Sure books can guide you, but your heart defines you – Jay Z (Beach Chair)
So for the past few months, my reading rate plummeted drastically. I went from reading multiple books and consuming self-help content on an almost constant basis, to not wanting to see another Tom Bilyeu, Tai Lopez or Gary Vee video.
Why?
Well, first, I am a person of extremes.
I tend to swing from one end to the other.
When I get into something, I really get into it, to the point of obsession. And then at some point, I just get over it and walk away. It is my nature, I need the balance of opposites to feel whole.
It was in early 2015, I really started to hunker down on my personal development and business knowledge. I watched and listened to a lot of Tai, and then eventually Gary, and then Tom and others over the years. Their content was incredibly useful in transforming my mindset and putting me in a different space.
I needed that.
It was their words and ideas changed the way I thought and my default settings to life. I literally rewired my brain with their content, consuming it every waking hour – at the gym, just lounging around in my apartment, on the train in between meetings, just before bed, and of course, while I worked.
It was awesome. I was practicing something I call ‘full-immersion’. Bombarding my mind to change the way it worked.
Fast forward to today, and I am barely consuming any self-help content at all. My YouTube playlist has morphed from Valuetainment, Gary Vee and Impact Theory shows to video essays and comedic videos breaking down the narrative and philosophical themes of my favourite pop culture movies, literature and video games. Now I write things like this and this.
I don’t know what to tell you. I like what I like.
Which brings me to my second point.
Life is a complex matrix, full of many moving parts and unique experiences.
You can not be one-dimensional. Most of the personal development space is that, one-dimensional and repetitive. The same lists and ideas sprouted off over and over again.
It is like if you are not waking up at 5am everyday, drinking bullet proof coffee, chugging down shakes and hitting the gym everyday, you will not be successful. If you are not obsessed with crushing it, your life has no meaning.
Life is vast, there are many ways to approach it and many ideas to explore. The trap of the self-help game is to have you think that someone else has all the answers so you can switch your brain off and mindlessly follow.
We see the same problem in most religions. Inspired living ideas quickly turn into mindless dogma. People become dependent on others telling them what to think and do.
Sure, there are universal principles that we must learn, but we are all unique individuals with specific contexts, and we still have to do the work of crafting our unique solutions.
We can spend all the time reading but only our true reflection on what we read and practice actually changes anything.
And if you do the self-help thing well…at some point you should ‘graduate’ from it. At some point, you should actually be helped, you should be a better person and be better equipped to get what you want.
It doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t need a reminder, a refresher from time to time. But you should have absorbed the lessons.
And that’s my third point – the point I am at now.
Taking action is what actually works
For all the content I consumed, they gave me ideas, they gave me tools, but they did not give me results.
I look around at my life, and there are many things I want to achieve and attain. The only thing that is going to make those things real in my life…is the work. Not another book, not another video, just the actual work of putting to practice what I learned and getting my hands dirty in the nitty gritty of making things happen in my life.
At this point, the content is more of a distraction.
Because it is very easy to conflate the knowledge of being able to do something with actually doing it.
That is how we become insight junkies, craving the dopamine hit of a new epiphany, a new idea, a silver bullet that would magically solve all your problems. That is how we become the perpetual student enslaved to the opinions and ideas of all the gurus just waiting to take your money and charge you to help you.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a place for all that. They do help, and people do have massively transformative experiences. But more often than not, after all the hurrah, most people are back the next year in the exact same place, with not much to show for it.
The only thing that works is the work.
The grimy work of change, of perpetual practice, of dust biting failure and the slow grind.
That is presently fascinating to me.
Because the people who we follow did not get successful by following. They got successful by doing.
Another book on business isn’t going to make my studio successful. What is going to make me successful is how well I apply the principles I learned to my specific situation. Not how well I followed this other author’s ideas to the T. But how I made it my own, how I absorbed it to my core and to my bones.
And you only absorb by taking a step back. By doing inner reflection. By putting it into practice.
It is the work that works.
At some point you have to put the books down and walk into the exam, and then into the workplace.
And of course, it is not like I will never read another book again. I am still buying books and noting down certain things. In fact I bought another one last night. But I am way more intentional about it, I am not looking for a silver bullet. I am looking for specific ideas to add to my portfolio of tools. Something I can take action on immediately.
Plus, I know myself.
Like I said…I am a man of extremes. I will be back to reading ferociously at some stage anyway, and that will be awesome.
In the mean time, I’m focused on the work.
