What Dostoevsky can teach you about a growth mindset

Portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky by Vasily Perov

“This was the point, that I blindly believed then that through some miracle, some external circumstance, all this would suddenly extend, expand; suddenly a horizon of appropriate activity would present itself, beneficent, beautiful, and, above all, quite ready made, and thus I would suddenly step forth under God’s heaven all but on a white horse and wreathed in laurels. A secondary role was incomprehensible to me… Either hero or mud, there was no in between. And that is what ruined me, because in the mud I comforted myself with being a hero.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

The Russian Novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) is widely viewed as one of the greatest writers of all time and one of the greatest psychologists in world literature. His novels, including Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and Notes from Underground deeply explore themes of psychology, philosophy, religion, literature and family, shining a light into the darkest depths of the human heart, whilst also gazing up in awe at our capability, despite everything, for transcendence through our love for each other. For Dostoevsky the good life was a kind of embodied, reciprocal exchange, with this reciprocity between self and other, being the foundation for grasping any kind of truth or understanding.

The passage above refers to a sense of superiority. A retreat into grandiose and delusional fantasy, a fantasy whose carriage is a warped kind of rationalism. A vision in a vacuum, dissolving on contact with reality and experience. The anti-hero of the novel holds a preference for the perfect conception of himself, over a potentially stained one in reality. A fixed conception that results in a fear of life and so a retreat from it. A burrowing into a solitary invention, one in which he is the hero, or will soon be. The abyss between his flawed self-conception and the inconvenience of reality, is filled with a despairing envy and hatred of those he encounters, as they represent a hammer to the mirror of his intellectual invention. Unwilling to let go and accept the contradictions and hypocrisies that are involved in living, this individual festers like a bad seed, his potential growth cut off by an unwillingness to expose himself to the fertiliser of experience.

The narrator of Notes from Underground is a disheveled, shambolic, and completely isolated individual, who views himself as a kind of messiah, someone who, if only the right moment would present itself, would be able to demonstrate his genius. Of course there is no such moment, and the narrator’s fixed, warped notion of himself, leads to a belief that the world should present itself to him “beneficent, beautiful, and, above all, quite ready made”, rather than presenting himself to the world in all the messy reality that entails.

For Dostoevsky, so much of his writing dealt with the dangers of pride and the limits of rationalism. Whether it is Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, calculating the personal and moral necessity of the murder of his landlord, the cold and calculating Ivan in The Brother’s Karamazov, or his unnamed anti-hero in Notes From Underground, a detached, cold and prideful way of thinking that carved the world up into fragments and calculated each step out of context with the reality, was persistently shown by Dostoevsky as being a pernicious and ultimately disastrous way to live. Richard Pevear in the foreword to his translation of Notes From Underground reflects on Dostoevsky’s writing as a whole that;

“The one quality his negative characters share…is inner fixity, a sort of death-in-life…. Inner movement, on the other hand, is always a condition of spiritual good, though it may also be a source of suffering, division, disharmony in this life. What moves may also rise.”

Pevear refers to ‘inner fixity’ like a kind of narrow mindedness, or blindness, resulting in a spiritual ‘death-in-life’ or the death of potential. In these books we live in the minds of his characters and are shown, through their examples, the catastrophe’s that await us when we let narcissistic pride prevent us from connecting with others. Dostoevsky was very sceptical that we would be able to think our way to a better world and was vehemently against the utopian ideals of the day, including both capitalism and socialism. In The Brothers Karamazov, he captured the utopian thinking of socialism at that time, saying that the socialists wished, “…not to go from earth to heaven, but to bring heaven down to earth”, prophesying that this would lead to disaster. Referring to capitalism, consumerism and the increasing isolation he believed this was causing he said;

“For he is accustomed to relying only on himself, he has separated his unit from the whole, he has accustomed his soul to not believing in peoples help, in people or in mankind, and now only trembles, lest his money and his acquired privileges perish.”

These warnings relate to how the development and over reliance on a kind of wobbly rationalism, stripped from history and context, with a blank slate, a year zero, the projection of a new kind of reality ‘free’ from the constraints of the past would ultimately lead to further division and death. This solitary focus on our own idea of the world, or of our blinkered, solo pursuit of material possessions ultimately would isolate us, disconnecting us from each other and life. Redemption for Dostoevsky’s characters came through an authentic, even vulnerable embrace of life, a dialectical exchange where a kind of embodied (not just intellectual) truth is mutually constituted by the interaction between self and other.

