In Defense of the Success Industry
By: Steven Yates
Tags: Self Improvement, Entrepreneurship, Capitalism, Success, Mindset

Photo by Sarah Cervantes on Unsplash

Yesterday, Umair Haque’s article “Why Self-Help Is (Mostly) Self-Destructive BS” came up in my feed. I’ve not been able to get it out of my mind.

Is self-help really as bad as he suggests? Is it really harmful, toxic, self-destructive?

As someone who’s been studying the success industry for the past couple of years, done some writing about it, and sought out the help of a couple of success coaches, I think I can shed some light on the topic.

My Story….

My story: I’m a born writer. I think I literally was born with a pen in my hand (were I a member of Gen Z it would be a tablet or some smaller handheld device). Although I studied philosophy, as it turned out, I wasn’t a born teacher. I had to work my tail end off to not be worthless in the classroom, and to do this I sought help from my elders who were sometimes helpful and sometimes not. Usually not, in fact.

I never became the cross between Socrates and Seinfeld everyone seemed to expect in a media-and-entertainment saturated world of rapidly shortening attention spans.

Nor was I any good at academic politics. You see, I kinda had a penchant for blurting out the truth, or what I thought the truth was, sometimes in print, when doing so wasn’t exactly politic. I could provide an archive. You’d be amused. Some of the things I blurted out back in the 1990s are things I’d never say today.

I could have used the services of a wise and knowledgeable success coach back then, before finally walking away from academia in frustration at the low pay and thwarted expectations.

I could’ve used the advice of someone with the people skills I clearly lacked.

More recently, I started a writing business to pursue my passion. I’ve sought out coaches to learn from them. Why? Because I’ve only the most limited knack for marketing. I’ve learned to tell myself, “I’m a better marketer today than I was two months ago, and I was a better marketer two months ago than I was six months ago.”

Self-help’s purveyors aren’t perfect and wouldn’t claim to be. Yes, the success industry comes up short in a few key respects. And yes, there are scams out there. You have to do your homework by investigating coaching programs. Fortunately we have the online world, which makes this task fairly easy.

Some such programs are expensive. What I’ve noticed is that the greater the upfront investment, the more I could expect to get from it. Note the way I put that. The successful look at such expenses as investments, not costs.

Are you going to invest in yourself? That may seem like semantic flimflam. Come on! If you’re in debt and low on funds, it’s a cost if there’s no payoff. But then the question is, did you implement? Did you actually do what the program and the coach(es) behind it recommended that you do? Did you do it consistently? Those are fair questions.

Misrepresenting the Success Industry.

So in my judgment, Umair Haque misrepresents the success industry, or as he calls it, self-help. His claim is that it is little more than what those of us who grew up in the 1970's learned to call blaming the victim. More: he calls it a “literature of false consciousness.” He claims it places full onus on the individual instead of placing the blame for all the misery in the world on a system almost designed to make most of us poor, isolated, and miserable.

In Umair’s words:

[T]he premise of the idea of “self-help” is wrong. Badly, grotesquely wrong. Especially in an age like this, where most Americans struggle to pay bills, live on the edge of poverty, will live poorer lives than their grandparents, and can’t even raise small amounts for emergencies. It’s so wrong, in fact, that it’s led to a kind of gruesome vicious cycle at work in society, particularly American society. Americans just…work harder…for the systems which exploit them…and get exploited more…and read more self-help books…wondering what the hell went wrong. What went wrong is the premise behind all that. What premise do I mean? The idea that systemic failures, grand failures of systems and institutions, are the individual’s fault — and that the way to overcome them, therefore, is through more individualism, through your effort: through more labour. Not more solidarity, collectivity, allocentrism (that’s the opposite of egocentrism.) Through more caring for yourself, in other words, and less caring for others. Self-help’s solution to social problems is always more labour, from you — physical, mental, emotional, social — not more solidarity. But what if the problem is that you’re being exploited for and by your labour in the first place?

I’m going to leave aside a lot of specifics, such as whether poverty really is increasing, whether more of us will be poorer than our grandparents, and so on, in order to cut to the chase.

Umair’s description is not of the success industry I’ve studied.

For starters, the success industry doesn’t promote egocentricism. Just the opposite, in fact. Take someone like Dale Carnegie, whose How To Win Friends and Influence People blazed the trail. Did Umair read it? I wonder. If he did, he had to notice that Carnegie wasn’t telling readers to be egocentric.

He was telling them to focus on what others are interested in and want. They aren’t interested in what you want, he says. They are interested in what they want.

Dale Carnegie and his bestseller (courtesy of www.ragan.com)

If you can help people get what they want — in a phrase, solve a problem for them — you help yourself.

