Self-Improvement: A Love-Hate Relationship

Is all that productivity and self-help literature slowly wearing us down?

(Photo: Grant Spanier for DeathToStock)

We live in an era of relentless efficiency, optimisation and productivity. Manage your time, find focus, be prolific, and don’t forget to be healthy and happy along the way. If that’s not quite working, a plethora of books compete to teach us how to function again, or function properly in the first place. A multi-billion dollar productivity and self-help industry that drives us to ever more self-tracking and life-hacking. An industry to reassure us that, if only we put in the work, re-invent ourselves on repeat, cultivate the right habits, and fine-tune our personal qualities, we too can craft a more palatable and successful version of ourselves.

The self-help genre increasingly overlaps with books about entrepreneurship, professional development and leadership. More self-help books deal with becoming more focused, more productive and more successful in life and work, while more business books adopt the style and tone of self-help books. I’ve recently come to merge the self-help and productivity folders on my e-reader because it has become impossible to decide where to file new books. And I’ve affectionately named my new folder “bossy books”, for lack of a proper name for this emerging genre — and that’s what I’ll call it here too.

The self-help genre increasingly overlaps with books about entrepreneurship, professional development and leadership.

It all begins with goal setting. No, wait. It all begins with Hal Elrod’s Miracle Mornings, an entire series that tells everyone from parents, writers, entrepreneurs to salespeople or real estate agents how to best transform their morning routine for more success and riches. My mornings still consist of grumpiness and lots of caffeine.

But now on to goals, for without goals, what is there to track and improve? Mark Murphy suggests we set ourselves Hard Goals, as in heartfelt, animated, required and difficult goals. S.J. Scott wants us to go for S.M.A.R.T. Goals instead, that is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound goals. If neither seems appealing, consider turning to Keith Ellis’ The Magic Lamp: Goal Setting for People Who Hate Setting Goals. Lamp, you may have guessed, is an acronym too and stands for lock on, act, manage your progress and persist.

Once our goals are firmly in place, we need strategies and methods to help us achieve them. Creating habits that support our brand new goals seems as good a place to start as any. In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg reassures us that habits aren’t destiny but can be forged. Phew. Replacing nasty habits that hold us back with more wholesome ones requires self-conditioning in three steps: a cue triggers a craving for a reward, which with time and repetition creates routine. You want to go for a run every morning? Make your gear the first thing you see when getting up and reward yourself with a nice breakfast after your run. Anticipating that breakfast should get you running.

If that doesn’t quite sound like you, Gretchen Rubin’s Better Than Before may have the answer. Because how to best change habits really depends on which of The Four Tendencies you belong to. Are you an upholder, a questioner, an obliger or a rebel? It’s a bit like the sorting hat in Harry Potter. Her reference, not mine. Confusingly though, Duhigg identifies willpower as an absolutely crucial keystone habit for success, while to Rubin the whole point of creating habits is that they take willpower out of the equation. Make of that what you will.

To be more productive and achieve our goals, Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan urge us to stop multitasking and figure out The One Thing that will make everything else easier or even unnecessary. Engaging in four hours of focused work on that one thing every day will yield extraordinary results.

Struggle with that elusive focus? Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World to the rescue. By following his four rules, we can teach ourselves the rare and valuable skill of deep focus. The first rule is to, uhm, work deeply. To be achieved by scheduling for distractions rather than for focused time. Second, we should embrace boredom to allow our mind to productively wander. Third, quit social media. And fourth, drain your workday of shallow tasks as much as possible.

Already at risk of falling off the wagon? Angela Duckworth’s Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance is here to remind us that persistence makes all the difference so long as we just really really want to improve. She defines grit as the sustained application of effort towards a goal and sees it as the most crucial ingredient of success and productivity. To develop our grit, we need to be passionate about our work, improve ourselves daily, have a greater purpose and adopt a growth mindset.

If that sounds just a little too gritty for your liking, Jane McGonigal has you covered. In SuperBetter, she teaches us how to get stronger, happier, braver, and more resilient by gamifying our way to the top. The SuperBetter method appropriates a set of techniques from video-games like recruiting allies, activating power-ups or completing quests to feel in control again — be that to overcome trauma (as she has) or to achieve a challenging goal. Let’s unlock some achievements, I suppose.

The lowest common denominator across this genre of bossy books seems to be that we are failing at adulting and not quite successful enough by someone else’s standard. And — that’s the good news — anyone can learn to be more productive, more focussed, more successful and happier, if only they develop the right mindset and try hard enough. And if I can’t manage that, well, then that’s clearly on me.

The lowest common denominator across this genre seems to be that we are failing at adulting and not quite successful enough by someone else’s standard.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with desiring self-improvement, with wanting success in business and in life. I want that too, and I often turn to books to learn about new techniques. But it’s time to rethink who we trust to define what success means and to prescribe how to best achieve a semblance thereof. And while we’re rethinking, it may be worth sparing the underlying neoliberal dynamics of the ongoing self-improvement craze some attention. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

To follow in his footsteps to success, Tim Ferriss suggests in The 4-Hour Work Week that his readers position themselves as faux experts: “Expert status can be created in less than four weeks if you understand basic credibility indicators.” His quick fix to authority requires joining two trade organisations with official-sounding names and reading the three best-selling books on your desired field of expertise. Summarise their key arguments and hang a few posters inviting students at a nearby university to a free seminar. Contact two well-known companies and offer them free seminars too. Don’t fail to mention that you are in fact a member of your new trade organisations, and let them know that you’ve taught at that university too. Record the seminars, offer to write for a trade magazine or two, feature the videos and articles on your website and voilà, you’re in the expert business.

