The Only 12 Lessons Buried In Every Self-Help Book - Spencer Greenberg - #1161

Chris Williamson (0:00)

You researched nearly 500 self-improvement strategies. What did you learn?

Spencer Greenberg (0:05)

Yeah. So my co-author Jeremy and Stevenson and I, we had this crazy project where we're like, what if we could gather all the good stuff in self-improvement and try to cram it down into one book? But there's a big problem with that, which is there's so much stuff, how could you possibly make sense of it all? So our idea was, can we find the underlying psychological drivers behind each of the self-improvement techniques?

So once we've gone through over 100 self-improvement books and over 20 types of therapy and taken out every method that they had, we asked ourselves for each one, what is the psychological method behind it? Much to our surprise, we were able to boil down to just 12 levers, which is these 12 underlying psychological strategies, and that's the name of our book, 12 levers.

Chris Williamson (0:46)

Why do you think so many people have become so disillusioned with self-help?

Spencer Greenberg (0:51)

I think one of the problems is that they're taught that there's a silver bullet. Someone has some new, cool idea, and they say, this thing is going to solve your problem, and often the author says, I used to be like you, I can relate to you, but look, I turned my life around and look how great I am now.

The reality is, there isn't one silver bullet that works for all people at all times. There are some really, really good methods, but even the best methods, they're contextual. You have to use them on the right person at the right time, and it may not be the first method you use that's actually going to solve your problem.

Chris Williamson (1:23)

What's been interesting to me, working with doctors and working on health and stuff like that since I moved to America, every single specialist has, and these are the teachers, not even the students, who are maybe even more fervent or ardent about whatever the thing is that saved them. Every single person, the sleep guy has a story about how someone started using CPAP and went from being a brain foggy mess into a superstar and he went on to become a millionaire and all of this great stuff happened to him. Or the nutrition people will tell you about how someone was allergic to blue 40 and peanut butter and seed oils and they cleaned their diet up and it totally transformed them and now they're an Olympian bodybuilder or something.

For every single strategy, there is an outlier success story and those people, if you went to them and you were to say, hey man, like my health is not feeling too good or I want to be a bit more productive and they go, dude, I've got the strategy. And it's weird because those people, it's quite easy to accuse them of being like grifters or overzealous or over selling what the strategy can achieve. But no, what you're doing by a process of selection, like by selection bias, self-selection bias, you are seeking out people that are hyper responders to that particular strategy. And they are telling you, sometimes they're lying, but a lot of the time they're just telling you their real experience. This is actually what happened to me or this is exactly what happened for a client of mine. And then if you embark on this, but it's the wrong context, the wrong time, you don't apply it right, it's not right for your physiology or psychology or particular situation or whatever. You're like, well, this is bullshit. You lied to me about what it does for you. And it's like, no, no, no, no. It is right for the right person at the right time applied in the right way. And that the idiosyncratic nature of any intervention is why blanket coverage advice is probably bullshit.

Spencer Greenberg (3:15)

You know, if you look at lists of cognitive biases, you'll see there's over a hundred of them. But I've been thinking about recently, what are the ones that the smartest people fall for? And I think this is one of the smartest people fall for. They find something that was genuinely life-changing, like truly life-changing and amazing. And then they just say, everyone's got to do this thing. And I know so many smart people have done this, and I don't blame them for it, but it's a huge mistake.

Chris Williamson (3:37)

One of my friends, Gwenda Bogle, has got this idea he called The Golden Hammer. And he says that a public intellectual, usually one that's got famous for a small number of principles, sees that principle in everything. And then he's got in brackets afterward, every definition of this should come attached with a photo of Nassim Taleb, which is like someone who's got an amazing idea set, but is able to retrofit lots of insights to this idea set. It's kind of the same as this. What's your problem? Oh, athlete's foot? Allow me to show you my CPAP machine. Like I fixed fucking athlete's foot with a CPAP machine. Like all of these things. And you're right, like this golden hammer kind of approach seems to be a master cognitive bias that a lot of smart people, that are the kinds of people who have gone through lots of these spirals that they're gonna fall for.