And not in a cynical, dissembling fashion. Because people with problems aren’t stupid. If you don’t sincerely care about them, they’ll pick up on it. They’ll go elsewhere.

That is, if you ignore others’ interests … that is, if you’re completely egocentric … you won’t succeed. Period.

You won’t win friends. You won’t influence people.

If you’re allocentric, you will.

There’s a deeper level here. Let’s look at it.

The Truth About Egocentricity.

Many philosophers and psychologists noted eons ago that most people do live egocentric lives. It’s probably our default setting, at least in the West. As I’ve observed here and here, we live life like the central character, the protagonist, of a kind of movie playing outward from our heads, in 3D. Those closest to us play supporting roles. Sometimes these change, as with a relationship, marriage, or divorce and remarriage. Many other “actors” just come and go, and there are hundreds upon hundreds of “extras” in the big city.

A few whose wants and interests clash with ours become our life movie’s antagonists. The playground bully in high school, for example. Or, much later, those people on the other side of the political aisle, or end of the spectrum.

But maybe the teacher who graded us down when our performance wasn’t up to snuff. Or the track coach who didn’t want you letting up. He’s not “exploiting” you but trying to help you help the team.

Or think of bosses. Some are creeps, but some are hard workers building businesses and just expect the same. You can learn from them.

And so on. In the world as it is, sure, we’ll all run across find people who seem to be complete dicks. And we’ll get to know decent folks who’ll give you the shirt off their backs once they know you, like you, and trust you.

The point is, most are egocentric. Carnegie assumed this, and most of the success industry has assumed it in his wake whether they put it this way or not. Most of us humans think, talk, and act like we’re the center of Creation. Although a moment’s thought should tell us, we’re not.

So if you can convince someone that you care about what he or she wants, you’ve won a friend. If you can convince him or her that you can do something about it, you may have a client or a customer. Maybe a partner (business or relationship).

How do you win their trust, especially these days?

Well, that’s a long story, but I don’t think we should count the success industry out, or assume that its message is just you, you, you.

Yes, it sets out to help you, you, you, but in Dale Carnegie’s sense, not Umair Haque’s. You don’t succeed by being egocentric. You succeed by being, in a very important and sincere sense, allocentric?

And if you’re the only person in the room whose thinking outside the egocentric box, you’re in a great position!

Because there’s not a whole lot of competition!

Owning Your Situation: What Does This Mean?

The success industry urges its customers to “take responsibility.”

Some success coaches say things like, “You have to begin by taking full responsibility for your situation, because where you are right now, in your life, is the sum total of all the choices you have made.”

Well-known success coach Brian Tracy urges listeners to repeat, like a mantra, “I am responsible. I am responsible. I am responsible.”

Whatever their situation.

I don’t think I’d put it that way. If we’re not careful, we can go badly off the rails at this point. Some do, I think.

I think I would say something like, “Here you are, in this situation / predicament / mess. You may or may not have caused it, but you can probably find bad choices you made if you look hard enough and honestly enough. Own those choices, because you can still learn from them. Own the full situation you’re in, because you have a choice in the present: you can go on complaining how terrible life is, how badly you’ve been screwed, or how screwed up capitalism is … or you can start on a plan to extricate yourself from whatever situation you’re in.”

I kinda like that better. Don’t you?

So assume ownership. Note that I don’t say, blame yourself for things you didn’t do. Nobody chooses to be swindled in a bad business deal, or ripped off by a scam artist.

Moreover, nobody chooses to be born poor, or born to slimeball parents who neglect them or worse, or to have any number of other calamities befall them.

You don’t need to blame yourself if your life is messed up. But you do need to start thinking in terms of resilience. Or just what you’re going to do to pick yourself up and move on with your life.

Umair sees the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche as the godfather of self-help, because Nietzsche challenged us to develop a post-Christian morality of strength, resilience, health — in a word, mastery, as opposed to slavery. So that much is true.

Friedrich Niezsche (image courtesy of www.brittanica.com)

It’s worth noting that, yes, most people never really escape slavery in some sense.

But isn’t this because they never learn more than what they need to know to keep their lives together and functional?

They’ll live out their lives trading time for money, and most will end up without a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of.

But maybe this is because they never step outside that egocentric movie they live inside.

They never see others as selves like them — and with problems they might be able to solve.

Trade doesn’t have to be dog-eat-dog. It doesn’t have to be “I win, you lose, sucker!” It can be win-win. The best trades are. Yes, there are capitalists who call this a dog-eat-dog world and act accordingly. There are capitalists whose ethos comes down to, “Screw you, Jack, I’ve got mine, and if you didn’t learn to game the system, tough, sucks to be you!”