That’s sketchy advice at best. At worst, it’s fraud. The line between faking it until you make it and unfair business practice can be a fine one when your credibility in the eye of prospective clients hinges on a fabricated expert-status. It probably depends what you do for a living.

Sometimes, however, advice can be downright dangerous. In The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, Don Miguel Ruiz suggests we take nothing personally, by which he means that folks can only get hurt if they agree to being hurt. That’s textbook victim blaming. And as if that weren’t bad enough, the book goes on to advise survivors of abuse to open up emotional wounds and let go of any blame they may feel towards their abusers.

If forgiveness amounts to absolving abusers for no reason other than that “they were victims of their own beliefs and programming”, forgiveness is deeply damaging and re-traumatising. This is an extreme example for sure, albeit one that bears mentioning. Since it was first published in 1997, the book has sold 7.2 million copies in the U.S. alone, has been translated into 40 languages and remains popular to this day.

To be clear — I’m not suggesting that all books I’ve cited here are quite this damaging. Neither am I claiming that these authors are merely peddling snake oil. No, many offer valuable impulses and techniques I’m happy to at least give a try. And even books I take some issue with have taught me lessons. The faux-expert advice above for instance? It made me re-evaluate how I advertise my own expertise. If others are comfortable faking it in a few weeks, I should probably be a little more forthcoming about showcasing the fruits of two decades of labour.

What I’m getting at, however, is that bossy books consistently fail to critically reflect on their underlying assumptions. And that their focus on individual grit and achievement sidesteps questions of power and ultimately leaves behind more people than it benefits. In that, they paradoxically become part of the problem rather than the solution they so fervently seek to provide.

When authors imagine their audience in their own image, with access to similar privilege, resources, and capacities, their advice bolsters normative expectations of what success looks like and sets up for failure anyone who is situated differently.

One-size-fits-all advice rarely works equally for all. When Sheryl Sandberg advises women to Lean In for more equality in the corporate world, she privileges white middle-class professional women who already hold relative power and who are thus in a position to lean in and take a seat at the table to get ahead professionally. When Tim Ferris presents us with his Tools of Titans, a collection of tactics, routines and habits of the rich and successful, it is strongly implied that what they can do, you can do too. Perhaps, if you’re able-bodied, financially stable, and have no care or work responsibilities standing in the way of emulating those titans’ path to success.

Or when, in The 4-Hour Work Week, he advises us to outsource all the tedious tasks that won’t fit into my fully automated 4-hour work week to virtual assistants in the Global South, he makes pretty clear who he does not see as target audience for the book. Not the virtual assistants in the Global South, not the local but equally virtual assistant hired to manage those other assistants, not anyone whose main job largely consist of those tedious tasks I’m advised to automate or outsource.

Just like Godin’s approach of limiting and containing what he refers to as “shallow” work in favour of deep focus must feel a little insulting to folks who’s job mostly consists of administrative work or, gasp, social media management. When authors imagine their audience in their own image, with access to similar privilege, resources, and capacities, their advice bolsters normative expectations of what success looks like and sets up for failure anyone who is situated differently.

It is no coincidence that the self-help genre overlaps more and more with books about entrepreneurship, and productivity. According to scholar David Harvey, neoliberalism “proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”

And this neoliberal version of viewing the economy, work, and success has become virtually the only legitimate story about what it means to be a productive member of society. It has found its way into our common sense, into the way we make sense of the world and our place in it, what we think success means, and what we must do to not barely function but be successful.

Productivity industrial complex, we see you. Bossy books, of course, play right into your hands by further cementing the seductive neoliberal idea that it’s all on us, individually, to work harder to improve ourselves. They construct all the little ways in which we’re not doing well enough — physically, mentally, professionally and so on — as ultimately personal flaws that we can fix by following a set of instructions. As a result, we think of ourselves in entrepreneurial terms, as if our life were a business to be managed or a problem to be solved.

Work and personal life merge into one success story in the making. And we become at once our own manager and our own harshest critic. Any anxiety or feeling of inadequacy that accompanies this labour is on us and us alone. Never mind that the playing field is no more level now than ever. Self-critique takes the place of critically engaging with the world around us, with the inequalities, with privilege and the structural disadvantages that hold some of us back. Self-improvement, in other words, stands in for social justice and transformation.

There is room for both, a genuine and healthy desire to work on improving ourselves and our business practice and a critical eye to the structural constraints that make it that much more difficult to make generic advice work for some of us.

Am I giving up on bossy books anytime soon? One might be forgiven for getting that impression. But no. There is room for both, a genuine and healthy desire to work on improving ourselves and our business practice and a critical eye to the structural constraints that make it that much more difficult to make generic advice work for some of us.

I suggest reading these books with a pinch of salt. I ask, what perspective the author writes from and what assumptions they make about their audience. I try to avoid hyperbole and select books that refrain from pathologising or patronising me from page one. I give myself permission to dismiss advice if it doesn’t resonate with me, and to occasionally call out advice rooted in unexamined privilege.

At the same time, discovering actionable advice that addresses an obstacle I face in life and/or work can be incredibly joyful and rewarding too. Tackle procrastination, write a little better, get a little bit more done, come a little closer to achieving a goal, take a little better care of myself and feel a little better as a result? Don’t mind if I do.

And perhaps one day I will stumble across that one author who’s synapses perfectly align with mine and whose methods perfectly work for me. Until that day comes, I’ll keep my love-hate relationship with bossy books as productive (!) as I can by reading them against the grain.