What does Dostoevsky have to do with a growth mindset? Well, Carol Dweck, a Stanford Psychologist, renowned for her work into “mindset”, motivation and how people succeed defined a growth mindset as a belief that our capacity is not fixed and that we can develop our abilities and skills over time. Dweck showed in her research that our fixed conceptions of ourselves had to be constantly updated and transformed by the growth that comes from experience and the insights it yields.

Some of her most impactful research, which investigated praise and its impact on motivation amongst fifth-grade students, showed that those praised for effort started to value learning opportunities, whilst those praised for intelligence were more interested in demonstrating their existing ability rather than stretching to improve. Dweck showed that the reinforcement of an existing way of thinking or viewing your own abilities as fixed can have a detrimental effect over time, leading to stagnation, frustration and a loss of potential.

Growth often involves stretching beyond your existing potential, which often means discomfort and effort. But as Dweck mentions in a revisiting of her initial publication, effort without actual learning is pointless. It is not simply about encouraging effort or resilience but also the encouragement of developing a personal insight into what works, a repertoire of techniques and strategies to learn and grow. In other words, a willingness to fail, which gives you the opportunity to update your understanding of what works by testing your concepts against reality and using this insight to transform skills and understanding. A fear of failure can often lead to the restriction of experience and develop into a kind of perfectionism that over time, if coupled with a fixed-mindset can become restrictive. Dweck, herself a recovering perfectionist, stated in a talk at The School of Life a number of years ago that, “I had to start shrinking my world in order to maintain [perfection].”

The shrinking of the world to match the conception you hold of yourself, as opposed to transforming your conceptions to match the world, would have been a thread of thought that Dostoevsky would have admonished. What is interesting about Dweck’s personal insight along with her extensive research is how it shows that in order to even maintain our abilities we need to keep challenging ourselves and pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone. A fear of looking foolish or ridiculous, leads to a retreat from experience and a constriction of action. A true growth mindset appears to involve a willingness of being the fool before becoming the master.

A brief wrestle with Heidegger

The cover of “Being and Time” by Martin Heidegger

Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff necked adversary of thought
Martin Heidegger

The desire of trying to discover and pin down a certain, unchanging truth, so that we may confidently stride forward without doubt seems wrong. We will never find certainty, as the ‘true’ way of being is something that never completely reveals itself. This truth is constantly shifting and changing depending on our relationship to it, existing in a mercurial relation to our being. The nature of ‘discovering’ truth is a process of unconcealing, stripping away the layers of mental and physical habits, social necessities and professional distraction in order to more closely experience that which we grasp toward, but which actually hums faintly, deep within us. Truth isn’t found by building, it is found by stripping away what we have already built around us and remembering that we are in fact a part of the world, not apart from the world.

Whilst we often grasp outwardly toward truth, the real nature of discovery is an inward process. A process of removing the noise so that the faint murmur of true Being within us can be allowed to be heard. For Heidigger, truth was not something to be arrived at, to be grasped with certainty, rather it was an ideal that guided us, an ideal that we could aim at, the resulting uncertainty requiring a leap of faith toward that horizon. The necessity of intuition are not lost for Heidigger, they are still critical to understanding in what direction we should aim. In some ways, reason and intuition will clash with one another, but intuition will often be the foundation, unknown to the conscious mind, on which reason builds its capability to grasp and manipulate the world around us for our own purposes. Our attention toward something in the world is drawn almost instantly by autonomic processes, that attention is then evaluated by intuitive emotional reactions long before our conscious, rational mind begins to evaluate the phenomena. Instinct and intuition serves the basis of our interest, with reason then manifesting the potential of that interest into something tangible, usable.

Diverting the river

Harold Fisk Map of The Mississippi River

To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.
Heraclitus

Is there a core of you that has remained since you were a child? A definable essence that the rest of your conscious self has been built around? How much of what is you is just memory and how much of that memory is accurate? Why are some memories, despite seeming innocuous or unimportant, so vivid and recurring?

