How to Live Your Life Without Self-help Books

THE ABOVE TITLE should really have a question mark after it. It is a serious question, and merits a serious answer. To call the current professional situation a rat race is absurdly litotic. My mother, at this advanced age (mine, not hers), still wonders why I’m not making as much money as some of my peers. “Why did you bring me up on stories of Rama and Krishna?” I’ll ask her one of these days. “You should have told me about Tata and Birla.” Ten years from now, there’ll be an Amar Chitra Katha comic on Dhirubhai Ambani’s life.

Until that happy day dawns, we have the self-help books. They’ve come a long way since the granddaddy of the genre, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, was published in 1936. James Thurber did a hatchet job on the first generation of self-helpers in The New Yorker (his essays were collected in 1937 in a volume called Let Your Mind Alone!). Thurber wrote:

I have devoted myself to a careful study of as many of these books as a man of my unsteady eyesight and wandering attention could be expected to encompass. And I decided to write a series of articles…offering some ideas of my own, the basic one of which is, I think, that man will be better off if he quits monkeying with his mind and lets it alone.

The time for Thurber’s irreverence is long past. These are serious books, with readers in hundreds of millions. That means big money for publishers. These books matter to professionals in every field. Even contributors to The New Yorker read and, what is worse, write them.

Three such books have recently come within my purview, which is a small one. They are The Professional by Subroto Bagchi (2009), Don’t Sprint the Marathon by V Raghunathan (2010), and The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande (2010).

The term ‘self-help books’ is not used any more. There is a wide variety of categories among the books that seek to help you in your career. But these are, in essence, self-help books, in that they are not (yet) part of the curriculum at business college. The first book above defines a professional in any field and outlines their traits, implying you can become better at your job. The second is aimed at parents who have grand dreams for their children; it also has valuable advice for young professionals. The third, first published in the USA, tells how a surgeon with vision looked for, and found, help in other crafts to make his own more efficient.

None of these books is to be taken lightly. I have read them all with interest—they all hold one’s attention—and learned from them. This is not a review but a view: a vision, in my turn, of the nature of these books, their importance, their relevance to the real world, and what, perhaps, they suggest, rather than tell.

All three are books written by professionals who have done well. They teach, or set guidelines for, careerists. (That word is interesting. It has a derogatory sense, though I used it in place of ‘professionals.’ I just looked it up. The Britannica dictionary defines careerism as “the policy or practice of advancing one’s career, often at the cost of one’s integrity.” And it dates the word to 1933, just when the first self-help books were coming out.)

The problem with these books, as I see it, is one of vision. Integrity is lacking in the corporate world, but anyone who works there does so with lawyers and accountants in flocks behind him. It is stupidity—not only cupidity—that makes for scams. In the office, no professional can afford to function on trust. What we deplore more seriously, however, is the lack of professionalism rubbing up against us in our lives outside office. The plumber says, “Tomorrow,” and tomorrow is always another day. The auto driver cheats us twice, first by fixing his meter and second by demanding more. The ward ‘boy’ in the hospital smokes bidis and asks for ten rupees for each little task he is mandated to do.

So Bagchi’s boast, in an introductory section entitled ‘How to Read This Book’ (even the how-to books have how-to chapters)—“For this is a book, I believe, which should remain relevant for all time and for all readers”—gets nowhere with me. Is he counting on the plumbers and electricians? The nurses, the auto-drivers? All these people read, only they don’t read what white-collars do. Certainly they don’t read Bagchi, and why should they? It gives them no percentage. Bagchi’s book is aimed at workers who call themselves professionals. The vast majority of workers in the real world do not. They think of themselves as earners. The wolf at the door is not an idle threat.

Raghunathan’s message is for parents: Do not push your child too much. Life is a marathon, not a sprint. It doesn’t matter if your child doesn’t score 98 percent, or get through JEE or CAT. So many achievers in the corporate world come from small towns, small colleges, and very small beginnings. They get there in the long term. Vision is the key, long vision.

Quite right. And yet Raghunathan’s bio, as soon as you turn the cover, is full of his career credentials. He says in the book that he studied in a small school and then in a small college in Punjab. But the bio begins, “Professor of Finance at IIM, Ahmedabad.” This can be put down to HarperCollins’ marketing vision. However, on page 134, he tells a story which points to the ludicrousness of tests, and of our universities. Yet he has to introduce the protagonist as “Professor of Organisation Behaviour in a leading business school” and later define him as “a PhD from a good US university.”

This harping on degrees and credentials is what I call the Taare Zameen Par syndrome. Most of that film, you will recall, is about how children should be allowed to develop at their own pace, not stressed by competition they don’t desire. Yet at the end the dyslexic boy must win a glittering prize and be fêted. In 3 Idiots, too, the chap who doesn’t want to compete—and thus gets his friends into trouble—maxes every test with ease and in the end turns out to be a world-famous inventor. Perhaps it should be called the Aamir Khan syndrome.

Success very rarely comes without trying. In a competition-driven world, it comes still more rarely without competition. You see how in Don’t Sprint the Marathon Raghunathan is compelled to compare life to a race—only that it’s a marathon and not a sprint. He says marathoners compete with themselves—which is not always true.

What, then, about those who don’t want to compete at all? In my youth (said the sage, as he shook his grey locks) I pitied the mediocre. That was our word for them, we who were at the top of the class. They were not particularly driven, they were neither especially unhappy nor happy. They went on through middle-level colleges to middle-level careers and lives, following not so much their karma or dharma as their inclination not to waste psychic energy. Now I think a gift for contentment is the best we could wish for from the good fairy with the wand. It is better to be happy than to be successful.

