It’s a subject that has occupied some of the greatest philosophers of all time, from Aristotle to Paul McKenna. But how do we sort the good ideas from the terrible ones? Over the past five years, Oliver Burkeman has delved deep into the ‘happiness industry.’ What is the secret behind happiness? In an attempt to find out, Burkeman tackles a range of subjects from stress, procrastination, laughter, time management and creativity. Witty and thought-provoking, Help! doesn’t claim to have solved the problem of human happiness, but it might just bring us one step closer.
Oliver Burkeman is an award-winning feature writer for the Guardian. He writes a popular weekly column on psychology, ‘This Column Will Change Your Life’, and has reported from London, Washington and New York.
The Antidote:
Happiness for People Who Can’t
Stand Positive Thinking
A few years ago, I started writing a weekly newspaper column in which I set out to solve the problem of human happiness. I was half-joking, of course. I was aware that the topic had already received an inordinate amount of attention from some of history’s greatest thinkers – such as Aristotle, in his Nichomachean Ethics, and Paul McKenna, in his Paul McKenna’s Change Your Life in Seven Days: The World’s Leading Hypnotist Shows You How – and I didn’t really imagine that I was going to make any staggering new breakthroughs. Besides, as a rational, non-gullible sort of person, I was allergic to the cheesy promises of self-help gurus. (Anthony Robbins, purveyor of $600-a-day motivational workshops, author of Awaken the Giant Within, and possessor of the most improbably chiselled jaw on the planet – I’m looking at you.) Even various not-so-cheesy explorations of happiness, by professional psychologists and philosophers, incurred my scepticism. This was perhaps because I’d grown up in the north of England, where people who go around looking too ostentatiously happy tend to be regarded as suspicious, and quite possibly American.
But I should be honest: if I was half-joking, I was also half-serious. Deep down, however much we cover it up with cynicism and wisecracks, isn’t everybody at least half-serious about wanting to be happy? ‘Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence,’ observed one of the aforementioned great thinkers. (Hint: it wasn’t Paul McKenna.) I mocked self-help gurus, and others who made a living dispensing tips and techniques for a more satisfying life, but I knew my mockery was at least partially defensive: it was much less embarrassing to dismiss all that stuff as mumbo-jumbo than to admit that I wanted some of what it promised. An awful lot of it is mumbo-jumbo, as I was to discover. But among those countless thousands of ideas for becoming happier, richer, more successful, more popular and more productive, surely there were a few that it might be useful to know about?
Fortunately, around the time I started delving into the topic, two developments were beginning to make happiness a slightly more acceptable subject for discussion among people who thought of themselves as sceptical and intelligent. The first was the explosion, among academic psychologists, of ‘happiness studies’, involving rigorous experiments designed to pinpoint the sources of human fulfilment.The other was the movement known as ‘lifehacking’, originating on the Internet, which disdained the grand promises of traditional self-help in favour of more modest goals: finding ways to beat procrastination, to keep your email inbox under control, and generally to simplify your life. Here, I felt much more at home, having always had a geeky fondness for time-management systems, to-do lists, personal organisers and the like. To put it another way, I was the kind of child who was liable to spend longer designing perfectly colour-coded exam revision timetables than actually revising for exams.
So I took a deep breath, tried to suppress my self-consciousness, and set out on an adventure through the world of popular psychology – a term I’m using loosely here to encompass self-help, happiness studies, lifehacking, and other ideas with an emphasis on practical implementation by a mass audience. I learned Neuro-Linguistic Programming from the experts, and listened to self-hypnosis CDs; I spoke to social psychologists, Buddhist psychotherapists and even a Scientologist, though to be honest he wasn’t much help. I kept a gratitude journal; I tried to become a morning person; I tamed my out-of-control email; I attempted to stop complaining for 21 days. Above all, I read a vast number of books (including Awaken the Giant Within – I can’t recommend it, I’m afraid) and research papers. I tried to approach it all in the spirit of a foreign correspondent, sending back reports from a strange new country, though I’m not sure I realised at the time exactly how strange some parts of it would be. This book is a record of what I found.
