Hi all! I'm going to do a little creative writing tonight and tomorrow poking some (well-meaning) fun at the Self-Help Industry. I'm making a list of tropes, realities, and cliches to mock. I've thought of a few but could use some more. Here's what I've come up with so far: - Self-help authors, especially those who teach on emotional balance and enlightened spirituality being an emotional mess in their personal life. - Similarly, personal finance gurus whose money situation is in shambles. - Publishers and imprints with a reputation for their profound books but that utilize cut-throat tactics to generate book sales by any means. - Authors who pose at those disconnected from results and material success but who shamelessly seek publicity and a following at any costs. Thanks for dialoguing.
Anything that contains a sentimental, life-affirming, inspiration quote. I came to your book/website/blog for practical advice, not to have a lifestyle mentality chucked at me that belongs in a schmaltzy rom-com.
I did an outline for a self help book once: It was called Shut up and Deal with It. Chapter 1: Shut Up. Chapter 2: Nobody Cares. Chapter 3: You're not Special. Chapter 4: You don't Deserve Anything. Chapter 5: Your Opinions don't Matter. Chapter 6: Stop Blaming Society. Don't remember the rest, but you get the idea.
My favorite example of this is the guy Greg Kinnear plays in Little Miss Sunshine (one of my top ten favorite films). He promotes his self-help stuff and it all just falls apart.
The idiots who have a "hook" and no training but people flock to buy their stuff like a bunch of lemmings. John Gray, Ph.D. - his "Ph.D" is from a mail order university apparently but his "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" books have sold millions of copies. My understanding is that Dr. Phil has similar "training." Gee, I wonder why I went to university for a degree in social work? Scott
Nah, Dr. Phil is the real deal. He has a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of North Texas.
"New York Times Bestseller". (Excuse me while I cringe.) It is a meaningless award for any written trash that happens to sell well, so it is kinda crap anymore. (Seriously, how many books that have come out in the last 10 years that got the NYTB that you would actually want to read?) This is brilliant, just write a book and then do this: Dr. PHD Expert (Author Name) Esquire (Not like anyone will really check anyways.)
Oh? News to me.... Maybe I'm thinking about Jerry Springer? If Dr. Phil is the real deal, then Jerry Springer has to be the fake.
While I agree it would probably drive sales, I think it's a type of fraud and it's not something I want to do. That said, if I *KNEW* for a fact that including "Ph.D." after my name would get me to hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit.........well, I guess I'm going over to the dark side! I need the money, sorry, light side!
Oh oh oh, I've got one, I've got one. Self-help books on diet. The ones that insist if you eat peanut butter and pickle sandwiches three times a day for two months, and don't eat anything else, your cancer and arthritis will be gone. The writer always has all sorts of kudos attached to his or her name to prove that he/she 'knows her stuff.' These damn 'miracle health/diet/cure' things ABOUND ...and are responsible for stupid 'health' crazes (like the Atkins diet, the grapefruit diet, etc) that either do harm or simply don't work. Or they promote miracle—but largely unobtainable and highly expensive—foods, like goji berries and snail shell smoothies, or the like. These authors sell to the gullible and/or the desperate. I have a friend who is ALWAYS messaging me with the latest craze. It doesn't matter how often these things fall short of expectation, she will not give up. Catering for her latest health craze whenever she visits me is a pain in the arse. Because she's a good friend, I've tried to follow along. But trying to concoct two good meals using the 'food combining' theory took days of planning. When I brought this incident up to her recently (it happened a couple of years ago) using it to reinforce the point that I won't pander to this sort of thing any more, her indignant reply was: "But I wasn't ON that diet for very long." I know. That. Is. My. Point.
The talk about Magnolia made me realize, Paul Thomas Anderson also directed The Master, about L Ron Hubbard, creator of Dianetics and Scientology (and of course Magnolia starred his most prominent follower Tom Cruise). Another scam artist / con man cashing in on people's insecurities and desire to follow a charismatic leader, even if that leader has no clue. This is exactly what politicians and salesman are. As long as they radiate confidence and seem to know what they're talking about, there will be no shortage of followers—most of them rather deficient in logic and reasoning skills. So, in other words, the great unwashed masses of the majority.
Huh...the worst self-help writer stuff I've found tends to be a lack of real content. Like they'll focus on maybe grammar stuff or personal stories rather than concrete information. Or they'll get really stuck on one idea and think that all writers have to do that thing -- like in one book, where one author said that it's important to name your character before you use them, or that all characters are pretty much caricatures and you have to exaggerate their characteristics for the reader to get it. I'd like to think readers aren't so stupid. Probably my biggest issue is when I buy a book specifically "for writers" when really it's a shallow overview of a given topic, printed cheaply. Like this one gun book for writers (I forget the title) where it's just an overview of certain specific weapons. I wanted to know a bit more about guns so that I could make up my own for sci fi purposes, and really when you're researching something specific, it's important to read something that will tell you the things you don't realize you don't know. In the book Field and Stream Total Gun Manual, it helped a lot, talking about the differences between wider and narrower barrels, and what ammo to use on which animal you hunt. Did you know it's illegal in the US to hunt waterfowl with lead shot? That the scariest animal to hunt in Africa is the elephant because it's the smartest? In short, if you need to research something, get a book where the author expects you to participate in whatever you're researching. Don't get a book for noobs or "for writers."