It is memory that gives us a past. It allows us to use the information that we have gathered over time to help make decisions in the present, based on an imagined projection of the future. The problem is that the information we have gathered previously is rendered incomplete and our spectrum of decision making is often constrained by past actions, habits and bias, shaped by time, experience and culture. What determines our future is the result of decisions made in an amorphous present based on a vague impression of the past.

This is why it is so difficult for people to change. Past thoughts and actions are like rivulets, carving tracks of thought and action, deepened by time, building banks of habit that become increasingly difficult to divert or overcome. To redirect the flow requires first a pause, and then conscious action to redirect the torrent onto new ground. At first this action will feel undirected, the water will splash over the new ground, some of it will be lost and because of the difficulty and resulting frustration, there will be the temptation to return to the old, established path. However over time, through repeated action, new channels will form, new attitudes and behaviours will slowly develop and new banks will become more firmly established as the new torrents of thought and action carve their paths deeper.

Our past selves and the memory of that self can be the thing that makes it so difficult to change direction. Often it is an external event that shocks us, forcing us to stop, drawing our attention to the beat of discontent that we have been trying to drown out through distractions, busyness and transient pleasures. Given that we have to divert our patterns of thought from their established riverbeds we need to take new actions consistently in order to build new pathways that can lead to a possibility of transformation over time.

Kaleidoscopic journey through light

“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type… whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”
William James

Yesterday I went to a workshop held by MIND, the European Foundation for Psychedelic Science. I have been interested in psychedelic states since having a profound experience of unitive consciousness whilst practicing transcendental meditation. That experience had such a significant effect that I have been investigating what happened to me ever since and as a result have been curious about altered states in consciousness in general.

The workshop was focused on creating hallucinogenic experiences through Flicker Induced Hallucination, using stroboscopic lamps. This phenomenon of hypnagogia induced through light has been scientifically documented since the early 19th century and the invention of this machine is entwined within the fabric of the renaissance of scientific research on psychedelic experience that has taken place over the last fifteen years.

I didn’t really have any expectations prior to the session, despite the fact that the other participants coming into the room after their own experience had this dazed, wide-eyed look of wonder on their face. The experience itself was one of the most awe-inspiring internal experiences of my life.

Lying down on the bed under the light head with my eyes closed, I expected to see blobs and swirls, the likes of which you see if you have accidentally looked directly at the sun and then immediately closed your eyes. What actually happened was extraordinary. When the lights first turned on I initially saw some vague red and purple blobs and then all of a sudden it was like I had been dropped into a kaleidoscope. I was seeing spinning, fractal, geometric shapes of amazing complexity, predominantly made up of crystalline-like diamonds and triangles, with incredible colours starting with tangerines and oranges before shifting to obsidian black and emerald greens. The shapes and the kaleidoscope were moving fast enough that I felt as though I were being propelled with increasing velocity through this fractal atmosphere, the planes and spirals and funnels enveloping me until it felt like I had broken free of the orbit of that world and was now floating in a misty blackness, surrounded by stars. I soon felt a physical sensation of falling back into my body, a similar feeling to when you are lying in bed and have that falling feeling that jolts you awake, and as I was falling the geometric, fractal shapes returned. As I was falling back into this geometric plane there was a bright, white light sitting at the apex of this visual storm and I had this urge to move toward it, a feeling as though I could move toward it, like I could will myself there despite the fact that I was stationary. That bright light felt like it was positioned at the point above and between my two eyes and reminded me of what many spiritual traditions refer to as “The Third Eye”. That sense of wanting to move toward that white light was probably the most profound during this intense experience.

What was incredible to me was the fact that these were simply white, strobe lights, rhythmically pulsing in front of my face and that was enough for my mind to project the most incredible visual complexity along with giving me a sense of motion into the infinite blackness created by my closed eyes. It gave me an insight into the scaffolding of our visual perceptions, how our brain has this innate sense of geometry that it uses as one of the building blocks for us to understand the physical world.

I had noticeable physical reactions to this experience. My heart was thumping from the intensity of the visual experience and my palms and fingertips were sweating. Throughout the experience my breath was deep and purposeful as I tried to breath my way through the anxiety generated by this powerful experience. There was a constant sense of mild fear that I was breathing through and trying to let go of, knowing that I wasn’t in any physical or mental danger; this feeling was mirrored by a feeling of exhilaration as I was propelled through this vast unknown.

