Sometimes I wonder about the self-help industry.

Okay, I recognize that I play a small part in the industry by writing in this blog, but I can’t help but feel a little bit critical of “self-help” when I stumble upon titles like  “The Power of Negative Thinking.” Yes, this is a book title, and I saw it on the shelf at Chapters.

Titles and products from this industry apparently bring in $10 billion a year right now (according to Psychology Today), and it sort of makes you wonder. I’m a self-professed self help junky, but the first 5 or 6 books I read made virtually no difference at all. Nothing I read, no matter how inspirational, had any sort of an impact on me. Even when I did the exercises. Although I’ve accomplished a good amount in a short amount of time, I don’t know that I’m necessarily happier by virtue of having absorbed somewhere around twenty self-help books in the last two years.

And now I read more self-help than ever before. I spend a good portion of my week days editing the work of self-help writers, and I’ve come to the conclusion that they all seem to provide the same thing. Lists.

Numbered lists are popular. They get a lot of traffic.  Many of our authors know that the secret to the self-help junky’s heart is to provide a LONG list of things that you should be doing everyday. The most obvious culprits come up first of course; things like meditation, exercise, mantra, gratitude journals, journalLing are always popular to didactically recommend. And then some new friends will join the pack. If I attempted to do every single practice that I’ve ever been told to do in the mornings, I wouldn’t leave my home until 5pm. I could spend my life trying to get through the perfect morning routine if I wanted to. Add the perfect night routine onto that, and good luck getting anything productive done beyond preparation.

Then there’s the guilt. The guilt that comes when you don’t do something perfectly. The guilt that comes when you can only find two things to be grateful for instead of three, when you get to the second last day of Insanity and then get a muscle spasm (as has just happened to me). If I was completely insane, I would force myself to workout through the pain and risk a more serious injury. But I’m not insane.

It seems that self-help books cater to the star approach. They cater to A types (like me) who obsess over getting everything perfect so that they can put a gold star on their agenda at the end of the day. The lie is that your success in self-help and your success in happiness are positively correlated. They’re not.

Over the last few years, I’ve listened to a plethora of interviews with artists and entrepreneurs whom I admire who speak about a book or a quote that changed their lives. I wonder if my obsessive absorption of self-help is related to my need to find the book or quote that will change my life. But I think that I may have neglected something important. Yes, despite everything I’ve said I do think that self-help has the potential to change your life, but only because the good ones have the ability to open your eyes to new paradigms you didn’t previously know exist.

With acting, the mantra that you’re constantly told is “do the work and then let it go.” I’ve heard it so much that it now plays as a relentless soundtrack in the back of my mind. As annoying as it is to be told to “let go,” I think that the same principles that I’ve been taught in acting also apply to self improvement.

Let’s assume for a moment that happiness is a craft.

I would hazard a guess that there are almost as many schools, workshops and books for writers, actors, illustrators and musicians as there are for happiness and success. In Monsters University, Mike Wazowski obsessively reads every book on scaring that he can get his hands on… and yet he still fails to be truly successful. Anyone else relate? While backstage of a play that I did in October, I was asked by one of my fellow cast members why I wanted to be an actor. I responded that I wanted to be an actor because of the magic that existed in the craft. That magic that I spoke of exists in all of the crafts, and it’s something that cannot be taught in a book. That similar magic exists in the craft of happiness. 

And so it seems that there is no perfect regime or habit that will make you happy. Just as an individual who has never read a single acting book can win an oscar, someone who has never completed a single gratitude journal has the potential to live a profoundly joyful life. These books will pave the way by helping you to see the world in a different way, but simply doing the exercises and crossing them off your list won’t make you happy.

It’s the people who break the rules who are the most successful, because they’re the ones who know that: “if one hundred percent of the movie bigshots in Hollywood told me I couldn’t make it to the top, I wouldn’t believe them” (Marilyn Monroe). It is the rule breakers who understand that they have the ability to be successful and to be happy without the achievement of a gold star from an author who, in all likelihood, probably doesn’t even follow their own advice.

Let’s face it, many of us spend a lot of time being exceptionally hypocritical, and the happiest and most successful people seem to be the ones who follow the beat of their own drums and do the things that make them feel good. So, if you feel happiest when breaking every rule that every expert ever maintained as the irrefutable key to everything. Then do that.