Greatest self improvement tip

A man walks into a bookstore, “Where’s the self-help section?” he asks the clerk. She shrugs and then replies, “I could tell you, but won’t that defeat the purpose!”

-Anonymous

Haven’t we all at some point of time read or at least glanced out of curiosity through books having some strange combination of the words like “How to”, “guide”, “dummies” or “complete idiot” in their title.

Well for those who haven’t (and I wonder if there are any such folks in the first place) let me say that books like these are a dime a dozen and you cannot miss them if you read (as most people do before buying a book) the text on the back cover of the books. ‘Blurb’ is what the educated editors like the ones publishing this piece call the back cover text that gives a hint of the story inside in an attractive way. As for me, I simply call it ‘the teaser’.

Continuing from where I left without any further proverbial digressions....You can’t miss these books from their teasers vowing to make our lives better, more productive, more fulfilling, more romantic, more exciting, more....err does this column have a word limit.... what’s funnier is that some even proclaim to do all of the above and that too over a single weekend of non stop reading.

Now my analysis says there are two different varieties of folks that fuel the ‘self help’ or ‘self improvement’ brigade. Firstly, those who feel really inadequate, have some real blind spots and fundamental issues in life and are willing to try anything over the counter to make things better for themselves.

The second variety though is more in numbers yet on the face of it needs less of self improvement literature then the first one. These folks are already good but want to become great. They would read a self help book and proclaim “Oh, Cool, there are a bunch of new things over here that I could try in my life too.”

Psst! there is allegedly a third variety also of those that though regularly turn to such titles yet never admit reading them, I presume this is primarily because they take the words like ‘Dummies’ or ‘Morons’ in the book’s title way too seriously.

Now, all this is perfectly ok and works well till efforts are made to put into practice the good things being preached in the books as these are often written with a lot of experience and research behind them. However, we expect to become better versions of ourselves simply by reading books and the thought of having to practice certain actions on a daily basis over months and even over years regularly doesn’t ever cross our mind.

I say “The word ‘Self Improvement’ is quite literal in its meaning and practicing self improvement in our daily life is the ‘key’, rather than merely reading about it.”