The Best Self-Help is Free: Avoiding Futile Endeavors

We humans are creatures of limited abilities. The limits of our abilities can and do expand, of course, and there is no universal law that states that our abilities will never reach certain levels. However, we are still limited at any given moment in time, and our abilities can only expand so quickly. It is essential to take this into account when deciding what projects and endeavors to undertake.

After all, it is much easier to think of a desired state of affairs than to actually enable that state of affairs to come to pass. Furthermore, there are numerous desirable states of affairs that you simply cannot attain, no matter how hard you work, given your present limitations. Having an accurate understanding of what these appealing but currently unattainable goals are is essential to prevent huge amounts of wasted time. Moreover, it is vital to your equanimity and good self-image.

If there is anything I have learned about human self-esteem, it is this. Self-esteem functions according to a positive loop. Successes bolster a person's self-image and inspire him to pursue further accomplishments. Because the person is confident and in control of himself during the pursuit, he is more likely to succeed than if he were distraught and plagued with doubts of an existential, rather than of a practical sort. On the other hand, failures bring down a person's self-image and lead to him to emotionally identify with his own insufficiency. Thus, failures serve to demotivate him from pursuing further ambitious endeavors. Moreover, if he does pursue further endeavors, he will be unsure not only about the practical details of accomplishing his goal - which is reasonable and healthy - but also about his own existential fitness for attaining it.

It is never good to harbor any existential doubts or anxieties. It is futile to ask oneself why one exists or whether it is a good thing that one exists or whether one was meant for this or that or the other purpose. You exist. Deal with it. There is no point in questioning or lamenting your very being; it will only bring upon you undue stress and make your life much more difficult than it otherwise would have been. However, it is also extremely difficult for even a highly sane and rational individual to avoid existential anxieties if he has been beset by a string of failures that came upon him despite his best efforts. Therefore, it is vital to preempt as many failures as possible by simply refusing to be put in a situation where you will fail irrespective of how hard you try.

In order to avoid futile endeavors, you need to have a good understanding of your own abilities as well as your weaknesses. Reflection and introspection into such matters might help, but the best way to obtain an accurate understanding of what you can and cannot do is by precedent. Examine your most recent accomplishments, what it took to attain them, and what your rewards were. Next time, try a task that is just a bit more challenging or more ambitious. The only genuinely sustainable progress can be obtained incrementally. Do not lament your current level of ability, no matter how absolutely low it might be or how unfavorably it might compare to the attributes of other people. Those are not the relevant criteria for evaluating your life. Rather, you should only compare your present state to your past states and then endeavor to produce future states superior to both the past and the present.

Whether you are trying to learn a skill, get into good physical shape, make large sums of money, rise in your career, write a book, or develop a new product, you cannot do it right away. The task is likely too big for you to even encompass all of it with your mind. If you try to accomplish all of it at once or insist that your goal is simply to overcome this singular big challenge, you will fail - because a task that is too large for your mind to handle will certainly be too challenging for your mind and body to overcome in any small time interval. But if you simply decide that you will move in the desired direction in small, manageable increments, then you will have no problem following through and eventually accomplishing impressive goals. In the meantime, it is the direction of your movement that must provide your primary satisfaction - especially for goals remote in time. If you are moving by increments in the right direction, then your life is continually becoming better than it has ever been. That should be enough to satisfy anybody.

Of course, we do face tremendous existential problems. Our very mortality - if we are honest with ourselves - should frighten us like nothing else. There are merciless deadlines for overcoming these problems, as once you are dead, you have no more chances. One might be tempted to think that, in the face of such dreary prospects, we need to undertake the most ambitious possible tasks as fast as we can, or else we will run out of time. And yet the incremental approach to virtually everything in life is still the most effective. Permit me to explain.

Currently and throughout all of human history, so much human energy and potential has been simply wasted due to a variety of factors. From sheer laziness, many people do absolutely nothing with much of their time; quite a few have not even learned how to enjoy themselves efficiently!

On the other hand, the utopian zeal of many others leads them to undertake personal or political revolutions that destroy much that was good about the old order the revolutionaries wanted to overthrow or reform. Virtually every political revolution (with the possible exception of the American Revolution, which was largely a conservative attempt to institutionalize the natural rights that the colonists had been used to having in practice for almost a century prior) has set the society in which it occurred back for decades and led to far more grievous problems than those it purported to solve. Virtually every personal revolution has likewise left lives, families, and friendships in shambles.

The superstitions of many lead them to waste their energy in pursuits that bring them no material gain whatsoever and often impoverish them. Throughout history, alchemy, astrology, divination, and many forms of religion have led people to a wrong understanding of cause and effect. At best, these superstitions lead people to perform silly, time-consuming, but otherwise innocuous actions. At worst, they lead to a horrendous toll in human lives - as evidenced by the Aztec superstition that the sun god Huitzilopochtli required a sacrifice of human hearts in order to rise every morning. Many modern superstitions - such as organic foods, feng shui, psychoanalysis, horoscopes, and the majority of paid self-help advice, are mostly rather ludicrous wastes of time and money but do not substantially hurt anyone except their practitioners. On the other hand, a much more destructive breed of superstitions - including socialism, communitarianism, military conscription, "deep" ecology, anthropogenic global warming, and religious fanaticism of all stripes - have resulted in millions of deaths and have held back human progress and flourishing in many societies. Many of these superstitions are pursued zealously by their adherents, who - if they did nothing at all - would have produced a far better world than the one left in the wake of their incessant barrage of regulations, prohibitions, compulsions, expropriations, and outright murder.

Likewise, the ignorance of many people leads them to hold a simplistic or insufficient understanding of how positive change might be accomplished. These people, unlike the utopians or the superstitious, are neither overly zealous nor deluded, and many of them have the best intentions. But since they do not have an adequate knowledge of the way the world and even their own lives work, many of their endeavors end without accomplishing the intended results. Perhaps they plunged into a task without acquiring the knowledge necessary to accomplish it beforehand. Perhaps they simply did not think matters through and thus overlooked vital factors. Typically, simply communicating the requisite information to these people works to remove many of the inhibitions on their success. To some extent, all of us are ignorant of important information, but to different degrees. The wisest of us know where and how we are ignorant and actively seek out knowledge to remedy such deficiencies.

And, of course, all too many people have become discouraged by their previous failures and disappointments. Therefore, even though they are largely aware of beneficial courses of actions and have the ability to undertake them, they do not do so because of unnecessary mental inhibitions and an unjustifiably low self-image. Typically, such discouragement comes from having tried some kind of revolutionary personal and social reforms and having failed miserably as a result.

An incremental approach largely devoid of laziness, utopianism, superstitions, ignorance, and discouragement will avoid most of the common pitfalls of human action. It has virtually no downsides and a potentially indefinite upside - when its long-term implications are considered. If most people followed an incremental approach to improving their lives, the technological, economic, scientific, esthetic, and moral condition of humanity would be greatly preferable to what it is at present.

Of course, you have little, if any, control over what other people do. Your only real choice is the course of action that you pursue. Thus, the best option available to you is to avoid futile endeavors and incrementally expand your range of skills, possessions, and accomplishments in the most effective ways known to you. By doing so, you might also indirectly influence others to follow your example. In this manner, the most reliable progress against death and decay can be made - since all of the available assets in this most essential struggle will be preserved, and new ones will be continually added to the human arsenal.

Read all chapters of The Best Self-Help is Free.