To recap, in my post I argued that you should think of self help as a form of ‘technê’ — the word that the Ancient Greeks used to describe tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is the sort of knowledge that is difficult to teach and must be mastered by practice — that is, things like music, martial arts, and business. I then argued that to simplify... See more

I strongly believe that stories are often better than pure advice, because you can see the context from which that advice comes from. This also applies to real life: my instinct is to ask questions whenever someone offers me advice. Specifically, I want to know the contexts in which the person applied said advice, and I see this as gaining more... See more

If you’re able to learn from practice alone, you wouldn’t need self-help for that part of your life. Treat reading such books with their proper value in mind: as guidelines to your practice, but never a replacement for practice itself.

What are action handles? I call action handles levers that you may manipulate to achieve a desired result. For instance, the academic literature gives us the Jobs Demands-Resources development model of burnout, which predicts burnout based on an imbalance between the demands placed on an individual and the resources the individual has to deal with... See more