But here’s the rub:

You don’t have to adopt that ethos. You can choose your values.

Assuming ownership means making this choice.

This is the key to what is best in the success industry, and what it has to offer the world.

The Stoicism of Success.

Since we waded into philosophy, let’s take our cue not from Nietzsche but from a far older school of thinkers: those I think of as the noble Stoics, who also thrived under a regime most would consider repressive — far worse than anything we have now, it needs to be said.

Epictetus (image courtesy of Wikipedia)

Though he didn’t found the school, Epictetus became one of the most famous of the Roman Stoics (1st century A.D.). A former slave, he walked with a limp due to a permanent leg injury resulting from a beating he once got.

He first counseled to distinguish what you can control from what you can’t control.

You can’t control the weather, so why gripe about it?

You also can’t control the opinions of others. You can’t control the actions of others. Think you can, and you’ll just frustrate yourself when they don’t fall in line.

You can’t control the fact that sometimes s**t happens. Markets change, the economy tanks, you lose your job. Or worse.

And you can’t control the fact that you live under capitalism, a system that demands that you either (1) earn enough money to pay for your necessities at least, or (2) find some way of obtaining money from those who have it and are willing to support you, or (3) go into debt and maybe into abject poverty.

You can’t control what the billionaire class does. Nor what the political class does.

Yes, you can vote for Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, but (a) there’s no guarantee either one will even be nominated, and (b) even if one is nominated and defeats Trump, there’s no guarantee he or she will follow through on any promises.

That’s the nature of politics and politicians: promising the sun and the moon and delivering, at best, burned out chunks of meteorite.

Most in political office can’t make decisions unilaterally. No modern political economy in the West works that way. So should you trust any politician to change it?

But you can learn to control your reactions to all these things. You can control your emotions.

That was the first key to what the Stoics can teach us: self-control, self-discipline … leading, yes, to self-mastery.

Umair writes as if self-mastery is a bad thing. It isn’t.

You can control your thoughts, up to a point. You can control your actions, up to a point. You can decide to learn new things — new ideas, new habits, new skills.

That’s not being exploited or exploiting others necessarily. It’s becoming a fuller human being. And there’s never been a time when there were more resources and information at your fingertips.

Mindset Is Everything.

One of the things the success industry does is ask you to focus on your mindset: is it limiting or is it growth-oriented.

Are you the sort of person who is always saying, “I can’t — ” or “I’ll never — ” “People won’t — ” or “It’s not possible to — ” or “I’m screwed because —p” etc., etc.

You’re not assuming ownership. Instead, you’re sabotaging your potential.

Consider this example. If you think people won’t respond to your ideas on Medium, you won’t put them out there.

Umair clearly believes some people will respond to his ideas. So he puts them out there. It’s a shame, they’re limiting ideas.

“But no one’s reading — ”

If you have an idea and just 1 percent of the population sees it, thinks about it, maybe acts on it, then in a population of just over 327 million people (the latest figure I was able to obtain for the population of the U.S.), that’s 3.27 million people, a city-sized group of people.

You don’t need a group anywhere near that large to affect positive change in the world. (Or, sadly, negative change, if the ideas are the wrong ones.)

Consider:

Courtesy of www.quotefancy.com

You can become such a citizen. I think that’s what Umair Haque wants.

If so, the success industry is not the enemy.

Start by developing a growth mindset.

Design first small, and then larger, changes in your thoughts and habits.

Do you want to get up earlier? Set your alarm and put it across the room, so you’ll have to get up to shut it off.

As opposed to leaving it on your nightstand so you can reach over, hit snooze, and sleep for another ten minutes.

Sounds trivial, I know. But stay with me here.

When you do something like that, you’re telling your subconscious mind that another ten minutes of sleep are more important than your first priority of the day.

Your subconscious mind is powerful. If you don’t change what it’s saying, it’ll sabotage you. It will condition you for success or failure in life, for self-mastery or servitude, for wealth or for poverty.

You can change it by giving it the right instructions.

And then by acting consistently, until you’ve created a new habit.

You can train your mind for personal improvement — and leadership.

Success coaches will tell you all this, and more besides. They will give you specifics I can’t get into here because this is already getting too long.

The point is, you’re can improve whatever area of your life you choose to improve — if you learn how the relevant systems work, and what to do so they’ll work in your favor.

Do that, and you can end your sense of personal helplessness.

Ending Helplessness.

Want to lose weight? You can learn nutrition, or just undertake to break habits like eating late at night, eating junk food generally, and instead seek out quality produce.

