As I approached my 40th birthday, I realized I wasn’t happy with the life I was living. I had been out of film school for more than a decade without even coming close to selling a script. My “day job” had become my career, and while I was having some success there, it wasn’t particularly exciting or satisfying. Most of my friends were moving away or having babies that took up all their time, and I was too socially awkward to make new ones. I kept hoping for a better future, but I didn’t see any realistic reason to expect the future to improve.
There wasn’t any “better life fairy” that was going to magically make everything better. It was up to me to change things, but I didn’t know how. So I started reading self-help books, as well as books about how the mind works. (Which I find are often more helpful than explicit self-help books.) I read dozens of books. Some had good advice, others not so much.
What I learned is that there’s no one single magic trick you can do to suddenly make life amazing. (And anyone who promises you one is just setting you up for disappointment.) Rather, there’s a lot of small changes you can make to your habits and outlook that will make life a little bit better. If you make life a little bit better enough times, it will eventually be a lot better.
You can’t change who you are overnight. But with enough time and practice, you can change what you do and how you think. And once you’ve changed what you do and how you think, you can become a happier person. It takes a sustained conscientious effort, but it’s doable.
This blog is about the best aspects of self-help books, and how to put them into practice to live a better life. I’m certainly not perfect. Self-improvement is an ongoing journey for me, as it is for all people. It’s a journey I invite you to share, as we all do our best to live a better life.
Bio – Steven Ray Marks
Steven Ray Marks experienced a wide variety of economic circumstances growing up, starting off wealthy living in the Hollywood Hills, but spending the majority of his childhood being raised by a poor single mother that worked nights, after his narcissistic attorney-to-the-stars father got caught stealing from his clients.
He got a BA in Economics from Georgetown University, and continued on to grad school before getting disillusioned with the field. He worked as an accountant/financial analyst before switching gears completely and getting a Master of Fine Arts in Screenwriting from University of Southern California, with the goal of playing with imaginary friends for a living. But it turns out USC film school is far from a guarantee of success, and most people who go there don’t end up with successful careers. He wrote dialog and trivia for video games based on Hannah Montana, High School Musical, and Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader, but then that work dried up.
After enough time of zero success at screenwriting, it became clear that he wasn’t a screenwriter doing accounting as a day job, but was actually an accountant doing screenwriting as a hobby. He has spent his accounting career working in start-ups, where at least the companies are interesting even if the actual work is somewhat dull.
He enjoys trivia, hiking, poker, puzzles, college football, and random interesting stuff. He was a winner on the game shows Win Ben Stein’s Money and Who’s Still Standing¸ and a loser on Jeopardy (but was in the lead going into Final Jeopardy). But most of all, he enjoys reading and thinking about how normal people can live life better.
He lives in Los Angeles with his wife.
