Incremental Improvements

I’ve read over 50 self-help books over the last few years. Some were helpful, and some not so much. But one flaw that most of the books have in common – even the good ones – is a tendency to overpromise. They tell you that if you follow their advice, it will bring about dramatic improvements in your life.

If you read a self-help book expecting it to make dramatic changes to your life, you’re inevitably going to be disappointed. That just isn’t realistic. The problem is that even in those cases when the sentence “If you follow this advice, you will dramatically improve your life” is true, it still contains a huge conditional: “if you follow this advice.”

The issue is that you aren’t going to follow the advice. Not all of it. Not enough to make immediate dramatic changes to your life. You are who you are. You can’t simply choose to be a different person, and you can’t just choose to change all your habits. Maybe you’ll get a burst of enthusiasm for a few days, but after that you’ll go back to normal, only now with an added sense of shame and guilt over failing to follow the instructions that the self-help book told you would make everything better.

On my page where I explain what self-improvement for skeptics means, I say that I don’t buy into woo woo/magic/”you can do anything” types of self-help books. But I’m also not cynical, and I don’t dismiss self-help.

Some people who are cynical about self-help just aren’t familiar with the wide array of books based on legitimate evidence-based research, and mistakenly believe that all self-help falls in the woo woo/magic/”you can do anything” category. Others are coming from a position of arrogance, saying “Well obviously everyone should just have infinite willpower, always know exactly the right thing to do at any given moment and then do it, not have any mental health issues, and be perfect in every other way, so self-help books are unnecessary.” And a very small percentage of people who are cynical about self-help are those who recognize the tendency for self-improvement books to overpromise and underdeliver.

Even though I do think most self-improvement books overpromise and underdeliver, I’m not cynical, and I don’t think they’re useless. It isn’t realistic to change everything about your life all at once, but it is feasible to make some small changes that will improve your life somewhat. Once these changes have become a habit that you perform automatically, you can make more changes to improve your life more. And keep repeating this. As you keep making these incremental improvements, over time it will build up to a large improvement in your life and a large increase in your happiness.

Or even if you only do a few things and don’t build anymore from there, improving your life and your happiness a little bit is better than not doing it at all.

What specific changes should you make? I wouldn’t suggest reading one book and trying to follow all it’s advice. Rather, you should read several books. When you do, note what specific small changes are recommended in multiple books, which are also things that you think would be beneficial for you, and are things you’re capable of building into a habit. Then adopt those a few at a time to incrementally improve your life. (And don’t be afraid to abandon any suggestions that you find aren’t working for you.)

In my next post, I’ll list some of the small/easy strategies I’ve seen come up over and over again, and which I think would bring about small but real improvements to most people’s lives.