Self-Help Peaked With “Just Do It”
He was right, you know. You know he’s right. All you have to do is It. Just do it. Do it already!
I’ve read a ton of self-help in the past decade. I always thought it would help, but it didn’t. When I read the famous How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie I thought for sure I was going to kill it with interpersonal relationships. Then nothing happened. It turned out a lot of my personal scenarios and circumstances didn’t call for any technique at all, simple basic human respect sufficed. Also, Carnegie’s stuff didn’t seem to matter on the internet. I never see any big popular people being kind in any way. They are usually shooing people away like flies. Self-help motivators don’t give an eff about people, they openly insult people as motivation.
Then, when you do try to get the other person to talk more (online, that is) they ignore you completely. If you do get a response it’s typically short and also the end of the conversation. People are oversaturated with conversation and content, they don’t have time to interact, especially not with a nobody like you.
Then I read Tony Robbin’s Awaken the Giant Within. It was a bunch of mindset gobbledygook. Make decisions, focus on where you want to be, avoid pain, seek pleasure, corrupt your bad memories of things, change your emotions through physical action. I even made an earnest effort to follow this book, thinking, this time I will get ahead in life. Nothing came of it. Literally nothing. It didn’t matter what I did, I kept failing to secure a better job, which was all I needed at the time.
In the next part of my journey I sought out books on how to get a better job. There were none. The closest I could get was Ramit Sethi’s Dream Job course, but that cost thousands of dollars which I didn’t have. I looked up everything I possibly could on how to build a resume and pivot to a new career (I even read the book Pivot). Again, nothing came of it, it turns out every single resume and cover letter advice was “word these three jobs you’ve already had with 15 years of relevant experience this way to get a similar but better paying job in the same career.” I couldn’t find anything on how to get out of the minimum-wage job hellscape.
Nor could I find anything on how to be a better worker, someone who could excel over others in their workspace, so they can at least move up into a team lead position. I was competent and worked hard at each of my jobs, but so did a bunch of other people. One place I left because almost everyone there was gunning for the next position up and the competition was fierce, to make an extra buck an hour. Some of the people who were already one step up were leaps and bounds ahead of me in their experience and commitment to the job. I wasn’t willing to spend years to have a mere chance at promotion at a pay-the-bills job I hated.
I’ve read loads of people talk about making money online writing. I’ve published 62 articles on Medium. I’ve made maybe $20–40 dollars, I forget how little. Now I’m not even able to make a dime because I need 80 more followers to get anything. Then there’s this, below…
That was the reality of my last several payments from Medium. I make more money walking around a parking lot picking up fallen change. A lot more.
Then I tried this program, Proofed. I paid some few hundred to join this program that taught you to proofread but the payoff would be that you would definitely be hired to Proofed after completing the program. I completed the program, I couldn’t wait to start making real money, about $20/hr at home proofreading documents. Then I found out your first 10 proofreads were combed over by an experienced editor, that was very nerve-wracking because they basically said if you weren’t up to their standards you were out. Fired. That was a lot of pressure and I could feel my heart pounding every time an article appeared in the queue. I would take hours proofreading documents only for my feedback to be pretty bad. I kept missing things or not following the instructions correctly. After a few documents I gave up. Not just because of my intense fear of failure, but because there was no queue of documents. Every time I looked at the queue there was nothing. Nothing at all. As soon as something would pop up it would disappear within seconds. I foolishly made assumptions and assumed the queue would always be full of stuff and my goal was to get good by doing a lot of proofreading and then grind my way through as many documents as I could in a few hours then chill. Instead, you had to be on alert and waiting for hours to get even one document, and because most of the documents were from Asia, they were submitted while I was asleep. I was in the wrong time zone for any of this.
It was with a heavy heart and a strong feeling of being scammed that I gave up on my shiny sexy remote proofreading job. Everything else in this online sphere of making money writing has been ridiculous, like Textbroker. I found that my personal standards were much too high to write for others, I couldn’t shake the feeling that what I was submitting wasn’t good enough. I also had to do a lot of research and reading for every small article. It quickly became boring, tedious, and stressful because it turned out I couldn’t handle the feeling of not living up to some standard.
The same happened when I tried working for Shipt. That should have been pretty easy. You drive to the store, shop the items for a person, then drop them off at their house. What could go wrong? I found I really didn’t like it when I couldn’t find the item and had to text the shopper if they wanted something else. I even had to make an executive decision to grab an alternative for the shopper because I was losing a lot of time waiting for them to respond. It was stressful, I realized I couldn’t pick the items super fast and do multiple orders per hour. There was a guy I noticed who had been doing it for months, this Shipt. He was doing well, seemingly, I’d see him (I was working at Target at the time) all day long, putting in 8 hour shifts running Shipt orders. You know what he’s doing now? He works at Target, in guest services. Shipt clearly wasn’t any better.