*
It’s a little strange, when you stop to think about it, that the quest for happiness should have acquired such an embarrassing reputation, as if the desire to be a happier person were not the most universal of urges but rather a shameful predilection, like collecting Nazi memorabilia, or attending Michael Bolton concerts. This wasn’t always the case. The ancient Greeks and Romans made no distinction between the noblest of all pursuits – philosophy – and self-help; for them, the whole point of figuring out what constituted ‘the good life’ was that you’d then be able to put your findings into practice. Why go to the trouble of asking the question, and formulating an answer, only to fail to follow your own advice? ‘Philosophy’s power to blunt the blows of circumstance is beyond belief,’ was how Seneca the Stoic expressed this connection, and much of his work, viewed from a certain perspective, is really a collection of self-help tips. (If you’re afflicted by the fear of failure, he advises at one point, try dressing in rags and subsisting on scraps of food for a week or two. That way, you’ll always have the comfort of knowing you could tolerate it if you had to.)
This upfront, unashamed attitude towards seeking a better life continued for centuries: even so esteemed a figure as Benjamin Franklin apparently felt little embarrassment telling the world about a notebook he carried, in which he listed 13 ‘virtues’ – frugality, sincerity, that sort of thing – then made a habit of ticking off which ones he managed to exhibit on any given day. If you tried something similar in the twenty-first century, would you tell your friends about it? I’m not sure I would. Somewhere along the way, something changed.
Specifically, what happened was the Great Depression – and out of it, the modern incarnation of the movement known as Positive Thinking. The mid-1930s saw the publication of two books that bear much of the blame for the tacky, embarrassing, scam-filled era of self-help that followed: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, and Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. (The third main offender, Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, followed several years later.) It’s not hard to see why they became bestsellers: in a world still reeling from economic devastation, their message to readers feeling pummelled by forces beyond their control was that they weren’t as powerless as they had imagined. The security they’d once known might have vanished – but they could seize control of their own destinies simply by changing how they thought! ‘Truly, thoughts are things,’ writes Hill, and thus by cultivating ‘persistence, and a BURNING DESIRE’ – he has a troubling fondness for capital letters – whatever you can dream of can be yours. Seven decades later, the message persists: it is, for example, the philosophy behind Rhonda Byrne’s mega-bestseller The Secret, which promises sports cars and expensive jewellery just by thinking really hard about them. I can’t say this ever worked for me. But then again, perhaps my DESIRE wasn’t BURNING brightly enough. Who knows?
The sad thing about all this is that positive thinking isn’t actually all nonsense – and in any case it’s far from the only possible approach to becoming happier, more successful, or more productive. Yet its numerous flaws have come to infect the whole field of popular psychology. Positive thinkers speak as if changing your life were rapid and easy (sometimes it is, but usually it isn’t). They promise perfection, thereby setting you up for gloom and self-reproach when you fall short (which you will). Taken to extremes, the approach also leads to some exceedingly unpleasant conclusions: more than one writer has suggested that, since your thoughts create your reality, the victims of crime and poverty must be to blame for their suffering. Other times, the conclusions aren’t sinister, just ridiculous – as in Zero Limits, a book by Dr Joe Vitale, in which the author relates the story of a doctor who ‘cured a complete ward of criminally insane patients’ without ever meeting them, merely by ‘look[ing] within himself’. (Vitale’s PhD, by the way, is from an institution in Arizona called the University of Metaphysics.) All of this also provides fertile ground for more straightforward con-artists and charlatans, preying on the desperate for financial gain.You can learn more about this in my ten-CD course, ‘How to Spot a Self-Help Scammer’, worth £1,999 but available for a short time only at the special price of £297.
The truth, though, as I now know, is that not all popular psychology is bad psychology. Yes, much of it will leave you unchanged, or even worse off than before – if only because your original problems will have been complemented by extra helpings of frustration and annoyance at failing to change. But some of it is deeply insightful, non-perfectionistic, practical, wise and humane. The trick is learning to tell the difference.
The other trick, of course, is putting it into practice – and the most obvious question to be answered about my encounters with self-help gurus, self-help books, happiness studies, motivational CDs, workshops and the rest is this: did it actually make me any happier, more productive, or more successful? I think it did. But not because I discovered some grand Principle of Happiness. Instead, I discovered numerous much smaller tips, techniques and insights, and it’s these that make up the majority of what follows. I touch frequently on the big questions, but mainly as they relate to the smallest of matters: how to organise your to-do list, how to manage your day, how to handle awkward friends, how to get the most from holidays, how to become an early riser, how to organise your filing system.
