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.

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 matt... See more

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

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 dat... See more