The first session only went for three-and-a-half minutes, after which we had a pause and the instructor then placed some headphones over my ears and started playing some instrumental folk music. By the time the second session started my body was shaking, particularly my legs. I tried to calm the shaking by placing my hands on top of one another and resting them on my stomach, paying even closer attention to my breath, trying to let myself fall further into my body, allowing my weight to sink into the bed. The second session with the music was more relaxing than the first, partly due to the music and partly due to getting used to the experience; much of my shaking was partly a residual effect from the mild shock and intensity of the first session.

Once the experience was over I sat up and had a brief conversation with the instructor, my voice and hands were mildly shaking. I had a conversation with a couple of others who had been through the experience, whilst speaking to them I had physical jitteriness similar to when you drink too much coffee. Once I left the workshop, walking down the stairs I suddenly felt this rush of euphoria, which was accentuated as I walked into the cool, foggy, night air of Berlin, jumping on my bike and cycling at full-pelt through the empty streets toward home.

It was such an awe-inspiring experience that showed me for the second time this year, the first being my unitive experience through meditation, how many other realms there are available to us, and how through the right approaches, we can open the gate and ‘the world’ is completely transformed through the dissolution of our day-to-day perceptions.

The shadow of luck

But their minds were always closed,
And their hearts were held in fast suburban chains.
- Cold Chisel, Khe Sahn

There is a complacency of mind in Australia. A complacent sense that what has worked in the past will continue working indefinitely into the future. There is a sort of trembling fear that pervades much of the national psyche, an anxiousness that all the time spent and sacrifices made in the pursuit of wealth, status and comfort maybe won’t be reflected in a sense of contentment, calm and delayed joy. So many people have been led to believe that the ‘Australian Dream’ is the paradise to which people should aspire, as though it were a final destination, a foretold promised land, where in truth it is more like a trap. Be mindful of politicians extolling the virtues of certain lifestyles!

In truth the Australian Dream is a way of tying people down and making them good little taxpayers. In the pursuit of security and comfort we sacrifice autonomy. When we sacrifice autonomy we stop manifesting potential, with time creaking into psychological stasis as our vision becomes blinkered by an arbitrary goal defined by others.

We are told to enjoy life when we are old, once we have retired from ‘doing our bit’, when the generative power of new ideas, people and places has lost its generative force, when they have become the pleasant distractions from the monotony of retirement. As Australians we cling in anxious fear to our possessions and houses, desperately reminding ourselves and others that we ‘have made it’ whilst being terrified to step off the treadmill and think for ourselves.

Buy a house, sure. But do it with your eyes open and do it after experiencing the world and analysing all the possibilities, don’t do it just because everyone else is doing it. Make sure that in trying to attain security you don’t smother your potential by becoming chained by debt and societal expectation. Politicians do not want a mobile workforce, mobility means a lower tax base, so beware of their endlessly repeated prognostications of ‘The Australian Dream’. Keep your eyes open and think for yourself.

Don’t be fooled by groupthink that buying a house is the only asset to bother considering or that assets of monetary value are the only ones worth pursuing. Invest in yourself through the education of life; make mistakes, read, write, paint, try and understand why you think and act the way you do, understand what motivates you so that your values and goals are the product of your truth and not someone else’s.

When the wave rolled back

We were all but proud of our drunkenness, debauchery and bravado. I would not say we were wicked; they were all good young men, but they behaved wickedly, and I most of all. The chief thing was that I had come into my own money, and with that I threw myself into a life of pleasure, with all the impetuousness of youth, without restraint, under full sail.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The passage above is from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and is the account of the elderly monk Zosima’s youth, recounted by the protagonist Alyosha. This passage struck me when I read it last night and I wrote the section down as the first thing I did this morning due to it reminding me so much of my own approach to life in my ‘youth’.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been increasingly thinking of past behaviour and how hedonic and aimless so much of it was and how all I was interested in over the course of many years was where I could find fun and pleasure. It is interesting to me that it is only recently, during the last couple of months, that my own opinion of my old life has so rapidly shifted, shifted to a point where I sometimes find it difficult to recognise the motivations of that old self.

