Self Actualizers and Their Works

 I grew up in a household filled with self-help and motivational books. My mom was involved in the church, and at one point in his life, my dad was a salesman for a pharmaceutical company, then a stockbroker. So the variety of motivational books made sense. THINK AND GROW RICH, 7 HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE, RICH DAD POOR DAD, 4 AGREEMENTS, GIFTED HANDS, THE PRINCE by Machiavelli, POWER OF INTENTION, or anything by Wayne Dyer. There was Black self-help, Christian self-help, business self-help, and conservative Republican self-help. Ayn Rand found her way onto the shelf with objectivism. There was warrior self-help, zen art guides, quantum physics of how 'your consciousness collapses infinity into your reality,' civil rights self-help of LETTERS FROM A BIRMINGHAM JAIL by MLK, Booker T. Washington's UP FROM SLAVERY, SOUL ON ICE by Eldrige Cleaver. My parents never said, 'You need to read this or that.' These were their books and for them. We, as kids, were just surrounded and living amidst their research material.

But you stare at a book a hundred times, and you become curious. I would pick up a volume of my choosing when I was bored. Read it and put it back on the shelf. Sometimes I would talk about what I read. Sometimes I would sit with the book or come back later. Inadvertently, I was honing my own discernment. I found some of the books great, some sheer quackery, and some with interesting ideas mixed in with delusions. Usually, it was a mix.

There wasn't any rhyme or reason to my 'knowing' except a feeling. It helped if the book had a detailed plan for turning good feelings into a solid plan. The plan meant I could try it out and see if it yielded 'growing rich' or 'being blacker' or 'gaining power over my enemies in war.' It also helped if the book included success stories directly related to the author's plan. And the success had to be quantifiable in some way. In other words, good feelings had to turn into an actionable plan that yielded hard numbers.

I guess that's what clicked decades later for me with "The Diamond Cutter:: a clear, concise book with actionable steps that produced fact-based results, and had a track record of success going back a couple of thousand years. But I also loved reading Wayne Dyer, a midwestern teacher who was just sick of his predicament and decided to change his life, and then created his own methodology that helped others.

It is fascinating living amongst all the words of 'self-actualized' ppl, whether it was Buddha, Christ, a civil rights icon in jail, a transformed school teacher, or the most successful salesman in America who wrote a book about how to sell pencils.

When I'm alone, I find myself retreating back to this. My default is my childhood: to be surrounded by the words of self-actualizers of any type or stripe. The doom scrolling and gossip of 'complainers and blamers' sounds hollow and ineffective to my discernment. It makes me feel viscerally drained and dull. There's always someone to blame for the world's awfulness. Self-actualizers just keep trying to make their corner of the world better and teach others how to do the same.

Listen to the words of ppl changing their world, hone your discernment, separate the good from the woo-woo, and use the good. No need to ridicule the specific writers or books that sound weird. If it's not for you, it might be for someone else. There is so much wisdom out there. Why wouldn't it come in different colors, textures, and harmonies?