If one big principle did emerge, it’s that we probably ought to consider changing our ideas about change – about how we understand the whole notion of ‘self-improvement’. Even if you hate that term, it’s surely an accurate description of many of the activities that make up our lives. Yet to listen to the likes of Anthony Robbins – who advocates ‘taking massive action’ to go ‘beyond the limits of the possible’ – you’d think that the only way to achieve personal change was by going all-out, straining every sinew and revolutionising your life. This absolutist way of thinking is deeply seductive, even for those of us who don’t share Robbins’s hyperbolic demeanour: behind almost every New Year’s resolution, for example, is the unspoken implication that whatever change we’re trying to make – to start exercising more, eating better, procrastinating less – we’re going to do it every day, perfectly, for the rest of our lives. I’d always wondered why my efforts at such extreme self-discipline seemed to fail every time. But then, gradually, I began to understand that real self-discipline is almost the exact opposite: the willingness to make small, incremental adjustments, to tolerate imperfection and bumpy progress, and not to throw in the towel in frustration the moment something starts to go wrong. In this sense, modest action (a phrase you won’t find in Robbins’s work) in fact takes more guts than massive action. But it has the inestimable advantage that it really works.
Then again, perhaps we also need to question what we mean by ‘works’, because achieving happiness, it soon became clear, doesn’t necessarily mean feeling overjoyed all the time. Again, we have the positive-thinking movement to blame for the unhelpful idea that the goal of life – Aristotle’s ‘whole aim and end of human existence’ – should be a state of unalloyed ecstasy. As the best scientific investigations into happiness make clear, there are two major problems with this. The first is that it simply isn’t how we experience our most satisfying moments: when wrapped up in genuinely engaging work, or conversation, or interactions with our friends and families, it’s more accurate to say that we’re so absorbed that we’re unaware of any kind of mood, overjoyed or otherwise. The second is that to experience a real sense of aliveness and fulfilment, the happiness researchers will tell you, you need to be exposed to a full symphony of emotions and not just the one-note melody of cheeriness.Too often, positive thinking is about closing off the possibility of negative emotions. But real happiness may also require a capacity for awe, curiosity and being comfortable with uncertainty – all characteristics that involve not closing off, but remaining open to the negative.
Something else I discovered: none of this needs to be complicated. The self-help industry thrives on complexity, for one obvious reason: it’s much easier to charge money for books and workshops that are packed with details and intricate systems than those that aren’t. It’s true that self-help also thrives on the promise of quick fixes, but that’s not the contradiction that it may at first appear to be: what’s being promised is a quick solution provided that you follow complicated advice. The reality, it turns out, is that the best techniques and insights are simple, but not necessarily quick or easy.They’re also not secret, which is an excellent reason to be wary of anyone promising to teach you the secret of happiness – or The Secret of happiness, for that matter. Not that I’m singling anyone out.
This is not, in any traditional sense, a book of advice. Indeed, my main advice is to be ceaselessly suspicious of the kind of people who set themselves up as sources of advice. But perhaps it can serve as a road map to the vast and sometimes bewildering territory of self-improvement, and also as a double-edged warning: to point out, on the one hand, that there’s plenty of unhelpful balderdash out there – but that, on the other hand, even the best and most scientifically credible advice can appear off-puttingly schmaltzy. At some point, you’re probably going to have to swallow your pride and try something even though some cringe-inducing guru recommends it.
As for the secret of human happiness – to be honest, I never quite did get around to solving it. But if I ever do, I’ll have a really nicely organised filing system in which to store it.
Few ideas have spread so rapaciously through the worlds of self-help and pop-spirituality as the notion of Finding Your Passion. Like a nasty outbreak of Dutch elm disease, it has infected entire populations, compelling publisher after publisher to use it in titles or subtitles. Motivational speakers, hypnotists and career coaches have also jumped on the passion wagon, taking a word hitherto reserved for those extra-special moments in life – making love, say, or being crucified – and applying it to the whole of it. Having found your passion, you’re meant to Live Your Passion pretty much all the time. If this strikes you as exhausting, you’re doing it wrong: you simply haven’t found your passion yet.
