If you’re new to Self Helping Yourself, these are my all-time favorite/most popular posts about self help.
These best represent what the site is about.
They’re in no particular order, so read the descriptions and decide what most connects with you.
Thirteen Things I Learned From Reading Fifty Self-Help Books
I read a lot of self-help books. The better ones tend to repeat the same advice. Here I’ve gathered the most useful lessons that I’ve found.
What I Wish I Knew
A list of ideas, concepts, and advice that I didn’t realize or got wrong when I was younger, and I feel like I would have had a happier life if had learned them sooner.
When I posted this, several parents mentioned that they planned to show this list to their kids.
Ways to Avoid Arguments on Facebook
As a recovered Internet-argument-addict, I’ve developed several strategies to keep me out of trouble. Here I share some of these, both to help you stay away from arguments and to have a more pleasant social media experience in general.
The Fundamental Rule of Weight Loss
In this excerpt from my book, The Weight Loss Habit: The No BS, No Gimmick, (Sort of) Easy Way to Lose Weight and Keep it Off Forever, I explain the primary habit to build in order to change the way you think about food.
Everything You’ve Heard About Dieting is Wrong
Most people who try to lose weight fail, and of the few who succeed, 95% eventually gain the weight back. The reason for this is that diets are too hard. I beat these odds. After spending half my life obese, I lost 30% my body weight and have kept it off 20 years, by coming up with methods to make healthy eating easy.
Delightful December Can Make You Happier
A great way to increase your happiness is with a month-long cleanse refraining from any negativity on social media. To take it further, each day post something you’re grateful for, something that made you happy, and something you look forward to. Once you try it, you may even decide to adopt the practice permanently. (You can try this any month, not just December.)
Feeling Overwhelmed? Try Tangibly Improving the World
A lot about the modern world can feel overwhelming, with intractable global problems beyond our abilities to solve. If you do something to make the world a bit better in some tangible way – aiding a charity, helping someone in need, or just brightening someone’s day – it will make you feel happier and in control. (In addition to improving the world.)
10 Things to Do When You Feel Overwhelmed
You can also get overwhelmed by your own tasks, when they pile up into what seems like an insurmountable wall you’ll never break through. I faced this situation quite a bit in my 20-years in understaffed start-ups, and share various methods for climbing that wall.
Self-Help Advice Can Ruin Your Life
A lot of self-help advice is based on cliches, wishful thinking, or the assumption you’re already a super-achiever. Uncritically following bad advice can be disastrous. This is the true story of how my father destroyed his career, marriage, and everything that was good in his life by doing things that are often suggested by self-help gurus and motivational posters.
How to Win Allies and Stop Making Enemies
In personal, professional, or political disagreements, many focus on scoring points in an imaginary game of “Who’s the worse person.” But this makes any situation worse. You, your cause, and the world would be better off if you focused on winning over allies instead.
Perfectionism Paralysis can be Beaten by Half-Assing It
Many suffer from Perfectionism Paralysis, where they can’t finish a project because they endlessly try to improve it. But this ultimately results in lower quality. By accepting something as “Good Enough” and moving on, you produce a higher volume of work, which gives you more practice. This improves your skills so you create better work than the perfectionist who forever tweaks their first attempt.
6 Strategies to Never Lose a Job and Have Rapid Career Growth
In my previous life doing Accounting and Finance for unstable tech startups, I had extremely rapid job advancement, and never lost a job, despite going through more rounds of layoffs than I can count. This is how I did it, which you can use to ignite your own career.