Again, we’ve never had more information available how to do this.

Forget about “the experts disagree about” such-and-such. Everybody with a functioning brain knows that you can’t get enough green vegetables and that you should limit your intake of fried and/or fatty foods, soft drinks, alcoholic beverages, and caffeine.

You can end the sense of financial helplessness, and of being exploited by “the system.”

You can stop letting hours of the day slip away, and days of the week slip away by learning to manage your time, which is just a specific form of self-mastery. We all have exactly 24 hours in a day. It’s worth it to find out why some people get so much more done during their waking hours than others.

If you get up at 5 am instead of 7 am, you’ve just gained two hours every morning to write that novel you’ve been thinking about but just can’t get around to. Two hours every morning turns into 24 hours per week — another full day (and not just a work day)!

Set goals and timetables. But let’s be careful. You’ll hit a huge roadblock if you’re not careful.

Don’t set goals that aren’t realistic, or that depend on things you can’t control.

Don’t expect to finish that novel in, say, two weeks working two hours per morning, especially if you don’t have much of a plan. If a novel is 80,000 words long, you’d have to write just under 6,000 words per morning assuming no days off. Probably no professional writers write at that pace. Not even Stephen King or J.K. Rowling.

Likewise, don’t plan on starting, say, a real estate business and earning $5 million your first year. It’s not going to happen, because while up to a point you can control how many ads you place, how many connections you make on LinkedIn, how many meetings you attend, and so on, you can’t control the response. You can’t control the fact that you’re still an unknown quantity, and you may have things to learn you didn’t realize (they weren’t in the exam you passed to get your real estate license).

So plan on connecting with X number of people. Whether it’s that or some other entrepreneurial effort, determine your message … what problem you are solving, for whom, and something about how you’re solving it (your process).

These are things you can control.

And you can get better at it.

The key thought here: don’t set goals that depend on factors you can’t control.

Extend the Range of What You Control.

You can extend the range of what you can control.

There are small systems and large ones. Small systems are like machines. (Many are machines.) They run on simple deductive logic. “If I do X to it, I’ll get result Y. If on the other hand I do S to it, T will occur.”

You can learn simple home repairs just by learning how things operate and what tools will do. If you’re motivated. If you’re not motivated, that’s not the fault of the machines or the tools or the capitalist system.

Learn the logic of the systems around you that you can use to improve your life, help other people solve their problems, and maybe your income will increase.

You won’t be exploited, and you won’t be exploiting others.

People are nothing like machines, of course. But they respond to incentives in predictable ways. Remember their egocentricity, which in most cases you’re not gong to change. They’re interested in what they want. They have pain points: problems you can solve with your ideas and strategies.

To imply that it’s a moral crime to be compensated, perhaps handsomely, for your efforts is silly.

Locus of Control.

We should always remember: most people will never escape that egocentric lock on their lives. I don’t think the success industry has reached more than a tiny fraction of the population, multiyear bestseller’s like Dale Carnegie’s book and Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich notwithstanding. What percentage, I have no idea. I think the world would be a far, far different place if those ideas really reached further.

What we know (from countless studies): people like to buy and consume, but they want to think it was their idea (people don’t like to be “sold”). Once their basic needs are met, people buy primarily on emotion. They buy based on the persuasive force of a sales argument that emphasizes benefits. Once they’ve bought, they want to rationalize their emotional buying decisions with logic (inability to do this leads to buyers’ remorse).

Why do consumers want to believe their buying decisions are autonomous?

It’s called locus of control, a concept in psychology.

Consumers instinctively prefer an internal sense of locus of control. The buying decision was theirs.

Curiously, this is the exact opposite of where Umair Haque sees it. He sees us all as immersed in, suffering because, our actual locus of control is external.

Is your locus of control external or internal? Let’s explain.

If your locus of control is external, you believe forces outside of you are responsible for most of what happens in your life — or as T. Harv Eker, success coach and bestselling author of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, puts it, you believe “life happens to me.”

If you believe you can’t succeed because of limitations imposed by “the system,” your locus of control is external.

That’s bad news.

Eker describes this as the attitude of the poor and much of the middle class, and why they’ll stay poor or middle class.

But if your locus of control is internal, you believe you are in control — or can take control — of the things that matter in your life: your finances, health, relationships. T. Harv Eker again: “I create my life.”

He sees this as the attitude of the rich, or just of those who set out on the path of self-mastery and success.

Mindset is everything. If you resent the need to make money, you’ll push it away. You’ll do this by not taking the actions necessary to earn it, or keep it. Ironically, you’ll be too egocentric to look for something others want and show them how to get it, or solve a problem for them. I call this irony, because again, egocentricity is what Umair criticizes in self-help.

