TJ Walker says most self-help fails because people read books and forget them. Instead, advertise your goals to yourself daily with specific cues like audio recordings, then attach micro-actions: drink water first thing, skip sugary drinks, lift weights for X minutes. Repetition rewires behavior.
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Can personal development work for you? Can it help your life? Can the self help movement be something meaningful to you? Well, it can, but here's the thing. Most of the time, for most people, personal development doesn't do much of anything. You read a book, that's interesting. Good principles. Oh, that's nice. Let me try it. Hey, I finished the book, put it on the shelf, never look at it again. Your friends say, hey, let's go to this great motivational speakers, seminars, three days. It's great music, excitement, great energy. When you go, you're all pumped up, it's fantastic. You're going to change your life. You can't wait to get back in the real world and get back to the real world and things are kind of the same. Well, why are they the same? If you want to help yourself, if you want to develop yourself, you have to change, you have to influence yourself. If you want to do that, you have to take a serious look at what are the most powerful influences in your life. Now, certainly if you're like a lot of people, you could say parents, family, friends, colleagues, school, all of these things, the workplace environment, all of these things have some influence. But when you look at what has the greatest influence, if you had to look at a single institution that has the most influence on human behavior in the last 50, 80 years, I think we can conclude from a scientific standpoint, when it comes to actual rigorous study, what has the biggest impact on influencing people? Advertising. That's right, advertising. Think of it this way. McDonald's, Coke. They want you to eat a Big Mac, drink a Coke. Do they send you a book once a year saying, oh, please read this book about how tasty a hamburger is? No. Do they send you a position paper? No. Coke doesn't send you. Does Coke ask you to come to a three day seminar about how great tasting Coke is? No. They bombard you every single day with short little ads. Billboard ads, radio ads, TV ads, video ads, online ads. It's advertisement. It's very hard to get through a day, virtually any place in the world without seeing ads for Coca Cola or McDonald's. Why do McDonald's and Coke spend a lot of money on advertising? Because it works. They measure this, they test it. And that's why if you want to influence yourself, you've somehow got to figure out how to take whatever personal development concepts you believe in or you want to follow, and you've got to advertise them to yourself to make them meaningful. What books do have an impact? Well, many people would say their favorite religious book, the primary text of their particular religion has had a big influence on them. But remember, the followers of most religions are taught you need to read your particular religious text every day forever. That's why it has impact. That's why it has influence, because of the repetition. Whereas the greatest traditional self help book you've ever read, you may love it, you may remember parts of it, but it's probably sitting on your shelf. It's unlikely you are reading that book every single day forever. And I'm not asking you to read the same book every day. I do want you to think about how can you influence yourself to take the actions you want on a consistent daily basis. Because right now, if you are like most people, you are passively reacting to what comes out of here. Emails, messages, text ads from Amazon. Hey, you bought this. You'll like this. Mentions Notifications from Music oh, you like this band? You're going to like this band. Notifications from Netflix oh, you like this movie? You like this movie all day long. This is influencing us and it's typically to consume more mindless entertainment, eat more food. That's not going to make us healthy to spend more time doing things that will not advance our career or really help anyone else. That's why it's crucial for you to gain control over this. So if you want your personal development goals to be meaningful, go ahead, read all the books from the people you like and admire. But then my advice is write down exactly, not just the goals, but on a daily basis, what is it you want to do. Eating healthy is too abstract and general and fuzzy. Doesn't mean anything to say. Eat healthy if you want to eat healthier, if you want to be slimmer and maintain the proper weight or get to your proper weight, then you've got to break it down to highly strength specific actions. Those actions can include things like start every day drinking a glass of water. Do not put any sugar in any drink or drink anything with sugar. That's a specific action. Do not eat second helpings. That's a specific action. Do not snack during the day unless you're doing a tremendous amount of outdoor things, physical manual labor and you have really a dramatically higher caloric need that day. But if you work in an office, you're doing something creative, chances are you don't need to snack between meals. So you got to be really specific on exactly what you want. The technique I use and it doesn't cost you anything to do, this is I just pull out my cell phone and I tell myself what are the daily habits I want to do today if I want a healthier body. I tell myself, tj, you are going to lift weights today. And I specify how many minutes. Now I record this once and then I just listen to it. Each day takes me less than 20 minutes. I can be doing other things throughout the day. I can be on a bus, car, plane. I can be reading other things as I'm still listening to it. The beauty of an audio is it's a form of advertising. It costs nothing. It's much simpler than creating a newspaper ad or a graphic ad. And all of us have a simple digital audio recording studio with us at all times. So that's what I think is the best way to really get the most out of any personal development plan, Any self help plan is you've got to nail it down. You've got to influence your brain on a daily basis to do the things you want. You've got to be micro. You've got to nail it down to the specific things you want to do. One of my goals is tj, if you are going to snack, only have a snack of a piece of fruit. And I tell myself that every day in an audio and I just listen to it. I recorded it months ago but I listen to it every day. It makes it a lot easier to not snack on unhealthy things. So that's the way you can take all the great concepts from the self development and personal development experts throughout the ages and really have them create an impact on your life. Good luck.
