Nothing Beats Being Right
Do you ever have a strange feeling reading these marketing blogs? Seth Godin, Derek Sivers, the cartoonist guy that’s friends with Seth Godin. It’s a not entirely new breed of self-help phenomenon. Very often they’re doling out little pieces of wisdom. Little nuggets. I read them a lot. Then there are the guys like Timothy Ferris that wrote the “4 Hour Work Week.” It’s fun to read these guys.
This isn’t a novel thought. Just that there doesn’t seem to be any direct correlation between, say, the web traffic that Seth Godin gets and the number of solved problems in the world. Actually, that may not entirely be true. But I just find it a strange and disconcerting thing. All these dudes doling out advice. And the reason they’re giving advice is because they’ve “made it”. They’ve written some best-selling books. They’ve started some cool new companies.
And the premise is that if if you can just ingest these lessons. If you can take them to heart and really live them then, maybe slowly but surely, you can remodel your DNA after these gurus and then be successful or rich or happy or whatever. And people do indeed crave that assurance. That if they just make a few switches here and there and internalize the thousands of lessons being.
I’m either a skeptic or a determinist or just a bummer. But as much as I enjoy reading these guys and think about what they write, I am still skeptical about the power of their words, or anyone’s words, to really change things or change behavior. But then, I’m doing the same thing.
And I doubt if you asked them they’d say the point was to “change people’s lives”. Rather, they’re more likely just in the business of spreading good ideas.
Nevertheless, it’s always struck me that there’s no comparison to just being right. There are many paths to success. And many ways to achieve your goals. And if you read Seth Godin’s blog or the Bible or any other weighty tome that has a lot of little nuggets of wisdom, you’ll most likely find that they contradict each other, and that they’re often helpful but in very specific circumstances. And that’s okay.
But there are no books to help you emulate Jack Welch or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. At least, I don’t really believe in them. I believe that certain people have good taste and the discipline to pursue it and those people succeed. And if they’re good writers they write a book about it or a blog about it. And the people reading that book will most likely not have good taste and, aside from hiring the author to make all their decisions for them, won’t be able to implement a lot of the rules consistently enough to make a difference.
But tell me if I’m being an idiot or a downer unnecessarily. It just strikes me that nothing beats being right.
