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How To Deal With Self-Help Overload
You have been…tsundokued
There is a Japanese word for people who buy more books than they can read. It is called Tsundoku.
But it is a practice that is actually well-regarded among literary aficionados.
My tsundoku even had a niche: self-help. I hoarded self-help books like my life depended on it, even when I knew that some of them just rehashed the same materials in so many words.
In today’s world, self-help is everywhere. It is a multi-billion dollar industry. It becomes much easier to keep stacking materials rather than work on the actual content.
Nike, you genius
You might be thinking, isn’t she a personal growth coach? Exactly, that was part of my own transformation journey.
I went from stockpiler to action taker. After an overconsumption of self-help information, I decided to do a Nike, which is:
Just do it.
In this day and age of information overload, it is easy to indulge in self-help genre without actually doing anything about it.
I used to read tons of Medium posts on the subject, then I would go buy a book, do a few exercises, get all motivated and go: yes, today i quit my job and start my passion project. Then silence.
Until I realized the proof is in the pudding: Act now, otherwise the information will just putrify in my brain.
So this is a message to my readers, happy you are dishing out $5 a month and motivated to work on yourself. But how much information is actually being channeled into action?
Self-motivation is not a reliable engine
I run a meet-up group every wednesday and while everyone has different goals in different areas, one thing remain common:
The inability to step up to the next level.
Group motivation can be extremely helpful.
The one thing I do not like about the word self-help is the thought that you have to do it alone.