It perhaps wouldn’t be jaw-droppingly surprising if this manic focus on passion-finding were to have some counterproductive effects – and sure enough, Cal Newport, who runs the academic advice site Study Hacks, at calnewport.com, reports a chorus of cries for help from agonised students. They’re worried they haven’t found their passion; or they’ve found too many and can’t decide between them; or their passion is working with animals, say, while their career path is electrical engineering. What all these worriers share, Newport notes, is a belief that passions are a priori, existing ‘out there’; that, as he puts it, ‘they’re some mysterious Platonic form waiting for you to discover. This is a dangerous fiction.’ Newport’s main point is that passion is the feeling you get from mastering a skill, not some magical quality unrelated to hard work: you create passion, rather than ‘finding’ it, and for any given person there are probably hundreds of activities that might suit.This has deeply practical consequences. Suppose you dislike your job: if passions are ‘out there’, waiting to be found, you’ll feel that quitting is the only path to happiness, but if passions are made, it’s conceivable that doing the job differently might be an alternative answer.
Beyond that, though, it’s surely debatable whether a (working) life governed by passion is necessarily that desirable anyway. For me, at least, breathless excitement about a new project is usually a sure sign that my interest is superficial and will quickly fade. Far from feeling ‘passionate’ while doing the things that mean the most, I swing between two poles: on the one hand, grumpiness, because they’re hard, and hard things make me grumpy; on the other, no discernible feelings at all, because I’ve slipped into the state of total absorption that the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls ‘flow’. And don’t get me started on managers who seek to ‘cultivate passion’ in employees. If ‘finding one’s passion’ means anything, it’s surely an intrinsically personal process. The act of presuming to help me with it, when you’ve got a vested financial interest in the fruits of that effort, is doomed from the start, no matter how well-meaning you may be.
More generally, Newport suggests, demystifying passion ‘is liberating. It frees you from obsession over whether you are doing the “right” thing with your life’. Almost any interest ‘can be transformed into a passion with hard work, so there’s no reason to sweat choices such as [a university degree] or your first post-college career’. If you’re fortunate enough to have the opportunity, just pick something that interests you, he counsels. Then work hard at it. ‘Passion’ may not be worth getting too excited about.
A good friend – a no-nonsense university scientist who’s convinced that every self-help book, workshop or website in existence is weak-minded poppycock – recently took up skydiving. But perhaps we don’t know each other as well as I thought, because he apparently believed I might say yes when he invited me to join him in jumping out of planes for no reason. It would be scary, he acknowledged, but then anything really worth doing is scary. Quite so. It doesn’t follow, however, that everything scary is worth doing; running blindfold across a busy stretch of motorway would be terrifying, but personal growth would be unlikely. ‘Do one thing every day that scares you,’ Eleanor Roosevelt said, wisely, but she surely wasn’t advocating a life spent sticking your fingers in electrical sockets.
This is also my problem with the idea of the Comfort Zone, a concept bandied about by self-help authors with alarming freedom. If you want to succeed at anything, they explain, try stepping outside your comfort zone, or preferably do something rather more muscular, such as (to quote the title of one motivational recording) Smashing Out of the Comfort Zone or even (to quote one blogger) ‘Destroy[ing] That Comfort Zone To Bits’. The theory goes as follows: things that we owe it to ourselves to do – quit a job, demand a raise, ask someone out, end a relationship – will always seem horribly unpalatable, because they induce so much anxiety.What’s rarely mentioned, however, is the obvious point that really stupid ideas are likely to seem unpalatable, too. If the idea of emigrating to Portugal fills you with resistance, is that because it’s a great idea, or a terrible one?
Which isn’t to say that the comfort-zone concept isn’t useful, so far as it goes. Figuring out how to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’, in the words of Susan Jeffers’s classic and actually very level-headed bestseller, is surely a desirable skill. But the point isn’t to force yourself to make frightening choices, or to ‘seek the discomfort zone’, as the exhaustingly frenetic management guru Tom Peters (or ‘tompeters!’, as he styles himself these days) recommends. Rather, it’s a matter of ceasing to make the internal demand that you have to feel a certain way before you can take a particular action. The bookshelves heave with advice on how to feel confident in social settings, or motivated to take exercise, how to get inspired for creative projects, etcetera. But what if you just accepted that you felt afraid, or unmotivated, or uninspired, and went fearfully, unmotivatedly, uninspiredly onward?
‘Give up on yourself,’ wrote the late Japanese psychologist Shoma Morita, whose deadpan approach provides a refreshing respite from the legions of grinning positive thinkers. ‘Begin taking action now, while being neurotic or imperfect or a procrastinator or unhealthy or lazy or any other label by which you inaccurately describe yourself. Go ahead and be the best imperfect person you can be, and get started on those things you want to accomplish before you die.’