I moved on from things with poor returns. There’s a reason why people want a job and not a gig, because a job pays right away, gigs can take years to pay, like Real Estate, where you often have to have a spouse support you until you start making a profit. The more I would dig for money making things the less I found, and I also don’t want to file dozens of W4s for my taxes. I want my taxes to be as painless as possible, and with freelance work you could be making next to nothing and ready to pay any taxes, let alone pay taxes quarterly.
The more I learned, the more I dived deep into things, the less I trusted everyone. Look, I just want a decent job, I don’t want to make a living writing, I don’t want to make a living hustling, or being an entrepreneur (I tried that too, had my own dropship “business” that made an average of $30 a month). I wanted something secure, which I feel most people want. I want moderate success with some room for growth before I go for the big leagues, but most people only promise the big leagues but all they are doing is selling you good feelings.
Good feelings don’t pay bills. I’ve read guys talk about killing it with this or that hustle they were doing, and these are just the money guys, there’s loads of others who are selling you their workout programs and trying to get you to join a gym. Why should I join a gym if I can’t even get myself to do pushups in my room? I had been working out lifting weights most of my life and I never looked anything like your typical gymbro, because I never did gear. I get that guys can be very fit by working out, some guys genetically have the “it” factor, but so many dudes are taking extra testosterone, girls too. Then they always leave that out when they talk about getting in shape. Bodybuilders can eat like garbage they take so much testosterone. It’s all a farce.
Self-help peaked at “Just Do It” by Shia Lebouf. It’s all that matters. No amount of fancy strategy will make any difference. No mind-tricks will help. You simply have to do it. For me, that means coding every day. there isn’t any trick other than doing it every day. It’s the same for working out, you have to do it every day. If you want to beat Super Mario Bros., guess what? You have to play every day until you beat it. There’s no trick or strategy that will help you beat mario bros in a day. Stuff takes time. I read a thing that MrBeast, the Youtuber, once studied Youtube algorithms for 100 days straight. He is a highly motivated guy who is doing what he loves, and it still took him a long time figure things out. But I bet if any of us could study a single thing for 100 days consecutively we’d learn something.
But you have all of these self-help people trying to get people to go from fat to fit, from $0 to $1000’s a month, from a nobody who can’t code to working for a FAANG for six-figures. It’s all nonsense. There’s no comprehensive program, there’s no help, there’s no measurable goal. I want to see the programs of “From flab to slightly less flab.” “From 200 lbs at 5'11” to 196 lbs, in 2 weeks.” “From 0$ to $5 in 3 months.” (That’s all I wanted from Medium, for it to pay for itself while I wrote and figured it out, but it couldn’t even do that.) “How to comb your hair.” “How to write a resume to get out of your minimum-wage job slump.” “How to love yourself.” And on and on.
Tiny programs. Baby-step programs. That’s what people need. Why? Because they can’t “just do it”. There may have been a time when they did it, but it probably didn’t work out, why should doing it again be any different? I had a thought a long time ago that I’d like to find people who were slightly better than me and copy them, then when I reached their level, find different people who were slightly better and copy them, and continue repeating that pattern. The problem was finding anyone at all and trying to figure out how they got to where they were. Sometimes some people simply don’t get sick as often, or they don’t have trouble with food, or sleep, or they had better relationships with their parents, or they never had a lot of self-doubt to overcome to begin with, and all the rest. We all have unique lives, micro-scale circumstances that makes everything for us different. I can never find anything about busy dads pivoting their life. Usually anything I find I learn the person was fearless anyway and would surely succeed at something, like the time I read about a guy who lost his job, became a mortgage agent, and spent his first days knocking on every door in his area offering to refinance people. I, too, trained to become a mortgage agent and somehow got a broker over me, but I was so broke I couldn’t even print flyers and I definitely didn’t have the guts to knock on doors.
Until someone comes up with something radically different, “Just Do IT” is the peak of self-help. Because if someone starts something and keeps at it, something good may happen, hence DOING IT works. The person doing it will figure it out as they go along, so long as they keep doing it. For the rest of humanity that can’t simply do it, they need something else, something clearer, conciser, safer, less risky, less scammy, less of a rip-off trying to take advantage of desperate people.
