After Reading Hundreds of Self Improvement Books, I Can Summarize Them All in Just Two Words
I did it so you don’t have to
The Ancient Greeks understood self help twenty-five hundred years ago better than we do today.
Historians tell us columns of the Temple of Apollo bore the inscription: Know thyself.
According to early Greek sources, this maxim meant a person should know their limitations and their place in society. But like all wise sayings, people have debated its meaning for millennia.
After reading hundreds of personal-development and self-help books over the past decade, I think those two words sum them up.
Know yourself.
Why? Because if you don’t know yourself–understand yourself–you can’t change.
We’re all complex beings. So the question is, what are we supposed to know about ourselves?
Let’s look at three of the most useful things to know.
Know the Stories You Tell Yourself
We tell ourselves stories to explain our life.
When something bad (or good) happens in life, we decide on a reason it happened. The reason might be true, or it may not. But once we’ve drawn a conclusion about ourselves, we construct a story around it to prove it.
Why? Because we want to be right. So we’ll do anything to prove the stories we tell ourselves are true.
It’s how we stay stuck in a cycle of self-sabotage.
Your story about yourself becomes your operating system. Until you know the stories you tell yourself, you’ll stay stuck.
Let’s say you went through a nasty breakup. You may have drawn one of many conclusions from that experience. For example:
- I’m bad at relationships
- I can’t find what I’m looking for
- I’m unlovable
- Nobody gets me
These are all the beginnings of a story you tell yourself about yourself.
The point is, once you believe something about yourself, your actions will reinforce that belief. So, if you believe you can’t find the person you’re looking for, you never will.
We create these stories about anything and everything in our lives.
There’s no shame in drawing the wrong conclusions about yourself or generating a disempowering story for yourself. The problem is that most of us don’t do the work to figure out what those stories are, so they run our lives on autopilot.
The real challenge is figuring out what your stories are. Once you know the stories you tell yourself, you’ll see how they’re affecting your life.
Only then can we do something about them and stop making the same mistakes.
Know Your Emotions
Look, this isn’t about being touchy-feely. It’s about not allowing your emotions (specifically your moods) to control you.
More accurately, it’s about learning how to control your reactions to the things that happen to you.
I see so many people going through life in reaction mode, always driven by how they feel. Everything they do is an emotional reaction to something or someone.
And they wonder why they’re stuck and miserable!
As Epictetus said, “Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.”
After working several customer service jobs in my life, I’ve learned that you alone are the guardian of your emotions. As the guardian, you have to be constantly aware of what gets into your mind.
It’s not as difficult as it sounds. When you pay attention to your emotions, you can choose how to respond to the things that happen.
I’ve learned to ask myself: Am I choosing how I react to this, or am I letting it dictate my reaction?
It’s normal to feel mad, upset, and frustrated when someone hurts you. It’s okay to eat a pint of ice cream after a breakup. You deserve some time away after a loss. Emotions are healthy. Feel all those things and more.
But don’t hold on to those feelings dictate the rest of your life.
Know your emotions, and guard what gets into your mind.
Know What You (Really) Want
Let’s say you want to become the CEO of a billion-dollar company. Are you sure you want to become that person?
Are you willing to pay the price for what you say you want?
If most people could trade places with Jeff or Elon, all the sacrifices and tradeoffs they’ve made would surprise them.
Everything has a tradeoff. Choose your sacrifices wisely.
Knowing yourself means getting truthful about what you really want in life–not what social media says you should want. Until you get honest with yourself, you’ll always chase the wrong things.
Are you pursuing a degree when what you really want is to take that cool internship?
Are you going broke living in the city, when you’d be perfectly happy in the suburbs?
If you aren’t clear about what you want in life, rest assured someone else will tell you what you should want. And with so much noise out there, it’s nearly impossible to ignore the voices pleading for your attention.
When you know yourself well enough to know what you want, you have a shot at building a fulfilling and meaningful life.
Two Little Words Can Change Your Life
Most people get into personal development and self-help because they want to change something about their life. Why is it so easy to become a “self-help junkie?”
Because the concepts and ideas in those books, podcasts, videos, and courses seem to provide actual solutions.
But they only work if we’re willing to deal with reality. They require us to look in the mirror and see ourselves–not the filtered version we want to see–the people we are when nobody’s looking.
They require you to know yourself.
When you do, the path forward becomes much clearer because you’re dealing with the dirt under the rug and not just what’s on top.