‘First and foremost, it’s important to be yourself on a first date,’ writes the relationship expert Lisa Steadman, author of It’s a Breakup, Not a Breakdown, repeating romantic advice that well-meaning people have been offering since the neolithic period. It’s not only dating, either: trawl the self-help shelves or magazine racks and you’ll find that Just Being Yourself is the key to performing well at job interviews, making friends and winning at business negotiations. One book, Authenticity:What Consumers Really Want , urges companies to just be themselves, too, and offers 288 pages of guidance, presumably because printing a book three words long would have been impractical.
What’s unusual about Just BeYourself isn’t that it’s questionable or infuriating advice, but that it’s so meaningless, and in a curiously profound way. First, there’s the problem of who you ‘really’ are. (Indeed, ‘be yourself’ is one translation of an old Zen koan, an instruction designed to blow the minds of trainee Buddhist monks because it can’t be processed intellectually.The whole point of koans is that they make no rational sense, which makes you wonder if recycling them as glib dating tips is wise.) Second, even if you know who you are, trying to act that way is impossible: as soon as you actively attempt to be genuine, you’re being fake by definition. Nor can you leapfrog the paradox by deciding not to try; that’s just another form of trying.
Most insidiously, the Just Be Yourselfers presume that ‘who you are’ is something fixed – an unchanging personality that potential friends, lovers and employers would instantly adore if you could only let it shine. It’s true that some aspects of personality, according to psychological research, aren’t very malleable.1 But the work of the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck strikes a killer blow to ‘just being yourself’.The notion of personality as fixed, she demonstrates, is a big part of the reason we suffer from stress, anxiety and lack of success.2
Many of us, Dweck argues, carry around a ‘fixed mindset’: the implicit belief that our abilities are pre-set. That triggers anxiety, because we feel we must live up to our innate abilities. It lulls us into shirking effort because we think we’re naturally good at certain things.And it causes us to avoid new challenges, in case they exceed our pre-set talents. By contrast, a ‘growth mindset’ – which can be learned – sees talents as developing, and early failures as feedback showing that progress is being made. You can Just Be Yourself, in a sense, but a ‘yourself’ that’s inherently always changing. Dweck’s studies show that merely learning about the fixed/growth distinction can transform people’s stress levels and success. A growth mindset turns change into an adventure. It frees people from the burden of having to ‘just’ be themselves.
How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, published in 1996, contains instructions for committing what its author Doug Richmond calls ‘pseudocide’: faking your own death and starting again, unencumbered by the disappointments of the past. In some circles, pseudocide has become a punchline, thanks to the bungled efforts of John Darwin, aka‘Canoe Man’, the Englishman who tried to fake his own death in a canoeing accident in 2002, then reappeared five years later, only to be arrested on suspicion of fraud, convicted and jailed. But Richmond’s book makes the whole thing seem rather compelling. Even though my life is not, to the best of my knowledge, about to collapse in a pile-up of angry creditors, vengeful mistresses and arrest warrants, the idea of a pristine fresh start is enticing. Whose life is so perfect that they don’t think they’d make a better job of it the second time around? Of course, I’m not desperate or foolish enough actually to do it. Pseudocides try to escape their existence. The rest of us buckle down and deal with things.
The awkward truth, though, is that a similar, if less extreme, addiction to ‘fresh starts’ underlies much of what we do. Self-improvement undertakings rest on the unspoken assumption that, by sheer force of will, we can cut ourselves free from unwanted personality traits once and for all. Unsurprisingly, self-help authors are the worst offenders: see, especially, books with titles such as The Great Life Makeover and The Fresh Start Challenge . But fresh-startism seeps throughout private and public life: it is also, for example, the promise of most politicians campaigning for election, and of managers unveiling strategic plans to overhaul ailing companies.
One obvious problem with this is that people – and societies and companies – are hugely complex; any plan that singles out one aspect for total change (‘From now on, no more procrastination!’) is almost guaranteed to neglect other con-tributory factors. Then there’s the ‘focusing illusion’: the way we chronically overestimate the effect that any one life change, such as moving or marriage, will have on our happiness. (In a famous study, sun-kissed Californians and residents of the often freezing American midwest both concluded that Californians must be happier because of the weather. In fact, there was little difference in their overall happiness levels.3 Moving to sunnier climes may not be as transformative as you imagine.) We think we’re making a fresh start when really we’re adjusting only one or two of countless variables.
