Libre Magazine

Over the last twenty years self-help books have inundated the market. I know, I’ve read most of them. I started reading self-help books, because I felt I wasn’t getting out of life as much as I was putting in. I put a lot of effort into my job and into my social life trying to be entertaining, and taking an interest in others. I wanted to be so popular I’d be invited to parties and the hosts would be grateful if I just bothered to apologise.

When I was young I developed strategies to make myself popular at school, unfortunately my paradigm of how the world worked and my place in it was sadly deficient. I believed all manner of doubtful facts including what people told me, e.g. honesty is the best policy. Making good judgements about when avoid telling the truth and when to tell white lies is the best policy. As a result I was about as popular as a loud fart in a library.

When it came time to meet with girls I had an inkling of what to expect. People are rarely outright nasty so you don’t really ever know what people truly think of you, what I do know is that for me girls were like planets; somewhere I’d really like to go but someone else, probably backed by NASA, always got there before me.

I couldn’t work out what it was that was wrong so I read ‘how to win friends and influence people’ by Dale Carnegie, written in the 1930s. I applied the rules, but you can’t change these things overnight. Now I’m not a quitter, if I start banging my head against a brick wall, I don’t give up until I’ve made a hole, so I read other books. I read about body language, confidence, positive attitudes, being myself.

You might say I should have stopped reading and got a life, but hey my folks believe in education. In fact judging by the fantastic growth of the education industry the whole world believes in education. Who knows it may be that the trillions of dollars spent on tertiary education is a good investment; personally I’d be interested to debate the topic on another day.
The thing that I really notice though is that every self help book I’ve every read has always said that what is important is staying positive. To paraphrase what they are saying is “You can achieve anything you want to if only you believe you can”. Now I have to say that for a while I believe this stuff but I’m also a trained scientist and I believe in evolution. If being positive all the time was such a sure fire winner then after natural selection had done its thing the only people left on the planet would be the ones who were positive all the time. I think you’ll agree with me that there are a lot of pissed off people out there who are not thinking positively about themselves all the time so I’d like to propose a different theory.

Being positive all the time is dangerous and we need to moderate our positive feelings. Frequently, it’s the irresponsible optimists who get everybody into trouble, just think of Neville Chamberlain He was positive about Hitler and look where that got us.
So why are so many of us negative and why has natural selection allowed so many of us miserable gits to pass on our genes to the next generation. I think it works something like this. Out in the savannahs of Africa where humans first developed there were a lot of dangers around. One bad decision and you could be dead.

So in the savannah you had to be careful, it was a bad move to go around believing you could achieve just about anything. Suppose you believed you could run faster than the lion which was hanging out near your home. You go out and challenge the lion to a race and you lose. According to the self help books this doesn’t matter because taking risks and losing occasionally is just the route to success in the end. But in my book this does matter because the lion’s not going to give you another chance to be positive. That lion’s going to chew your leg off. Having your leg chewed off is going to spoil your day not only that with only one leg it’s going to be even harder to attract girls.

To take an example from the modern world if you believe property prices are going to rise and then borrow a lot of money to buy property but the value of property then falls your going to be poorer and less successful.

Every minute of every day each one of us makes cost benefit judgements in relation to every action we take. Each time I decide to do something the benefit to me has got to outweigh the cost of doing it. Here I’m using the term cost benefit to mean more than just money. If I decide to carry on typing this article it’s because the benefit I perceive to me is greater than the cost of continuing to think and type. If you’re too positive about your chances of success or of the potential benefit of an activity then you will misallocate your resources and end up a loser just as surely as the guy who is too negative about everything and never takes any risks.

So what happened to me? Well I just sort of kept trying to improve and in the end I found a way to live my life that worked for me. As for self help books read them by all means but don’t expect any quick answers. Oh and don’t give up.