Self-help; Business

All of us wannebe-hackers seem to find great joy in the fact, that every­thing in life is actu­ally hack­able; you can tweak your habits and your mind just as you can tweak your data­base or your OS of choice.

GTD, ‘hacker’-blogs and var­i­ous books on self-hacking is all the rage, and I cer­tainly have read my part from the almost oblig­a­tory list of must-reads.

Classy reports that Kom­mu­nika­tions­fo­rum now fea­tures RSS (which, just to prove his point that you can’t under­es­ti­mate the power of… trig­gered this very post as I was brows­ing by K-forum for the first time in ages), so I just dis­cov­ered their review of Blink.

All of this just to say, that while I enjoyed Blink (I read it on my way down here), enjoyed The Tip­ping Point (also by Glad­well) and have gained a good amount of pro­duc­tiv­ity by think­ing along the lines of GTD, I fell for the temp­ta­tion and bought The Now Habit — which I didn’t enjoy all that much.

It should be noted, that this might have some­thing to do with the fact, that it turned out I’m not a real pro­cras­ti­na­tor but just lazy, so the book wasn’t really for me. Nev­er­the­less, some­thing on the back of the book trig­gered some­thing I’ve been think­ing about for a while: Where do you draw the line between Self-help and good, ol-fashioned reality-hacking?

I enjoy mak­ing fun of the grow­ing self-help scene that has almost taken over the space of any Dan­ish book­store, rid­ing on the back of numer­ous tv-shows, turn­ing aver­age peo­ple into help­less babies, need­ing help for mov­ing in together, mov­ing out again, con­vert­ing an ugly gar­den into a just as ugly — but dif­fer­ent — gar­den, apply­ing wall­pa­per etc. etc. But maybe, just maybe, I some­times read books or weblogs that are just as bad?

What trig­gered my raec­tion was the rec­om­men­da­tion for plac­ing the book in the store, put on the back of the book by the pub­lisher: Self-help; Business.

This pretty much says it all. This blurry zone between psycho-babble and ‘busi­ness’ I don’t need. Explicit guide­lines for sort­ing infor­ma­tion, focus­ing on sys­tems rather than state-of-mind and what have you: Yes, please. Books on var­i­ous sub­jects that’s nice to know some­thing about and might improve your think­ing about cer­tain areas: Defi­nately. “Just say to yourself”-type books: No, thanks.