If you’re allocentric, you care about others and you’ll take actions necessary to help them achieve something. They’ll pay you for solving a problem. You’ll make money. You may make a lot of money.

You may, on the other hand, hate the rich. Umair clearly seems to hate the rich.

Stoicism to the rescue. Can you do anything to change the fact that under capitalism, some get rich? Some have solved problems for people, some have gotten rich by other means.

But can you do anything to change even the fact (if it is a fact) that capitalism funnels wealth and power into the hands of an elite?

Can you even change the fact that some people have gotten rich gaming the financial system?

I don’t think so!

But again, you can focus on you, and on improving you.

And you can do it without being egocentric.

You can do it thousands of times better without being egocentric.

What will solve a problem for some group of people you can reach out to?

Be as allocentric as you can! Network! Develop solidarity with as many others as you can! Umair likes the idea of solidarity solving problems like health care and education.

Once we’ve done more to think this through and broken out of all the old categories and limited beliefs, maybe it’ll turn out he’s onto something.

Until then, nothing keeps you from reaching out. (And by the way, guys: watch girls and women. No, not in that sense! Where’s your mind, anyway? Watch women because they tend to be good networkers. Over the past couple of years I’ve really come to think that for whatever the explanation, they are better at this than we men are! Which is why I’ve gravitated towards seeking out women coaches.)

The success industry — self-help, if you prefer — is not BS. It doesn’t just rationalize a system based on exploitation by leading you to do nothing except work harder. Yes, you’ll work. But with a plan to improve your life first by design and self-mastery, and then by having improved the lives of others.

The Dangers of Grand Political Visions.

I may have left out something. Umair might think I’ve completely missed his point about “the system.” So let me add some final remarks.

The history of ideas discloses two kinds of political thinkers. There are those who had some kind of grand vision. Maybe it was a Platonist idea (like the society in Plato’s Republic or Thomas More’s Utopia or Sir Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis). Maybe it involved some guiding principle such as Rousseau’s general will.

Maybe, like Marx’s theory of history (which drew on Hegel’s philosophy before him), it postulates an evolution-through-revolution process that will give us a Utopia when the process is finished — even if we have to break a lot of eggs to get that omelet!

Such notions when put into practice don’t have a very good track record (to say the least!). Where they fall down is having nowhere to put the many people who don’t want to go along, or who don’t fit the Plan. Think Hitler and the Jews, or Stalin and the more than 3 million farmers in Ukraine who resisted collective farming and ended up starving to death.

In fairness, not all Grand Plans come from the left. I tend to see many absolute free-marketers, or anarcho-capitalists, propounding the same basic idea, or Grand Plan, just of allowing “markets to function” after abolishing the state (maybe instead of letting it “wither away,” Marx-style).

This ignores what free markets probably can’t solve, and my argument here is not that they can. Right Utopianism also ignores the fact that the elite class doesn’t want free markets, never did, and never will. Today’s billionaires don’t want totally free markets.

Be this as it may, I think Grand Plan thinking is dangerous. Again, it presumes the controllability of too many things no one can control, such as future inventions, the insane things politicians do, and a multitude of unpredictable factors completely outside human control.

Umair will say I’ve misrepresented him, that he’s not a Grand Planner, just a social democrat who wants solidarity and allocentricity. He wants us caring about one another, and by extension, caring about the whole body politic. Not just profit for oneself.

Fair enough. But how do we get there?

Not through enacting top-down policies under the assumption that these will “change the system.”

Changing the system begins at home.

I think the success industry can help, if we understand it.

Learn to control what really is in your control: your emotions, your words and actions towards others, your time, your habits, your personal finances.

Learn to see the problems others have, keeping in mind that most never escape that egocentric box. But you can escape it! You’ll be a small minority, but so what?

If you control yourself and master your life, you’re in a better position to lead others!

Treat others as having intrinsic value.

They’ll notice! They’ll look to you for leadership if you’ve solved their problems consistently!

Do you want success instead of failure (not that we can’t learn from those)? Do you want truth instead of BS? Do you want peace of mind instead of stress, joy instead of frustration, abundance instead of scarcity?

Then let’s talk about what we can do now, realistically, to start building that sort of world. It won’t happen all at once, it won’t happen without a lot of thought going into what sort of society we want and what we’re willing to do (and sometimes go through) in order to build it.

Above all, it won’t happen without a lot of work.

These again all fall under that umbrella of those factors we can’t control, but in learning how the systems work, we can use those systems to make ourselves and our world better — one human at a time.