Most Common Advice in Self-Help Material
If you get advice from, say, Bear Grylls, it’s probably valuable advice. But if you get the same advice from Bear Grylls, the Dalaï Lama, Bill Gates and 6 dead philosophers, it has to be some important piece of wisdom.
Over years of self-help material consumption, I’ve noticed some advice keeps on being repeated in various forms by various people. I assume there is value in those messages and I’ll try to distill that advice in this slick listicle, with my own little twist on them.
1- Have a routine
What a boring start, right? Yet I’ve read and heard about the virtues of having a routine from many thought leaders over and over again.
We tend to associate “routine” with “boring life”. For instance, what better way to kill romance than a routine? But we all need some kind of routine to be performant and healthy. So much that we usually fall into one if we don’t intentionally create our own. Hence, the couple who routinely goes on a date every month might not be worse off than the couple who hopes that they will make their relationship exciting by planning nothing.
I’m paraphrasing Scott Smith from Motivation to Move here: having a routine does not mean you cannot be spontaneous, in fact, why not plan to be spontaneous? Literally have blocks of time labelled as…
