Success is a Choice Fire in the Belly Sacred Hoops Awaken the Giant Within To Be a Man: Letters to My Grandson PLUS:
|
Manly advice books these days come in varying testosterone levels. Dwight Garner straps on his reading jock and checks them out. Like a lot of guys I know, I have zero tolerance for the self-help industry and the sad weenies who buy into it. I can't help it. When I climb into someone's car and there's an eight-pack of Anthony Robbins or Barbara De Angelis cassettes rattling around on the floorboards where the Freedy Johnson and Lucinda Williams tapes ought to be, all my warning bells start a-clanging. I'm convinced I'm in the presence of either Biff Greedhead or someone who, at any moment, is likely to turn to me with a lunar grin and declaim: "Hey, man, strap on these black Nikes, have some punch and we'll wait here in my mini-van for Hale-Bopp to swing back around!" Either way, I want out. It's not fair to lump self-helpers in with cultoids. I know this. Yet it's hard not to notice that most self-help books, like most cults, do aspire to the level of religion. Read me carefully, their authors intone, voices heavy on the apostolic reverb, and I will show you the true path. Want a promotion? Better sex? Respect from your peers? Follow me and we'll go there together. The threat of quitting these programs in midstream is like the threat of quitting Rogain: You're back to square one, and that spiritual bald patch is beginning to take over your inner rain forest. There is a funny flip side to my mistrust of the self-help industry, however. Like a lot of atheists, I secretly want to believe. My life is fucked up in a number of minor ways that don't seem beyond repair, and when I'm reading self-help books -- usually after an editor orders me to write a piece like this one -- I often find myself genuinely (and humiliatingly) jazzed by them. I catch myself taking their advice and making little goal-oriented lists for myself: Write that novel! Exercise, you tub of lard! Call your poor Aunt Doofus in Ohio more often! Quit sleeping till noon! Don't whack off so goddamn much! This enthusiasm lasts about a day. By then I've sunk back into a slough of despond and have ordered enough greasy Chinese take-out to medicate myself into the millennium. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - > NEXT PAGE | Learning to kick ass "sensitively" |
