by Dr. Dragos How Dangerous Can Self Help Be? For seven years, I holed up in bookstores and read almost everything on the shelves of self help and personal development. I read everything from holy books, sacred texts, and ancient manuscripts to business books, entrepreneurship, and leadership how-tos. But somehow what I learned in these self help books didn’t prevent me from ending up broke, and failing in my work. ‘What’s wrong with me?‘ I thought to myself. ‘How can I be so unworthy that I cannot achieve what these books claim everyone can do so fast?‘ I didn’t achieve financial abundance instantly. No, I didn’t make a million dollars in 90 days, and the I-don’t-know-how-many steps to success didn’t lead very far. The secrets in the self help books turned out to be nothing more than common sense. The three, the four, the seven things ‘you have to know’ were not the only the things you must know. The instant success formulas were deplorable delusions that throw people in pain. I began to investigate the scientific literature to find out the truth. Merging the Truths of Self Help and Science After 400 years of research, scientists discovered that we have a truthfulness bias, a natural tendency to believe what we read, even when it’s not true. Every idea, every conversation, every human interaction changes our brain, and others can impose these changes on us against our will. When we receive new information, our brain’s instinct is to accept it as true. We can accept or reject the information, but only after we have initially believed it, and we are not always successful at undoing it. In an article titled, You Can’t Not Believe Everything You Read, Dr. Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, wrote: “Acceptance of ideas...
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