Self-help is all the rage. There are books on almost every subject known to man, and the Internet is overflowing with helpful content, trying to instruct people on how to do stuff – all kinds of stuff. There are presumably knowledgeable people lecturing and speaking at conferences about how best to do things, all sorts of things, and people are gobbling it up left and right.

I love the good intent behind this type of advice, truly, and I don’t want this to sound uncharitable, but I’ve personally had a pretty important realization over the past five-six years on this topic:

It’s not for me.

Don’t get me wrong: I used to LOVE this kind of “how-to” content. I read it voraciously, and I think I believed that it would make me productive; that it would clarify things for me; that it would empower me. I read loads of interviews with other creators, and clung to their words as if they were magic formulas. I thought that by absorbing their methods, and using their tools, I could emulate their successes.

But I’ve found that it actually does the opposite. For me. By focusing so much on how other people do things, and by trying desperately to internalize that, I lost sight of how I do things myself. I’ve lost sight of the fact that I actually do know how to do stuff. I have the capacity to work through things, and figure them out for myself.

And after realizing this, I’ve become many many times more productive – so much so that it’s actually astonished me. I’ve been more productive in the past five years than I had been through the entirety of my career up to that point. It’s made me a bit regretful of the time I wasted; all the time I sat there procrastinating, thinking I needed to read up on something before I went ahead and did it.

I’ve done some soul searching to figure this out, and the answer – while not exactly revolutionary – still hit me like an epiphany. I think that I (and many others) learn principally by doing – not by reading, hearing, or seeing. And while I was trying to learn how to do stuff in those other ways, I actually wasn’t learning, and it made me feel that I couldn’t do whatever it was that I was trying to do. But by not relying on those crutches, and by instead immersing myself in the work, and trying to figure things out for myself to find my own solutions, it’s really uncorked my productivity.

So, for all the people out there who are helped by this type of helpful “how to” content: more power to you. But please also consider that you may actually be able to figure things out for yourself, and this may be a way of learning that could actually feel much more empowering for you. It could rid you of crutches, of methods which may ultimately not be for you, but which will hold you back as you struggle to make sense of them.

Sometimes, the right way to do something is what works for YOU, not what works for others.

Now I guess I need to go write a self-help book on the subject. Let’s see, how do you write self-help books…?

I’d better Google that.