Why I stopped reading self-help and human development books….

Why I stopped reading self-help and human development books….

I’ve been a longtime fan of human development books and seminars. I’ve been reading and watching self-help books and courses since I was a teenager and until just a short period of time when it all started to change.

Just until recently I came to see that self-help (as the name implies) is that same person and only him who is able to help himself using his own free will and personal power.

The coincidence that started it all

I’ve started to get board of such books that I saw all of them repeating same words. It looked as if they were all agreed to some set of words that they all keep saying in all books and seminars.

It was like hearing the same old Bla, Bla, Bla…..
Just as a twist of fate when I saw that book that had a strange title and how it could help everyone to be better.

The brain that changes itself, Norman Doidge
I’ve been completely new to the subject. Although I’ve heard a lot before about how you can train your brain in the same way you train your muscles. 

That’s how you can enhance your skills and even change yourself.

The book started with many examples from patients who suffered from severe brain damage cases from injuries or comas that made them unable to do tasks that normal people can.

Even some other persons who have been born with brain damages that made them lack some skills. 

In all those cases mentioned in the book, the writer goes with how doctors have been able to deal with those cases who have been thought upon to be hopeless.

On the contrary, they dealt with them as people who need to be trained or as patients with muscle injuries that need some physical therapy and training for these muscles to get better with training.

At first, the book may seem as a book that gives hope to people who have seen those kind of injuries or suffered from them with someone close to them.

But for normal people who need to know about something as self-help it looked completely irrelevant.

Here comes the hypotheses, if people with severe brain damages can be trained to compensate for the skill their brains lack because of damage or injury then there must be a fact behind the old saying that the brain can be trained like a muscle.

Then I thought that this book may be implicitly saying that normal people can benefit from this virtue of the brain to make their lives better.

Practice makes perfect

And here comes the answer for me right after the first part of the book. While people think that learning might be just a thing like software that you can get easily and forget easily, it has been stated clearly that the brain can and does change itself thought every moment of all of our lives to optimize its tasks.

The continuous process of brain change through Neuroplasticity and Synaptic Plasticity is what makes the brain so dynamic and adaptive to whatever tasks it performs.

Even from the first attempt to do something your brain starts to figure out how to make it. Then as you repeat this process the brain also tries to master it by making more connections (synapses) involved with this specific task.

Then as you keep repeating this task comes the optimization stage that includes making those connections more efficient and reliable.

Just as and more better that electric circuits, brain connections become better at conducting signals at the correct speed, at the right time, to the specific destination and with the correct amplitude.

As you practice more of what you do, this process is enhanced inside your brain.
Physical skills, intellectual skills or even emotional skills all are dealt with same concept.

This means that the way you train your body to play tennis is just as the same way you train your brain to calculate mathematics and as the same way you train your emotions to feel positive or negative about something.

Trained to think negatively

Can you believe it? It means that if we train ourselves to think negatively we will master the skill to think that way all the time and be professionals at it.

On the other hand, of we train ourselves to think positively about things or even see them just as they are not worse than they are our lives can be better.

Neuroscience from a new perspective

When I came to read about another book that deals with skills from a self-help point of view but also mentions the concept of brain change through something called Myelination. 

That made it clear for me how the brain is able to change and what mechanisms can speed up that change and make it last for longer times.

Here is when Neuroscience had a whole new meaning for me. I found out that Neuroscience can be a major explanations to many questions I had in mind about whether those self-help speeches were true or false.

Neuroscience and top performance

After reading many books about top performance and how researchers studied people of rare talents, I found a major pattern in all these books.

We have been convinced that talent is the major element in human success in any area of life. 

This idea has been settled upon from early ages of humanity.

But only in the last couple of decades that scientists came to ask the same question about whether innate talent is the major factor related to success or not.

All those books had some ideas about innate talent and how it’s not the principle factor to success. Even in some cases talent come to be the reason of failure in life.

What these books state is the most important factor of success is deliberate practice. Practice can be viewed in the simplest form of repetition. 

While repetition only is not so important but what is more important is how your repetition looks like.

Deliberate practice means that you pay attention to whatever you do and make every time you do it to be better than before.

Practice is no so easy and fun that it also requires a lot of patience and will power to continue.

Here comes the secret that researchers come out with: talent is not important. 

The most important is free will and circumstance. Environment is more important than genes. Nurture is more important than Nature.

But where is the will power located in the Human Brain???????!!!!!

That's what I'm trying to figure out on the next days.

Don’t forget to check my books on Amazon. And live with passion

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