Let’s call self-help what it is: “Other people’s advice.”
Self-help and business literature sometimes involve scientific studies. Sometimes, they don’t. What they do often include are limited studies of an industry, or anecdotes from industry leaders.
I’m going to talk about external validation for a second, and then the law of big numbers.
External validation is, basically, using other people’s opinions to validate your success or well-being. This makes a lot of sense. But, like many things that make a lot of sense, it actually doesn’t make any sense at all. Let’s take a look.
You probably don’t understand the person you are requiring validation from. They may be mad for completely unrelated reasons, and are just taking that frustration out on the world. They may not understand, or be unwilling to understand, what you are talking about. They may have a completely valid opinion that can exist in a world with multiple valid opinions about the same idea.
The law of large numbers is interesting in conjunction with external validation. This law basically means, when you have a large enough sample size, the trends you are aware of or looking for tend to even out. A coin flip is the most boring and easiest way to explain this idea.
Everyone knows that a coin has a 50% chance of being heads and a 50% chance of being tails. Yet, when you flip a coin once, it doesn’t land on it’s edge. It isn’t actively attempting to live up to the probability. It is just being a coin. If you stopped flipping here, you may be confused.
“Okay 50/50 chance of landing on either side, but right now I’m 1 and 0, which means that 100% of the time it will land on this side.”
It’s very easy to see how bad that logic is. But, it is quite possible to flip a coin and get one side up to 5(!) times in a row. If you saw that happen in person, you might think you were lucky, or had a weighted coin. Instead, it turns out that if you flip a coin enough, this is just likely to happen. It’s really not phenomenal at all. And, if you continue to flip it, your total flips for each side will still tend to even out.
Coins are pretty easy to understand. There aren’t a whole lot of variables affecting how they behave. People are not. There are tons of variables affecting how they behave, and a fair amount of them are undetectable or not intuitively visible in any way. Their outcomes are also wildly more variable than a heads or tails flip.
Yet, we constantly beat ourselves up over how people react to us. Even going so far as to try to figure out how to change ourselves to live up to other people’s expectations.
We also constantly compare the results we are getting from our small sample size of people, to the results we should be getting according to the articles we read. These articles most likely deal with larger, more averaged sample sizes, or alternatively, deal with different, small sample sizes.
By looking to the outside world for validation on your own success, you are dooming yourself to a life of confusion. You most likely just don’t have enough information to truly tell exactly what you are succeeding and failing at all the time. This is not to say that you can’t get close, but that is not where most people start out.
Realistically, in terms of absolute success and failure, you’re probably failing at everything. But, so is everyone else, and society doesn’t really run on absolutes.
So, back to self-help.
Self-help and business literature operate on principles that are very similar to what I described above. They often include solutions to issues that are very specific to their life or industry.
It can be easy to know when to discard certain kinds of information. If an article was titled “10 things you must know about screw threading,” you might say “I am a butcher. Screw threading is irrelevant to me.”
Life and business advice can actually be the exact same. But the catch is, everyone has a life, and most people care about their life. No matter how different each person’s life may be, the words that are used to describe completely different lives are in fact very similar: happiness, sadness, success, failure. These words are actually pretty general, though we treat them like they are incisive.
So, when you see an article that says “10 ways to be more creative,” you may be perfectly creative and not need the article. You may actually really need the article because you are so uncreative. Most interestingly, you may require completely different things to excel creatively than the author.
Someone who I respect, who is older and more successful than me, said “I have good advice to give, but you have to take it with a grain of salt. The world is different now than when I was your age. Some things I will be able to explain or help you with, while other things have changed and you will have to figure out on your own.”
Psychology is still a relatively unexplored discipline, but people tend to take all psychological articles for gospel, especially the ones that weren’t written by psychologists.
What does this mean in a nutshell?
A lot of these articles or books may have some interesting advice to consider, but very few of them have advice that is well vetted, or advice that you can live by, if only due to the fact that your life is different than the author’s.
You should definitely keep reading and learning, but, if you are constantly binging on blog posts and TED talks, it may help to stop and consider why you feel the need to consume that media in the first place.
I will leave you with two videos.
One is by Tai Lopez. The internet loves to hate Tai Lopez. Though, the ideas he presents in this video are actually pretty good.
This next video is by a channel you probably haven’t heard of, which means you might not trust it. Let’s be honest, it’s much easier to mistrust things you are not familiar with, but I’ll say the same thing. There are some great ideas in this video.
