I find it particularly difficult to engage with self-help guides. I blame my year 12 English teacher for making us study You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation as a core text (more like bore text, amirite?), and also the subliminal connection I draw between Dr Phil and wasting endless days of unemployment at home in front of the TV. To me, self-help has always seemed the most bourgeois form of pop psychology: stripped bare of any real root in science, and watered-down to make us all feel a little bit better about being shit at living effectively.
Yeah, it hurt falling off that high horse, but boy, did it hurt good. Rob Hanly’s ADDUCATION: Living the ADD Lifestyle is self-help at its best: motivational, not pretentious, and full of tips that are actually practicable and allow you to, y’know, help yourself. Hanly describes the site as “the first education resource for mature ADD people who choose to improve their life.” But there’s more to it: chronic procrastinators (who don’t necessarily have ADD) like me will find a new perspective on time-management and self-control, particularly on how to turn flashes of inspiration into reality.
I’m far from running out and booking myself into a Tony Robbins seminar (seriously, would that guy just please gtfo?), but now I’m fairly confident I won’t find myself playing SPORE when I should be doing something productive.
Maybe.
