The unhelpfulness of self-help

A guy got on the tube and sat down next to me last week, which is a momentous enough event for me to open the column with because being that close to another human is a sure-fire way to ruin my week in spectacular style. Fortunately for me, the chap in question pulled out an iPhone and opened the notes app, where he began adding to a list – a list which would turn out to be the highlight of the day.

The list was topped with the words “BE DO HAVE”, like the half-finished lyrics to a jazz freestyle session, and underneath was all manner of seemingly disconnected phrases. “Live In France”. “Sing At A Club”. “Learn To Tango”. At first I assumed he was making a list of things that he couldn’t possibly do when dressed like he was. However as my eyes progressed down the list the items started growing considerably stranger and shed more and more light on what the list’s real purpose was, until I had to stifle a chuckle as I came across the entry “Travel to a pacific island and take those strong hallucinogenic drugs they have”.

Google later confirmed that “Be, Do, Have” was some self-motivational system for something called - among other things - The Law Of Attraction. The idea being that by writing down the person you want to be, and the things that person would do or have, you mentally bring yourself closer to being that way. Or, as I like to think of it, by writing down the person you want to be, and the things that person would do or have, you allow yourself to avoid actually doing any of those things and just think about them instead. Hooray for self-help.

There are good intentions behind some of this stuff, if you look for it hard enough. It suggests that by adopting the mentality of a person who is fit and healthy, for instance, that you’ll avoid eating things that are bad for you because a fit and healthy person wouldn’t do that. Right? That’s fine. That’s a logical thing to do. At some point the logic breaks down though, usually around the time that they start talking about millionaires.

“You must BE the millionaire first, long before you actually have the money in your bank account!” the website proclaims unhelpfully. “How would a millionaire think? How would they make decisions?” to which the logical response seems to be, “They would throw money at the decision, because they are a millionaire.” And if it’s not that response, then I don’t know what they’re getting at. Most millionaires I know of have pretty poor decision-making skills.

The guy’s list went on: “Live in silence for a week”. “Spend a night sleeping alone on a deserted island”. I don’t know what kind of person he was trying to visualise but it seemed to be the lead character in a Danny Boyle movie. There was nothing on the list about eating your own weight in ice cream, or painting a gigantic wang on the side of an Olympic billboard. What kind of aspirations were these anyway?

This is why I stray away from making long-term dreams too specific. Once you start to write them down and focus “positive energies” on them, or whatever schlock you’ve been told to do, you start setting yourself timers. Little, insignificant reminders like the ones on your phone that don’t work very well and just irritate you with their whining. Every day that goes by with you “visualising” these dreams rather than actually achieving them will be another contribution to your inevitable, crippling sense of worthlessness. Which will probably lead you to making more lists, and feeling more useless when they don’t get you anywhere.

It’s far easier to just stick to doing what you enjoy, right now, and leave the worrying about where it leads for later, particularly if you’re young enough to be at Imperial. Learning to tango while your head’s being rammed with peyote isn’t going to make you any more whole as a person than buying the new Elder Scrolls game and going to a half-decent fireworks display.

So there. Watch out this week for my £15 pamphlet series: “Giving A Fuck And You: Self-Empowerment Through Not Caring”.