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Post by Admin on Jun 29, 2012 9:08:34 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jan 22, 2020 12:02:50 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jul 20, 2020 11:39:17 GMT
The self of self-help books is adrift from social and economic facts psyche.co/ideas/the-self-of-self-help-books-is-adrift-from-social-and-economic-factsYet much of the self-help literature on economic and career success is still written in the vein of Carnegie’s book, and consequently reads as if one were always a free agent negotiating for (and with) oneself without a social context. Another author unhindered by social context is Mark Manson, who wrote the bestseller The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck (2016). Manson takes umbrage with the modern focus on self-esteem and our sense of ‘entitlement’. But this perspective is personal. In Manson’s worldview, self-esteem quickly becomes entitlement and then narcissism. What is overlooked is the unwarranted focus on self-esteem that’s been so popular in narratives of the past several decades. Social science research shows that a person’s self-esteem doesn’t necessarily explain his or her accomplishments. Beyond that, leaping from inflated self-esteem to entitlement, as Manson does, serves to promote questionable social agendas, for example undermining social welfare programs while promoting welfare-for-the-wealthy through mechanisms such as public-private partnerships. Like Manson’s implicit description of the individual, other self-help narratives about success and failure consider economics as a purely personal or household strategy. In Awaken the Giant Within (1991), Anthony Robbins advises us to think of what he calls ‘compounding’, which is really a strategy for saving that involves reinvestment of profits. A social scientist covering the same territory would likely first look to national trends or demographics. For example, in the United States, the purchasing power of a dollar has declined every year since 1967 except for two. Statistics from the International Monetary Fund show that, around the time Robbins’s book first came out, actual household savings rates had begun a 20-year-plus decline in the US, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada. Crosscultural or transnational differences are often the focus of social science studies and, as it turns out, the specific society in which one saves is an important factor in whether one saves: saving in the US occurs at lower levels than elsewhere because, according to some economists, the culture is one of high consumption and immediate gratification, and decisions to save are easier to put off to the future. Robbins might argue that if more people had read his book, more might have practised compounding. By contrast, one can imagine an academic social scientist beating around the advice bush and merely stating the facts of saving. It’s no surprise that works of self-help are more immediately appealing – they give a sense of personal control and excitement in the choices we make in our financial and career lives. Having the power to save enough money to change our fundamental terms of existence is attractive, indeed. One reason for saving is to have the money set aside to make job or life changes when necessary or desirable. Bolles’s question ‘What colour is your parachute?’ refers to the decision to change or launch a career based on the inner self, alone. Social scientists, however, want to know the conditions under which parachutes acquire a colour; we feel it essential to know why a parachute is red or black or green; we want to know what forces made us jump; we want to know what kind of cultural, historical, social and economic changes have occurred over time that produce individuals who need parachutes, and how these conditions are changing. Of course, sometimes a self-help approach is what we need. Social scientists have played more of a descriptive than an advocacy role. When it’s time for ‘change agents’ and revolutionaries to alter the basic social conditions that keep individuals down, a self-help narrative might energise action best.
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Post by Admin on Sept 20, 2020 21:05:37 GMT
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Post by Admin on Sept 24, 2020 12:57:24 GMT
What Good Shall I Do This Day?: A Journal Inspired by Benjamin Franklin Diary by Chronicle Books (Creator) This handsome guided journal invites modern diarists to contemplate all the good they can do in their everyday lives using Benjamin Franklin's own daily questions. Featuring 365 undated entries--including 75 prompts based on the founding father's life and writings--and an elegant cover, this journal boasts a timeless, classic appeal befitting the enduring wisdom of one of history's greatest thinkers. www.artofmanliness.com/articles/what-good-shall-i-do-this-day/
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Post by Admin on Nov 17, 2020 19:18:30 GMT
Useful Books The past and present of self-help literature.By Jennifer Wilson www.thenation.com/article/culture/self-help-compulsion-beth-blum-review/From the 1940s to the ’60s, the Onitsha Market in southeastern Nigeria was the center of a burgeoning movement in self-help literature. Known as Onitsha Market literature, these cheap, locally published booklets were at once moralistic and titillating. With titles like Why Harlots Hate Married Men and Love Bachelors, How to Avoid Corner Love and Win Good Love From Girls, Money Hard to Get but Easy to Spend, and Drunkards Believe Bar as Heaven, they were sold at market stalls and were intended to appeal to a class of newly literate Nigerians interested in advancing themselves professionally and culturally. Reading for self-improvement was something the British had encouraged in their mission schools, but the advice and moral guidance of the Onitsha Market pamphlets had much in common with the tenets of local folklore traditions. As Chinua Achebe noted, the pamphlets were in many ways extensions of Hausa folktales and could not be written off, as some critics argued, merely as vestiges of Western influence. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that such a literature could only have begun in Onitsha…the original site of evangelical dialogue between proselytizing Christianity and Igbo religion.” In her recent book The Self-Help Compulsion, Harvard professor Beth Blum discusses the Onitsha Market pamphlets, among many other examples of self-help literature from around the world, in her effort to offer a more culturally specific and layered reading of the genre. Many people tend to write off self-help literature as little more than fodder for the worried well-off, and as Blum concedes, there is good reason to do so. Between books on self-actualization, speaking circuits for self-appointed life coaches, high-priced personal growth seminars, and corporate-sponsored self-care initiatives, the $10 billion a year industry can seem to be little more than, as she puts it, “a force…that fosters privatized solutions to systemic problems.” But as Blum shows, the genre actually originated in the literature of radical self-improvement societies and the collective do-it-yourself efforts of 19th century British anarchists and socialists. Long before the publication of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and Abigail Van Buren’s “Dear Abby” columns, working people were reading manifestos like George Jacob Holyoake’s 1857 Self-Help by the People, which urged readers to acquire new skills so that they might be of better service to others. As the genre moved away from these roots and embraced laissez-faire capitalism, Blum writes, it found an increasing number of detractors. The modernists, in particular, took great pains to distinguish their work from the genre, even mocking its instrumentalism with titles like Ezra Pound’s How to Read (1929). But for all of self-help’s faults, Blum wonders whether anything of value has been lost in the growing disdain for a practical literature that seeks to move us toward becoming better versions of ourselves. The self-help genre, she explains, fosters “a specific mode of reading” that values books as tools “for agency, use, well-being, and self-change” and that operates well outside academia or the rarefied world of the literati (in places like the Onitsha Market, for example). While the literature of advice and of cultivating personal fortitude has existed as long as the written word, from the Analects of Confucius to the writings of the Stoics, Blum dates the advent of modern self-help to mid-19th-century Britain. Self-help, she writes, may have reinforced the notion of self-sufficiency, but its impulse toward self-reliance also grew out of radical working-class organizations like labor cooperatives and mutual aid societies. In these settings, laborers held meetings to discuss ways of bettering themselves and looked to books like Self-Help by the People to learn skills that could benefit the community.
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