At the beginning of Robinson Crusoe, the hero’s father dissuades him from adventure:

He told me…that these things were all either too far above me, or too far below me; that mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found by long experience was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanic part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition and envy of the upper part of mankind.

This is not a reflection suited to our circumstances. The Europe-fuelled drive of the last 500 years has not contentment as its goal. Without it, we wouldn’t have many of our luxuries. (We wouldn’t have reality TV, 90 percent of our news media, or self-help books either.) In this driven world, it’s rare to have both success and happiness. I look at my own avocation. A happy writer is a contradiction in terms. A fellow becomes a writer because he is ambitious, or because he has something to say. He never quite finishes saying it; neither is the ambition ever really sated.

I read in the local rag two days ago of a young executive who’s written a bestseller. His mythological novel (The Immortals of Meluha) has sold 25,000 copies in a month, using aggressive marketing on social networking sites in particular. “First, I attempted a book on philosophy,” said the 35-year-old. “But my sister told me that nobody will read one. So my writing started taking the shape of a fiction.”

This is what I’ll call the Chetan Bhagat syndrome (for no fault of Bhagat’s: he seems reasonably sane; or at least I thought so until I read Srinath Perur’s profile of him in the May issue of The Caravan). People want to be famous for anything at all, successful in whatever field. Writing differs little from bank robbery. How many disciples Harshad Mehta had in the Bombay of 1992! (Chetan Bhagat has almost as many in today’s Mumbai.) How many Indians clamour to get into the Guinness Book of Records!

This competition, this bandicoot race, is without a point. There is seldom any exalted vision driving it. Dryden’s lines often recur when I think about it:

All, all of a piece throughout!

Thy chase had a beast in view;

Thy wars brought nothing about;

Thy lovers were all untrue.

’Tis well an old age is out,

And time to begin a new.

What is the beast we chase now? The new age differs from the old in that it is even less directed towards something.

The crusades and jihads, however idiotic they were, had a beast in view. The Industrial Revolution raised a new god, Efficiency. A demi-god, Economy, hangs upon its shadow. Gawande’s new book asks why these gods are not revered in medicine.

Gawande is a skilful writer who wastes few words. His style is what is today called elegant because it is both efficient and economical. He writes in The New Yorker, and since William Shawn clenched his iron fist around that journal’s editorial policy, hijinks of the Thurber type have been kept out of the temple. That is all, of course, beside the point.

Efficiency is respected but not revered in medicine, because its own priests have preserved a mystique. Any fool can wield a spanner; but you need ten years of dedicated study before you can be allowed to use a scalpel. The checklist that Gawande offers can certainly make a difference to fatality rates. There is, however, considerable resistance to it within the profession, because adopting it would amount to throwing open the hallowed theatres to the blue-collars, the plumbers. Engineering defects kill by the hundred and demand investigation. Medical mistakes pick us off singly.

This attitude on the part of the stethoscope-wearing brethren blunts the very efficiency of the demand for efficiency. Moreover, we the public—the consumers—require it in some things, but do not agitate ourselves about its lack in governance or medicine. Besides, I have seen the efficient doctors work. In Mumbai and other cities, the top surgeons have developed an assembly-line procedure. While they are busy cutting up one patient, their (unqualified) assistants speed to the next hospital on the list and set up everything. The surgeon arrives, cuts and sews, and departs. Gawande’s checklist requires efficiency to have the human touch. Doctors see it otherwise.

What is remarkable in these writers of self-help books is their acceptance of the status quo. Or perhaps it is not so remarkable, seeing that they are high achievers under the current gods; but should we, the consumers, be so devout? Should we have no higher god than the Great Bandicoot?

The corporate heroes compete so fiercely that the rest of us can scarcely breathe. Then they relax at the top of the heap and tell us to relax, to breathe deeply, to pay attention to values and the larger meaning of life. When success is measured by how well you do against competition, the one who breathes most deeply, relaxes most completely, wins. So they say; we observe the contrary.

Bagchi has a chapter showing how three ‘great professionals,’ in times of crisis, went the extra metre to save their companies. He cites the CEO of eBay when power failed in California; a senior executive of FedEx when its planes were stuck; and the CEO of Southwest Airlines after the New York attacks. The first stayed in her office, round the clock, for 13 consecutive days. The second owned responsibility for mistakes. The third made an employee payment at a time of financial stress.

What strikes the outsider is that all these were the obvious, and even more, the right, things to do. Why are these actions lauded? Because, obviously, honesty is not necessarily the best policy. It is the best only when it pays.

Dissociating your professional critical sense from the status quo, from what pays, while reading a management self-help book is a feat akin to rolling your eyeballs to the backs of their sockets in order to look differently at reality. Both are difficult to do. Both pay—the second action is, of course, to be taken as a metaphor.

Gawande’s checklist stays longest with me because it is a tool as palpable as a spanner, with effects that may be made as visible. I’m an inveterate list-maker, too. No trip—to market, or the city—is complete or has a chance to be fulfilled without that piece of paper in my pocket.

Twenty years ago I met my match in Bombay. There were roadside hoardings all over town announcing ‘The Three-Way Test’:

“Is It True?

“Is It Fair?

“Is It Necessary?”

To which I mentally added a fourth: “Who asked you to open your mouth, anyway?”