“We were all but proud of our drunkenness, debauchery … they were all good young men, but they behaved wickedly, I most of all.”

This was what university and the emerging adulthood period of life was for me. There was a feeling of pride. A sense that what we were doing was right, smart even. That we knew we were ‘making the most of it’ by sewing wild oats and getting our kicks whilst we could, before it was too late.

I always thought when I was younger that I had to see and do as much as possible so as that I could stave of future regret and not have the chaotic mid-life catastrophe that eventually engulfed my father. I realise now how misplaced some of these notions were, how pursuing fun and distraction only drove a chasm in my own life, a void in which I lost a sense of meaning, purpose. My expediency regarding work and university led me to feel that whatever it was I was doing over those years didn’t really matter. There was no wisdom in the drunkenness, debauchery or hedonism but it did ultimately yield wisdom, wisdom of what not to do.

The move to Hong Kong was the apex and termination of this ultimately unsustainable trajectory. We went to Hong Kong out of boredom, chasing fun, status, money; and the pressure, heat and brightness of that fascinatingly strange place incinerated this old part of myself, revealing an old truth and an old vein of understanding that I had lost. During this painful process, one which is still unfurling, it was as though I rediscovered a part of myself which had been occluded by the fog off all that I had tried to distract myself with. I realise now that I was blinkered and blinded by the light reflecting off the wrong values, values which I had never really stopped to consciously consider.

What is likely true is that in desperately trying to not repeat the same mistakes as our parents we simply blunder on, smashing into things on the periphery of the tunnel vision that focuses so determinedly on avoiding their bad examples, instead creating our own.

The remedy for this appears to be living as truthfully as possible. Of not giving up the potential you know is within you simply because it is difficult and will jeopardise your security and comfort at that moment. Manifesting what you intuitively know to be right seems to me at this moment to be a bulwark against the future corruption of your psyche. The difficulty of course is finding that moment of clarity, a still moment when the fog has lifted and you can not only see, but know that truth. What this might mean is that in order to find it you first need to jump into that fog.

You could be happy

The pursuit of happiness is one of the traditional rights of man; unfortunately, the achievement of happiness may turn out to be incompatible with another of man’s rights, namely liberty.
Aldous Huxley

You could be happy. Happy like a fucking donkey strapped to a cart. Satiated by a regular carrot, a scratch behind the ear, some hay and a bucket of water at the end of the day. Happy because you have submitted. Given up your responsibility in order to be bound to the yoke of someone else’s charge. Preferring to be bounded to something, anything, simply so you don’t have to wrestle with the freedom of your own independent thought and subsequent psychological storms. You could be happy. Happy as a lobotomised automaton, blinkered and clopping through life to the tempo of someone else’s rod.

Freedom doesn’t mean happiness, in fact it very likely means the opposite, particularly when it is first grasped. Newly found freedom can often be terrifying, as all the possibility of the world comes flooding in and you are made aware of all that you could be which you are not. Like the first moments when we wake up from sleep and are dazed, confused and vulnerable, freedom simply exposes you to all the potentialities of life, dazzling and overwhelming us. It takes a conscious focus to aim at that which you are interested and through that focus begin to build on that which sustains your interest as that is what brings meaning. Our interest determines what we value and by focusing on what we value we begin to breakdown the overwhelming vastness of the world’s potentialities into a world that reflects us, that we can mould into something that will allow us to manifest our own latent power. Freedom doesn’t mean happiness. However it allows us the capacity to make our own decisions that can harness our own potential in the pursuit of something that we value, that has meaning.

Breaking our bonds

Vasily Kandinsky – Free Curve to the Point – Accompanying Sound of Geometric Curves 1925

This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one’s potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life.
Carl Rogers

Bounded. Meaning requires us to have some sort of boundary or bond in order that we can wrestle and fight against them. In lieu of a deeper meaning in life the bondage of duty ties us to a purpose that suppresses the devil’s of our darker nature. This bondage attracts and focuses the minds attention, quieting that incessant voice that is so fixated on sabotaging noble plans made in faith. The bounding of time allows us to enjoy the free time that we do have for ourselves. Remove the bondage of our time and we wander aimlessly through the desert of our thoughts. Removing our bonds we escape the tyranny of drudgery only to find ourselves lost in freedom. In our dreary doing we can rail against the yoke of our necessity, whilst dreaming of a utopia of creativity and autonomy. We can feel righteous in our rejection of the herd, rejection of bondage, walking off with our head held high into the gloriously imagined future, free to craft a life that doesn’t require us to give up our dignity. As soon as we are confronted with this wide expanse of time we find that instead of relishing the innumerable possibilities, we are paralysed by them and those brightly lit uplands of our imagined future begin to be obscured by the brewing storm of our flailing ego.