But there’s a deeper problem: the concept of the fresh start suggests a very bizarre notion of the self. It implies that you can ‘stand back’ objectively from your personality characteristics, nominate some of them for change, then set to work. But, obviously, we are those characteristics; they define us. The self doing the work is the self being acted upon.This needn’t mean change is impossible – clearly, it isn’t – but it makes things vastly more complicated. It means we’re inescapably implicated in what we’re trying to leave behind, and it makes the idea of a truly fresh start highly suspect. Start Where You Are is the (very sensible) title of three different books on happiness, but the real point isn’t that you ought to start where you are. It’s that you have no option: you are where you are.
Cognitive therapists makes the valid point that it’s not always useful to dissect the past: wallowing in childhood issues can be a poor route to contentment. But to try to escape entirely what makes you yourself is surely doomed by definition. It’s like Baron Münchausen, lifting himself out of a swamp by his own hair. (He succeeded, but only in fiction.) Or like the pseudocidal efforts of Canoe Man. And look how that worked out for him.
Something I’ve had to learn to accept, as I wander the world of self-help, is an awful lot of people telling me to practise ‘the art of acceptance’. Most books on self-improvement, of course, preach the opposite: they’re about How to Transform Your Whole Life Completely. But a sizeable minority urges you to love your life, or your job, or the fact that you’re single; they claim to tell you how to ‘want what you have’. I’ve always bristled at this, mostly because it smacks of resignation – should you ‘accept’ being in an abusive relationship, or the destruction of the planet? (Other times, it seems like an excuse for self-indulgence: should you just ‘accept’ the fact that you drink too much, or treat others like dirt?) Maybe it’s preferable to work in a sweatshop and not mind, rather than to work there in a boiling rage. But most of us wouldn’t want to accept that fate at all. One book on acceptance, the bestselling ‘business parable’ Who Moved My Cheese?, urges employees to embrace the era of layoffs and longer hours. Accept your lot: it’s such perfect management propaganda that some firms bought a copy for every worker.
It was the title of Tara Brach’s book Radical Acceptance that made me think there might be something more to acceptance than this. Brach is no doormat: when she believed the United States was launching an illegitimate war against Iraq in 2003, she didn’t complain at dinner parties; she protested at the White House, and was arrested and briefly jailed. ‘Many people do use the notion of acceptance as passivity, and underneath that passivity there’s an unwillingness to respond to life,’ she told me. But real acceptance isn’t about convincing yourself that something is good when it’s bad. It’s about fully acknowledging that what’s happening is happening – ‘accepting the realness of what’s here’ – which includes, crucially, your negative feelings about it. Accepting a situation ‘doesn’t mean you like it or say it’s OK,’ writes the psychologist Robert Leahy in The Worry Cure. ‘It means you know it is what it is, and that is where you start from.’
That might sound like a cop-out. Most of us aren’t delusional: we already accept that what’s happening is happening. But, in fact, there’s plenty of experimental evidence that we go to enormous lengths to avoid confronting, psychologically, what we dislike about our lives.4 Our negative thoughts about our situation cause us emotional discomfort, so we try to stamp out the thoughts (positive thinking), or we just rail against them; we think we shouldn’t be feeling bad. We try to deny how things are, and how we feel.
Looked at like this, accepting things doesn’t mean putting up with them; indeed, it seems to be a precondition for real change. In one university study, for example, diabetics taught to acknowledge their negative feelings about their condition managed to stabilise their glucose levels.5 ‘The curious paradox,’ as Carl Rogers famously put it, ‘is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.’
One of the most stress-inducing books I’ve ever read is called GOALS!, by the business consultant Brian Tracy. It’s not about soccer. It’s about achieving your GOALS! in life – and those capital letters, along with the exclamation mark, may convey some sense of this book’s strange capacity for tying my stomach into a knot, then tightening it. ‘Living without clear goals is like living in a thick fog,’ Tracy writes, forebodingly. His readers’ sense of inadequacy thus stimulated, he’s on hand with a solution: you need to define exactly what you want, then pursue it relentlessly. The only alternative is failure. ‘Clear goals enable you to step on the accelerator of your own life and race ahead rapidly’, he says, and the rest of the book purports to show you how. In fact, it reduces you – all right, me – to a gibbering, indecisive wreck, unable to define my GOALS! in the first place, and sulking resentfully about the shouty man who keeps telling me I’ve got to pursue them unceasingly, or else resign myself to becoming a person of no merit whatsoever.