Oh, I don't know. I bought a couple satirical self helps in the past. Though I suppose that doesn't mean they were exceptionally popular. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000XU4UBC https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XG48FGL Some of the first books I ever bought on Amazon Kindle! Along with The Wisdom of Psychopaths apparently but lets not get into that... As far as the original question: I recently tried listening to Girl, Wash Your Face... judgmental rich girl explains how everything came easy for her and you should follow in her footsteps. Just look at some of the top reviews: https://www.amazon.com/Rachel-Hollis-ebook/dp/B072TMB75T
Firearms books for writers are all pretty much written by people who know more about writing than firearms... I've seen two where they confuse carbine rifles and submachine guns and don't lets even start on clips vs magazines... i was in the process of writing one before the pandemic started but it got back burnered due to work pressure. Incidentally i'd have said the scariest thing to hunt in Africa (with the exception of man) would be buffalo... i don't hunt big game though so i could be wrong about that
This is true, they are faster than a man on land and in the water.... so if you ever compete against one in a triathalon, make sure you make up time on the cycling However from a hunting perspective they'd fall reasonably easily to a large calibre (or so Muldoon, Corbett etc say... I'd not shoot one now, they're endangered)... buffalo have very hard heads so it isnt guaranteed that even a 45-70 will drop them in a frontal head shot, meaning you have to hit the heart before they charge at you. Also they tend to hang out in the tall grass at the river margins, so if you go in after them you may have very little time to react,
The book also mentioned the cape buffalo, about how you need a bullet that can pierce its thick skin but then expand, so that it doesn't go all the way through and hit a second buffalo that you might not realize you hit and will subsequently come after you. However, the book said that the only person the author had heard of being killed by an animal on the hunt was an elephant, and also the only hunter he knew that was afraid of an animal was afraid of an elephant. I forget why -- I borrowed the book once and then purchased a copy for my dad, so I don't own one at the moment (which will be rectified at some point). But yeah, buffalo are pretty scary, too. Oh and if anyone needs to study space, get a magazine for telescope owners. Those will tell you for real information.
Not entirely OT, but books on writing that are actually an autobiography with a bunch of random quotes and some lukewarm advice. I mean, I do enjoy insight into a writer's life and what they consider useful advice, but not when most of the book is just the writer talking about how they married an editor or talked to their publisher father and auto-magically became a published author. And their advice is usually garbage, also.
Programmers are always plagued by people trying to sell you self-help books in disguise, because you have to learn from someone and they all want to preach their way of doing it. When they see a way to make more profit using false promises, they begin holding conventions targeting bosses who have the most influence over decisions and the least practice in what actually works. Arcane knowledge from the prophets After the Java programming language popularized the idea of using object orientation for all software development, the cult of object orientation was loosely formed. The followers believed that object oriented programming was easy and they were just bad programmers if they couldn't make it work. Anyone questioning the sanity of using the same tool for all problems was mocked as a terrible programmer. Instead of offering straight answers to how the problems should be solved, masters of the arcane scolded beginners for not knowing "proper object orientation". They simply had to devote their careers to the divine teachings and buy more books about object oriented design patterns. Persecution and shame Anyone wanting to get a job would have to lie and say that they loved object orientation. I was even refused a job because I told the truth. If you got the job, you were pressured to write your math formula as "(x.+(1).sin()).-(y)" instead of "sin(x + 1) - y" even though it only made the math harder to read. Blasphemy against the church Then the game industry's biggest legend John Carmack told people to use a performance optimized style of functional programming with return by reference. People who had never even tried the old ways of programming found it to greatly improve their code. Then came the final nail in the coffin when multi-threading could not be properly implemented in Object Orientation. The workaround with synchronization locks everywhere killed performance, caused complex dead-locks and made the code completely non-modular. The bugs piled up until most developers either gave up on object orientation or went bankrupt. The emperor is naked After many programmers had tried to master object orientation for a decade and discovered that it was all lies, the people who had touted it as a silver bullet went into hiding. Converted programmers are still writing blogs about how they are ashamed of what they wrote before. Almost identical to how SS soldiers talked about their war crimes. New generation of programmers, new heights of stupidity: * Continuous Integration (Why bother testing manually when we can ship untested code more frequently?) * Soft Tabbing (Why press tab once when you can hit space until your arm goes numb and constantly count columns until you have migraine?) * Web front-ends (Why use plain HTML and URL to display the news, when you can fetch a text document dynamically from SQL inside an application emulated on a pile of broken languages over JavaScript that comes with third-party malware from unknown sources that you stole from some Russian site?) * Web-applications (Why bother learning a platform's conventions when you can use broken web frameworks to make native applications as browsers wrapped around a single web-site?)
Oh wow. Is this some kind of prank? Less than an hour ago, I saw this: Now, one of the things that so-called self-help is the 'do your research!' bullshit. In other words, their thoughts and beliefs go against the grain of modern society, and are backed by anecdotes, blog posts, and facebook pages. The biggest problem with this is that a one-month search through NCBI and the internet isn't the match of several decades worth of study. And yet, the anti-intellectualism basically tells them that they're right. Words like mother's intuition and 'your body knows that something is wrong'. One of the worst part of self-help, is in my opinion, the law of attraction and 'The Secret'. If you watch Oprah, you might understand it. Basically its 'want it, visualize it, and then you'll get it'. Basically its weaponized wishful thinking, that if you want something and think about it, you'll get it. Oprah said that it got her the job which gave her stardom. Which of course, gives an ugly other side who don't succeed. Starve to death? You probably never wanted that food enough. Child died of cancer? Well, you didn't beg hard enough. Must have been the negative vibrations. And so on and so forth.
Cape Buffalo are generally regarded as the most dangerous of the Big Five (which includes elephant, lion, leopard, and rhino). Since most people go to Africa after game, Cape Buffalo usually gets top billing. By the numbers, hippos cause more fatalities - but since most don't consider them a viable game animal they don't tend to get the spotlight.
