 Alex Pattakos' book Prisoners of our Thoughts
synthesizes the work of death camp survivor Viktor Frankl down to seven
key principles that will help you be happier and more successful in
your life:
- Exercise the freedom to choose your own attitude
- Know your "why", and discover your higher purpose
- Overcome your fears through self-knowledge
- Don't try too hard or delude yourself, so you don't work against your self-interest
- See yourself from a distance, so you 'get outside yourself'
- Shift your 'frame', your focus of attention, so you can see things differently
- Get beyond your own self-interest, and connect with community and the world
It's
hard to argue with these principles, but I have the same problem with
these that I do with the whole mountain of 'self-help' books out there.
I don't believe that people fundamentally change (although if they go
through what Frankl did, which I can't imagine doing, maybe they
could). For the rest of us, I feel about these make-yourself-better
programs much the way I feel about 'beauty' products: They make us feel
we aren't good enough as we are,
and create expectations of becoming a better (or better-looking)
person, expectations that are almost certain to be dashed. So we either
get addicted, signing up for more self-improvement in the futile hope
that with enough work we will finally get there and become (spiritually
or intellectually or physically) beautiful (when by implication we
aren't now), or we get disillusioned, and our self-esteem suffers
lasting damage.
We are who we are. We are not prisoners of our thoughts, I think, so much as prisoners of our bodies and our genes. What we can affect, much more than who we are, perhaps, is what we do with our lives. By learning about the real world, and taking responsibility and acting on that learning, I believe, we are more likely to change who we are, and
make the world better in the process, than we would by introspection of
the type suggested by self-help authors. That's not to say we needn't
change ourselves before we try to change others (and the world) -- just
that that self-change will come first from our actions in the world,
not from self-analysis and reading.
In a complicated universe,
it makes sense (as Snowden says) to analyze before you act. But in a
complex universe (which I think the one we all live in really is)
analysis is futile -- you probe, outside
yourself, before you act. When I visit the bookstore, you'll usually
find me in the cultural studies, fiction, history, poetry, politics,
economics, humour, nature, science, philosophy and business innovation
sections. The self-help section is huge and busy, but I usually give it
a wide berth.
Am I being unfair here? Is there something in all
these million-seller self-help books that I'm missing? Can reading a
story about moving cheese really save your career, your marriage and
your life? |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