You’ll be familiar with Tracy’s approach if you’re unlucky enough to work in one of the many organisations where managers make themselves feel useful by requiring employees to define ‘SMART’ goals. ‘Smart’ stands for specific, measur-able, attainable, realistic and time-bounded, and it’s one of those acronyms that ought to make you suspicious from the outset, if only because it spells out a slightly too convenient word.
You may also have heard a story about the dangers of not setting goals, which is repeated in numerous self-help contexts. It usually goes like this. In 1953, students graduating from Yale University were asked if they had specific, written-down goals for their lives. Only 3 per cent said they had.Two decades later, the researchers tracked down the students, to see how things had turned out. And guess what? The 3 per cent who had formulated precise goals had accumulated more wealth than the rest put together.
This looks like an overwhelmingly powerful argument for setting goals – a scientific study to settle the matter, once and for all! – except for one problem: it never happened. (The magazine Fast Company was the first to debunk it publicly, basing its conclusions partly on an extensive search of Yale’s archives from the 1950s.6) And so there’s still little hard evidence that setting clear goals will make you richer, let alone happier.
Life, Brian Tracy is fond of saying, is like a buffet, not a table-service restaurant: you have to buckle down and work hard now, so that you can enjoy the fruits of your labour in the future. But this is surely exactly wrong – a recipe for storing up all your happiness for a brief few minutes on your deathbed, when you can look back smugly at your achievements. Contrast that with the insight of Stephen Shapiro, whose book Goal-Free Living makes the case that you can have some kind of direction to your life without obsessing about the specific destination. ‘Opportunity knocks often, but sometimes softly,’ he observes. ‘While blindly pursuing our goals, we often miss unexpected and wonderful possibilities.’ That sounds a lot more smart to me.
If you want to get really stressed out – unlikely, I realise, unless you’re a method actor preparing for a role as a sleep-deprived heart surgeon being pursued by the mafia, or something – you could do worse than read Change Your Life in 30 Days, a bestselling book by the American TV life coach Rhonda Britten. ‘By picking up this book you have committed to making dramatic changes in your life in the next 30 days,’ she writes in the first paragraph. Hang on. I have?
It’s unfair, though, to single out Britten, because her book is only one example of self-help schemes that promise massive transformations in highly specific periods of time. In fact, 30 days looks relaxed in comparison with Change Almost Anything in 21 Days, Change Your Life in 7 Days, Shape Shifter: Transform Your Life in One Day and, my favourite, Transform Your Life in
90 Minutes, an e-book that comes, bafflingly, with a 30-Day Fast-Start Guide for how to transform your life in 90 minutes.
As a sucker for quick fixes, it took me a long time to realise the problem. Deadlines induce stress and worry.They also lead to things getting done. But when the things you’re trying to do include reducing stress and worry, the contradiction is obvious. Worse, these books exude perfectionism – the idea of total transformation, instead of just getting a bit better. ‘I have been to sales seminars where the motivational speaker implied to 250 real-estate professionals from the same company that all of them could be the firm’s number one salesperson next year,’ Steve Salerno writes in Sham, an anti-self-help tirade that’s overly negative, but spot-on in this instance. ‘Consider … the psychic costs of coming up short in a philosophical system that disclaims the role of luck, timing or competition, and admits no obstacles that cannot be conquered by the sheer application of will.’
One day I may write a book called Conquer Your Panic Attacks Now! No, Now! Quickly, Before Something Really Bad Happens! Meanwhile, leading the field of authors who create more problems than they solve is the designer Karim Rashid, whose book DesignYour Self is guaranteed to awaken obsessive-compulsive disorder in even laid-back readers. ‘All your socks, t-shirts and underwear should be identical,’ he advises. ‘Impose order: line everything up perfectly.’ Oh, and: ‘All kitchen products should be hidden.’ Why? So I can construct a hugely fragile existence that will send me off the scale with stress if someone gives me the wrong kind of socks?
‘Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people,’ the infinitely more sensible essayist Anne Lamott observes in her book on writing, Bird by Bird. ‘It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life … perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.’ I’m not saying I’m any good at following this advice. But it is really, really good advice.
