Tag: rules

Are all self help books the same?

I am a fan of self help books. I’ve even written a defense of them. So I was interested to read this, which says that every self-help book ever comes down to these rules:

1. Take one small step.
2. Change your mental maps.
3. Struggle is good. Scary is good.
4. Instant judgment is bad.
5. Remember the end of your life.
6. Be playful.
7. Be useful to others.
8. Perfectionism = procrastination
9. Sleep, exercise, eat, chill out. Repeat.
10. Write it all down.
11. You can’t get it all from reading.

I don’t agree. It’s true, you will find many of these rules in popular self-help books. But the best self-help books give you insights and ideas you won’t find elsewhere.

So yeah, if you pick up the latest self help book, some form of those 11 rules may be all that you get. But take some time and do some research and you’ll find some guides that can really help you with whatever you are dealing with.

Don’t give up. Get the help you need. Even if its self help.

Good rules for twitter use


There’s been some discussion of the pros and cons of twitter this week. From one of the pro pieces came these rules which I thought were pretty good:

Never check the site before 8am.

Mute anyone who is neither funny nor polite.

Mute notifications regularly.

Delete the app periodically.

Never assume anything is important just because it’s big on Twitter.

Never say in conversation, “As I recently tweeted”.

The pro piece is here: I’m a Twitter addict and I don’t care | Financial Times

(Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash)

Three sets of rules to help guide you

  1. Marcus Aurelius: 3 Rules For Life – Darius Foroux: a good set of rules to govern your life. Stoics and stoic wannabes, take note.
  2. Wells’s Rules, annotated – Macleans.ca: a good set of rules on governance. These are aimed at Canadian politics, but really can apply anywhere.
  3. A very simple rule – Austin Kleon: finally one simple rule which is where the top image comes from

My six month rule that destroys my negative certainty

Sometimes – ok, often – I will be down and despairing and I will strongly feel I will never be happy again. When I think that, I fall back on my six month rule.

For my six month rule, I think of the times in my life I’ve been happy and I picture that time. Then I picture the time six months earlier. In that earlier time, I think: could I have predicted that I would be happy six months later? The answer is no, I never could. Then I ask myself: is my ability to predict any better now? And the answer again is no. Then how can you predict you won’t be happy again in the future, I wonder? And I have to answer: I can’t. For me that is enough to break out of my negative fortune telling about the future.

Maybe I won’t be happy in six months. Maybe I will be worse. Who knows? I sure don’t. So I get in with things and hope and work for the best and I stop trying to predict the future and I stop letting this predictions determine the way I feel right now at this moment.