Making Life Better Isn't Usually About Self-Help Books
Living Happy
There’s this post from February by the intensely popular writer/blogger/podcaster Tim Ferris entitled, “You Don’t Need More How-To Advice — You Need a Beautiful and Painful Reckoning.”
In it, he talks about all the self-help advice in the world doesn’t make people actually do those actions that will help their selves.
He writes,
“People suck at following advice. Even the most effective people in the world are often terrible. There are at least two reasons:
1. “Most people have an insufficient reason for action. The pain isn’t painful enough. It’s a nice-to-have, not a must-have. There has been no “Harajuku Moment.”
2. “There are no reminders. No consistent tracking = no awareness = no behavioral change. Consistent tracking, even if you have no knowledge of fat-loss or exercise, will often beat advice from world-class trainers.
“But what is this all-important “Harajuku Moment”'
“It’s an epiphany that turns a nice-to-have into a must-have. It applies to fat loss, to getting your finances in order, to getting your relationships in order, and to getting your life in order. No matter how many bullet points and recipes experts provide, most folks will need a Harajuku Moment to fuel the change itself.”
He has Chad Fowler tell his story of how he was quite obese for decades and then one year he lost 70 pounds. Chad speaks of a moment in Japan where he was with a friend and suddenly had this epiphany when everyone else but them was shopping. He said to his friend, “For me, it doesn’t even matter what I wear; I’m not going to look good anyway.”
That was his moment. He said those words just hung in the air.
THOSE MOMENTS
A lot of us have had those moments. For some people that moment comes from their own voice, like for Chad.
For some of us, that voice comes from someone else. Like me when Steve Sills said in sixth or seventh grade “Let’s just face it. Neither of us are lookers. We might as well make due.”
Or for me when my mom said many, many times about all members of my family, “None of us have an artistic bone in our body.”
We create these truths out of these moments: I’m not a looker. I’m not artistic. Nobody will ever love me. I’m not smart.
There are a million negative scripts that we find to weigh us down, that we dig into and settle there.
But they are all pretty much bull-poop. I know! I know! Strong language.
So, what I'm really uncomfortable about is showing my art. That's because of a couple things:
It's really personal
I'm not trained
My mother.
As I told a lovely woman that I met one Friday night, "My mom was amazing, but she had really defined notions of what our family could and couldn't do."
The lady said, "Oh, I get this. My mother is the same way. I get this."
According to my mother, If we were going to create things, it was supposed to be:
Meat-based meals
Babies.
Writing
Music.
She said to me on multiple occasions when I was little, "Nobody in this family has an artistic bone in their body. None of us can draw a straight line."
But I really wanted to draw straight lines and make comics and paintings. I knew there was no point though.
None of us can draw a straight line.
I spent years and years wishing I could draw or paint. I spent years and years wishing I could make images without words.
Not an artistic bone.
When I was divorcing, I gave in and bought paint. I would stay up late into the night, painting. I had no idea what I was doing, but it was the only way I could think to get my emotions out into the world so that they wouldn't fester inside of me.
It didn't matter that they sucked because nobody would see them. I would paint over canvasses because I didn't have enough money to buy more canvas. (Still do this). I would paint on newspaper pages (not a good idea), on the backs of old-fashioned notebooks, on anything.
Not an artistic bone in my body?
It seemed pretty true.
I became a writer and I wrote novels, but sometimes I needed something else, another way to get things out. So, I'd trudge down into the basement and paint.
It's cold in the basement. The kitty litter box is in the basement. It's easy to hide down in that basement. I hid.
Sometimes when I get stuck in a story, or can't work out its theme, I paint.
Sometimes when I get lost inside my emotions, I paint.
A woman said to me on that Friday, "You wrote all these books, too? I have never met anyone who is good at both before."
And I laughed and was all self-disparaging and said, "You still haven't."
She gave me a look and said, "Oh, honey. Yes, I have."
Oh, honey. Yes, I have.
Even writing that now? It makes me get all teary-eyed.
EPIPHANY MOMENTS AND DIGGING IN
It was an epiphany moment, right? It was what Chad Fowler and Tim Ferris are talking about, but in reverse. And it is very hard to believe those moments in reverse.
Painting is the places inside of me where I can't make words work, where I can't get things to express themselves via writing, so I have to go deeper.
There are places that are deeper than words.
Fowler said on Ferris’ blog,
“For a long time, I’ve known that the key to getting started down the path of being remarkable in anything is to simply act with the intention of being remarkable.”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, about who I want to be and why. How about you?
And later he said some things that really hit into my way of thinking about art and self and happiness,
“But somehow, as the school nerd who always got picked last for everything, I had allowed “not being good at sports” or “not being fit” to enter what I considered to be inherent attributes of myself. The net result is that I was left with an understanding of myself as an incomplete person. And though I had (perhaps) overcompensated for that incompleteness by kicking ass in every other way I could, I was still carrying this powerlessness around with me and it was very slowly and subtly gnawing away at me from the inside.
“So, while it’s true that I wouldn’t have looked great in the fancy clothes, the seemingly superficial catalyst that drove me to finally do something wasn’t at all superficial. It actually pulled out a deep root that had been, I think, driving an important part of me for basically my entire life.
“And now I recognize that this is a pattern. In the culture I run in (computer programmers and tech people), this partial-completeness is not just common but maybe even the norm. My life lately has taken on a new focus: digging up those bad roots; the holes I don’t notice in myself. And now I’m filling them one at a time.”
Bad roots, he calls them. They might be more like invasive weeds (not dandelions, but something icky) that take over your heart, your vista, other bits of you that can grow.
Holes. Weeds. Bad roots.
How we fill them up? Figure them out? That’s where the work, is, I think. And it’s hard to do. But we can do it. Fowler shows that.