Self-Help or Self-Hype?

In Roman times, had there been a bestsellers list, perennial favorites surely would have included How to be Emperor Longer than Three Months, Gladiator Games for Dummies, and How to Profit in the Coming Dark Ages. In medieval times, I could imagine a title like How to Fight a Hundred Years War in 100 Minutes – and Win. I suppose Martin Luther could have cashed in with Who Moved My Theology or Write a Hymn in 30 Minutes or Less.

The book publishing genre of “self-help” books has enjoyed a long history, although I’m not completely positive they extend back to the glory days of the Roman Empire.

When I first became aware of self-help books in the bookstore in the 1970s, some of the best known ones were Passages by Gail Sheehy; Robert Ringer’s Looking Out for No. 1; Born to Win by Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward (remember transactional analysis?); A Guide to Rational Living by Albert Ellis; and Leo Buscaglia’s Love.

Self-help books follow a relatively simple formula: find a common, everyday problem (or find something that could potentially be a common, everyday problem), break the problem down into five (or six or seven) components, and then present the three (or four or five) parts of a solution. A self-help book needs to be written in simple language; if you can utilize the fable or story approach, even better.

Some are well written and thought-provoking. Most have their day in the sun and are then forgotten. But publishers publish them for one very simple reason.

They sell.

They sell to a secular audience, and they sell to a Christian audience.

The question isn’t “Why are they published?” Publishers are in business to make money, and if the public wants self-help books, then publishers will be there to meet the demand. We can get all academic and literary about it and sniff our noses while Who Moved My Cheese sells millions of copies and extraordinary novels languish, struggling to sell even 500 copies, but the marketplace is the marketplace. And it’s likely that without the success of Who Moved My Cheese, a publisher couldn’t afford to take a chance on a novel, no matter how extraordinary.

The real question is, “Why do we buy them?”

I suggest three reasons.

First, self-help books are invariably about me. They’re not called “self-help” for no reason. They personalize a common problem, the one that you think that you alone are experiencing.

Second, everyone else is reading them. We like to read what everyone else is reading. We like to read bestsellers. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal don’t publish lists of “The Best Books Selling Virtually No Copies This Week.”

Third, they offer simple solutions, often by projecting the author’s experience on to millions of other people. And we want simple solutions to our problems. Difficult solutions suggest that life isn’t as simple as we want it to be. And they mean hard work, often for a lifetime, and who wants to do that while you’re preparing for your 15 minutes of fame?

In Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day, Todd Henry says “we want the results without the uncertainty and risk. The hard truth is that there is no real and lasting success without the potential for failure. The pain of the journey is what allows you to sustain your success on the other side.” (I should point out here that while I’ve enjoyed reading Die Empty, it is a self-help book, although different from the kind I’ve read before.)

This is not the understanding to which self-help books usually appeal. We want our problems simply, neatly, and quickly. If we’re honest with ourselves, we know that simple, neat, and quick solutions to problems rarely if ever exist. Life is thorny, difficult, and challenging for all of us. It often hurts. It is often filled with less-than-joyful moments. It is not about walking down the red carpet at the Academy Awards; that lasts only a moment even for movie stars.

But life is worthwhile, and living it well and honorably is worthwhile.

Maybe we do need a Living Life Well and Honorably for Dummies.

Actually, I think we already have it, and it’s been around since Roman times.

This month, we’ve been reading Die Empty over at The High Calling. Today concludes the discussion with a focus on the last three chapters of the book. To see what others have to say, please visit The High Calling.

Photograph by Piotr Seidlecki via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

What Resonates? (It Matters)

Most of my working career has been spent in speechwriting. It’s tempting (the temptation being smugness) to think that the 30 years I spent immersed in speechwriting (roughly 1976 to 1980) were the last hurrah of formal discourse. Television, PowerPoint, and now social media have all had an impact, and not necessarily positive.

Instead of civil discourse, we utilize videos and talking points.

Instead of speeches, we have PowerPoint.

Instead of intelligent conversation, we tweet.

For someone like me, whose day-to-day work occurs online and largely within social media, I understand what we have and what we have lost.

The change was already obvious by the mid-1980s, largely due to television. “Sound bite” had entered the communications lexicon. So had “talking points.” Up to that time, most large companies had speechwriting departments (we didn’t call them teams then). But change was underway. The great corporate restructurings of the 1980s did not spare the speechwriting departments. In 1980, I was one of four full-time speechwriters for the company I worked for. In 1990, I was the sole corporate speechwriter left, and I had supervisory responsibility for other functions.

The conventional wisdom about speeches had become (1) shorter is better, (2) use illustrations like photographs and videos, and (3) be entertaining.