There appears to be some disagreement, though we can assume it’s an extremely friendly disagreement, over who invented the concept of the ‘random act of kindness’. Credit usually goes to the American peace activist Anne Herbert, who reportedly coined it – and its counterpart, the ‘senseless act of beauty’ – on a napkin in the early 1980s. Then again, a Californian college professor, Chuck Wall, claims to have thought it up in 1993; today, he tours as a motivational speaker and sells coffee mugs and fridge magnets extolling the virtues of spontaneous generosity. (Why not try asking him to send you some for free?) Every few years, the notion gets rediscovered as if it were new – by Oprah, in the movie Pay It Forward, or in Danny Wallace’s book Yes Man; there are at least five other books on the topic. All of which baffles me slightly, since the only time I’ve been on the receiving end of an RAK – I was buying a sandwich in an airport when the woman ahead of me paid for it, vanishing before I could thank her – I wasn’t suffused with a warm sense of humanity’s interconnectedness. I was suffused with a feeling best expressed by an acronym that’s popular online: WTF?
Maybe I’m atypically misanthropic. Or maybe not: the handful of studies conducted into people’s responses to random generosity at least partly back me up. We know that bestowing kindness boosts the giver’s mood. But recipients – according to a study in 2000 in which researchers handed gifts to members of the public – are frequently hostile.7 ‘If someone randomly does something kind for me, I’m on guard. I don’t think that shows a fundamental cynicism or a deep distrust of mankind,’ writes Gretchen Rubin, on her blog The Happiness Project, at happiness-project.com. ‘It just shows that I think that most people act purposefully, and if I don’t understand the purpose, I question their motives. It’s not the kindness of the act that’s the problem; it’s the randomness.’This isn’t to denigrate every good turn advocated by proponents of RAKs. But the really good ones aren’t really random. Helping someone who’s struggling with their shopping, say, is a targeted act. Random behaviour dis-orientates us.
Specifically, we wonder what the giver wants in return: reciprocity is so fundamental to human relationships that we assume something must be expected of us, too. Crafty salespeople can exploit this expectation: as the psychologist Robert Cialdini notes in his book Influence, we’re so deeply primed to reciprocate generosity that customers who receive a free gift become far more likely to make a purchase ‘in return’. (It works even when they dislike the seller. The reciprocity rule, Cialdini writes, ‘possesses awesome strength, often producing a “yes” response to a request that, except for an existing feeling of indebtedness, would surely have been refused.’) There’s a reason the Hare Krishnas hand out flowers before soliciting donations: adopting that fundraising tactic transformed their finances.
Some despair of people like me, who are freaked out by the kindness of strangers: has trust in others really been so depleted? But there’s something uncomfortably self-absorbed about an RAK that thrills the giver while confusing the receiver, and simultaneously triggering their inbuilt propensity to feel indebted. Here’s to non-random, thought-through, rationally targeted kindness. A rubbish bumper-sticker slogan, lacking in anarchist pizzazz – but surely, on balance, a rather better thing.
Recently, I’ve been testing a series of self-improvement CDs called Paraliminals, which claim to use state-of-the-art methods to give you, among other things, ‘instantaneous personal magnetism’. The problem with evaluating them, though, is that you can’t really go around asking friends and colleagues whether they think you’ve been demonstrating instantaneous personal magnetism over the past few weeks.
Actually, that’s not true.You can. I did. Uniformly, they gave me a slightly scared look, which made it clear that they agreed I was indeed demonstrating a new personality trait, no doubt about it. Just maybe not the one I’d intended.
Paraliminals’ selling point is that they’re not meant to be hypnotic, yet nor do you process them consciously.You can’t: you’re instructed to listen wearing headphones, and a syrupy-voiced American named Paul Scheele speaks two different scripts, one in each ear, at the same time. ‘Your conscious mind finds it difficult to process two voices simultaneously, so it shuts down,’ Scheele explains. (Afterwards, I made the following transcript of how his two scripts sound to the listener: ‘Your image of yourself and there was a special delight notice your potential has always been on occasion that image of you leaking springs and weedy patches …’) At first, it made me feel car-sick. But then further thought did become impossible, which is definitely relaxing, whether or not it instils the promised benefits (as well as Instantaneous Personal Magnetism, there are CDs called Ideal Weight, Anxiety-Free, Get Around to It and Positive Relationships, each for around £19).
Get Around to It