Self-Help Porn and the Power of Habit
The self help industry in 2022 is estimated to be worth a mind-bending 13.2 billion dollars. YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok feeds are overflowing with fitness and lifestyle videos promising to deliver your daily dose of motivation to get you to the gym or to eat healthy for the next meal or be more attractive to the opposite sex, etc. Hundreds of books are published every year in the “self-help” category claiming to do the same, only in a longer, more time-wasting format. People spend thousands of dollars to attend boot-camp style courses or lectures from prominent motivational speakers. After all this time, money and effort, people must finally achieve the undying “motivation” they seek, right? Except in most cases, this does not happen.
These books, articles and videos serve as a drug, a quick burst of what feels like motivation, a euphoric feeling of clarity that centers on a sense of a relentless goal-achieving drive. It doesn’t take long for this feeling to subside, however, leaving the customer needing another “hit” of motivation. The self-help industry knows this. They know that they're not helping anyone, but because their content serves sort of as mental mastrabation, customers will keep returning for more and more motivational content while their life doesn't truly get any better. While there may be short term success, this cycle and dependance on external motivation leaves most no better off than when they started in the long haul.
The problem with “motivation”, as it is packaged by the self-help industry today, is that it is entirely transitory and impossible to maintain. In terms of success, whether it be in sport, business, or whatever, motivation is a fraction of the equation. A common misrepresentation of successful people is that they are in this heightened, motivated state of mind at all times. While they undoubtedly feel this sensation occasionally, this is not the case all the time and if they only trained, or worked when they felt this, they wouldn’t be a fraction as successful as they are. Using the world of athletics for example, what separates an olympic champion from someone buying their sixth self-help book, is it is more difficult for the champion to NOT train than to train. What do I mean by that? High level athletes have trained for so long that their training has become a habit. It has become a COMPULSION. They don’t need motivation to train because it's mentally more difficult for them to take a day off than to train. While yes, athletes like this often possess innate qualities that make them this way, this is a quality that anyone can develop. While at the start, forming new habits can be tough, over time as they become more ingrained in it, it becomes easier.
Think of this phenomenon as a U-shaped graph where the Y axis is the ease of adhering to a given goal and the X axis is time adhering to a goal. At first, it is easy to adhere to a goal, but as time goes on it initially gets more difficult. Somewhere in this downturn of the graph is where the majority of people fall off. At the bottom of the U is when the habit forms, and those who stick it out that far will see that adhering to the goal becomes easier, as the graph trends back upwards. This phenomenon applies to all goals, whether they be personal, professional, or athletic.
How does one develop new habits? Persistence. Anything that is new and challenging will be hard to stick to but the only way to make meaningful change is consistency over time. There will be far more days where you want to stray from the program than there are days you feel “motivated” and ready to crush it, and that's okay. That's part of the plan. It’s pushing through the days where you’re unmotivated and don’t want to do anything that will develop the habit you want. Don't get it twisted though, contrary to what self-help material would have you believe, the goal of these unmotivated days is NOT to become motivated, it is simply to complete the task in question completely void of all “motivation”. Developing that ability is the only way you can make lasting change.
In the words of Aristotle, “We are what we repeatedly do, excellence then is not an act but a habit.” We should choose our habits wisley then, because they become who we are. While a powerful tool for success, forming the wrong habits is just as powerful at causing our downfall. Thus, we must consciously choose who we want to become and develop the habits that will help us fulfill our potential and break the ones that will stand in our way.