And then I attended an event that turned the conventional wisdom on its head.

In 1992, I attended a speechwriter’s conference in Chicago. One of the speakers was Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a former aide to U.S. Rep. Claude Pepper and now with the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. A few years before, she had published Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechwriting. The book spoke to political and corporate speechwriters alike, and it articulated the unease that many of us speechwriters felt. It wasn’t only speeches and speechwriting that were changing; it was all discourse – corporate, political, academic, and social. And it wasn’t change for the better.

Jamieson spoke with interruption or a break for an hour. A solid hour. The audience was spellbound. No one got up to leave. She finished to thunderous applause. She was asked one question, and spoke for 45 minutes. Forty-five minutes to answer one question, and the audience remained spellbound.

What she said resonated with me and the other 200 people in the room. I still consider it to be one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard. Two years later, I arranged for her to speak at a company conference. She had the same effect. By 1994, many of us could see what was coming with electronic communications technology, and how it was already transforming how we communicated with each other.

Today, I hear and read very few “speeches” as I understood and wrote them. Speakers string together message points and call it a speech. Virtually no one utilizes the tools of rhetoric. Few marshal evidence. Instead we make assertions as emotionally as we can, and it passes for thought leadership.

In Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day, Todd Henry talks about the importance of resonance,  which he calls a “valuable clue on the path to performing your best, most unique work.” We each have, he says, “resonant frequencies that we respond to naturally, and when we encounter them in others, their words or actions are amplified in us and we begin to resonate with the other person…Typically, these points of resonance are thematic, not specific in nature. It’s more about the deeper theme their words or actions point to and not just what was said.”

Her words resonated. In the years that followed, I wrote some of the best speeches I had ever written. What she said also had an impact on how I approached social media, and I generally use it in atypical ways.

I still remember that speech. I still remember the room, and being there. The impact was lasting.

Over at The High Calling, Laura Boggess is leading us in a discussion of Die Empty. To see what people are saying about this section of the book, please visit the site.

Photograph by Peter Griffin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Passion, Curiosity, and Risk

When I started college, my plan was to become a doctor, so I chose to enroll in a pre-med curriculum. My first chemistry class convinced me that my future was not medicine; I faced another 13 hours of the subject and I knew that simply wasn’t going to happen.

Medicine had been my father’s dream, transferred generationally. He had wanted to go to college and become a doctor, but the Great Depression intervened and ended that dream. After high school, the would-be doctor instead went to work in the only place offering jobs – the oil fields of East Texas. He hoped his son would pick up the dream where he had had to leave it. Medicine—being a doctor—remained his passion, long after he had left it behind.

Once you know or understand what your passion is, what Todd Henry in Dying Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day your “productive passion,” much becomes clear.

To continue reading, please see my post today at The High Calling. 

Are We Called to Mediocrity?

In Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day, Todd Henry tells a story about a woman named Julie who worked at a design firm. She was at the top of her industry and the top of her game.

She attended a workshop Henry led, and she pulled him aside to say that despite all of her promotions and recognitions, she feels like she’s slipping into something she can’t define, that she’s no longer making important progress in her work.

We can be ferociously busy at work, and still be caught up in mediocrity. Situations characterized by too much work and too few resources to get it done are particularly ripe for institutionalized mediocrity – just doing whatever it takes to get it off your plate.

I knew a man who experienced something exactly like that. At one point leading a fairly large and successful team that was producing incredible work, he found himself at the wrong end of departmental politics and, yes, jealousy. The team was gradually stripped away, and the functions that had been so successful had, in the hands of others, slipped into mediocrity and even dysfunction. My friend was left with a very small team, being both isolated and patronized.

I’ve seen other situations like this, and been in similar ones myself. The obviousroute to take is to keep your head low and slide into the mediocrity of the daily work routine. And many organizational cultures favor doing exactly that.

But mediocrity is not a calling. Accepting the status quo, hunkering down and going with the flow are not a calling. “Be Average and Don’t Rock the Boat!” is not a call to greatness. The important things in this life come from the desire and passion to overcome obstacles and to break through to what matters.

My friend did not passively accept the role of mediocrity. Instead, he took what he was now responsible for, recognized its importance, and began to build the future.

Eventually, his work paid off. The recognition arrived first from the outside before his organization recognized it, but it came from within as well. He had accomplished something important, often in spite of his organization.

He had the passion and the desire to do his best work every day.

Today we’re starting a discussion of Todd Henry’s Die Empty over at The High Calling. To see the conversation and what’s being discussed, please visit the site.

Illustration by Frits Ahlefeldt via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.