the authors mentioned were involved in writing the book). I joined a club where we would get a new self-help book every month and discuss it. I was in love with the genre.

But one thing I noticed in retrospect is that I enjoyed reading more than actually doing anything the books taught.

Here's the thing about self-help books, they're necessarily abstract. If they gave specific examples, those examples wouldn't apply to most people. So they give general advice, more inspiring than practical. And inspiration, while it feels good in the moment, doesn't build anything on its own.

Over the years, I learned that advice by itself is useless. Imagine getting writing advice from a pro, but you've never written anything. No writing advice can be applied to a blank piece of paper. You can't edit what doesn't exist. You can't improve a sentence you haven't written.

What you actually need is to start something, anything, and reevaluate every so often. That's it.

I think about Bob Nystrom, who wrote Crafting Interpreters, a book about building programming languages. What I love about his story isn't just the book itself, but how he wrote it. He did so publicly, chapter by chapter, responding to feedback as he went.

And when he completed the book, he published a reflection of the process he titled Crafting "Crafting Interpreters". He wrote through some of the worst years of his life. His mother was diagnosed with cancer. Loved ones died. The world around him felt like it was falling apart. But he kept writing anyway.

Not because he was superhuman or exceptionally disciplined. He kept writing because it was the one thing he could control when so much else was spiraling beyond his grasp. Finishing the book became proof that he could make it through everything else. Skipping a day would have meant the chaos won. Writing became his anchor.

We can always find reasons not to start. The conditions are never perfect. We're still learning. We don't have the right resources. We haven't read enough books yet. But self-help isn't meant to be inspiration porn, something we consume to feel good without changing anything. It's a method for helping yourself. The books, the advice, the strategies, they're all pointing toward the same message. You have to be the one to do it.

Nobody can help you get started. Nobody can give you advice that works on a blank page. The only thing that transforms nothing into something is you, sitting down and beginning.

Self-help means helping yourself, not someday, not when you're ready, but now. Start messy. Start imperfect. Start without knowing how it ends. Because the secret isn't in the next book or the next piece of advice. The secret is that you already know what you need to do. You just need to help yourself do it.

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