The Best Self-Help is Free: The Need for External Feedback

Chapter 1

This is Chapter 1 of The Best Self-Help is Free, a treatise by Mr. Stolyarov. You can read all chapters of this freely available work here.

In endeavoring to improve your life, the manner in which you approach your own mind is vital. Caution, prudence, and a healthy dose of skepticism are in order before any self-improvement can be made. Thus, the proper approach to one's own ideas is the first issue that must be addressed.  

When approaching any aspect of the world, it is essential to take nothing about it for granted at the onset - including one's own views, theories, and predispositions regarding it. Your mind, if rightly applied, can liberate you from many of the material constraints of your existence - by actually loosening those constraints and thereby making your life more prosperous and pleasant. If wrongly applied, however, your mind can become a prison - with false notions serving as its walls.

But how can you know whether your own current ideas are aiding you or harming you? Surely, you cannot rely on the ideas themselves to evaluate the soundness of those ideas. Some external indicators are necessary to make such evaluations. In other words, you need to continually challenge your own theories using evidence external to those theories. You need to look at the outside world and see whether its phenomena can actually be made consistent with the ideas in your own mind.

If you find a discrepancy between your ideas and external evidence, do not be too hasty in drawing a conclusion. It could be that some of your ideas are wrong, but it is essential to know which particular ones are in error and to go no further than eliminating the erroneous ideas. All too many people, when they find that one of their notions is false, proceed to reject a whole series of related but true and useful ideas - thereby leaving themselves on balance worse off then if they had held on to the original false idea in the first place!