The only cure for this to to struggle against the ego that wishes for the path of least resistance, for expediency! To remember there is a reason why so few people break from the herd, namely because it carries risk and difficulty, the difficulty that comes with fighting the devil in your mind, the devil that always takes the opposing view to any notions you might have of carving your own path, of truly living. Our inability to consciously live without distracting ourselves with soul sapping work and mindless amusements is a learned habit of existence that becomes very difficult to break. There is a comfort in giving up our agency and following the herd as it occupies our minds and absolves us of the need to take conscious action in our own lives, something which is a precarious and perennial balancing act. After years of conditioning from a school and employment system that is still predominantly based on the industrial revolution, it is no wonder that it is so difficult for people to live with true intention, despite all the modern conveniences that theoretically allow us to do so. To be able to create an independent, sustainable identity that is strong enough to withstand the buffeting winds of societal expectation and egotistical self-sabotage, to live a life of meaning and integrated truth, to be your own person, not anybody else’s, is the ultimate acheivement.

The universe in our heads

The more science discovers and the more comprehension it gives us of the mechanisms of existence, the more clearly does the mystery of existence itself stand out
Julian Huxley

The universe is in our heads. The mind itself is our universe of experience with all the accompanying complexity, contradictions, wonder and awe. We create the ideals and meaning within that. Our mind within mirrors the vastness of the universe above. Similar to how we only know the small spec of space that houses our world, similarly do we only understand a small part of our minds. Our knowledge of experience is so limited to our immediate field of senses that we are blind to all the possibilities of different experience that lie latent within us. The complexity of the environment around us is filtered out through our evolutionary survival mechanisms, meaning that we only see a fraction of the world in our daily experience.

The brain has more connections between its 100 billion neurons and 40,000 synapses than the universe has stars. It is as though our brain is a small projector and all it requires for the universe to be fully rendered above us is an input that will illuminate this hidden wonder for us. All of the firing, connecting, suppressing, communicating, the storms and calm and synchronicity are the micro-equivalent of the cosmic weather that rolls above us. We have evolved over millions of years to be focused solely on what yields the most evolutionary benefit, filtering out all that is superfluous to our immediate gain, and as a result we have a very narrow focus on what the world is. It is a fascinating thought to realise that our lived experience is unique to us and that an aeon of experience is sitting, unbeknownst to us, within our minds.

Self-help & the religious impulse

The religious impulse and the enormous appetite for self-help must stem from the same part of the mind. If we can boil religion down to the search of and alignment with an ultimate truth that transcends our individual existence, then we can see how easily self-help literature can fill the gap of those who have left religion behind.

The fundamental essence of so much religious literature focuses on the way to live your life. Jesus offered his own life as an example for those who wished to enter ‘The Kingdom of Heaven’. The most salient message from Buddhism is the path to enlightenment, with Nirvana the ultimate goal. In Chinese philosophy Taoism (or Daoism) means “The Way” which is visually represented by the line that splits the black and white hemispheres of the Yin-Yang symbol, a symbol that encapsulates what is required to live a life that is balanced and harmonious with self and community.

These religions and philosophies are very different in how they manifest and have influenced the cultures where they have become dominant, however what unites them is their talk of “The Way”, the path you should follow if you wish lead a good life.

The self-help guru steps in where the religious authority has departed (or was never present). They offer the promise of a heaven on earth through devotion to The Way they are proposing. The self-help author, whether it is fitness, business or the arts, talks in terms of a set of principles or a path that needs to be followed in order to begin achieving your dreams and living up to your potential. These stories are intended to be a collection of wisdoms designed to open your eyes so that you can see, find and then stay on the path to salvation (whatever that may be). No wonder the seeming inexhaustible appetite for self-help, these stories are ones that we have been telling ourselves since the beginning of time.