The Danger of Too Much Self-Help Advice

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People who read a lot of self-help books and blogs are ambitious to change and certainly are working toward a noble pursuit. But I think it it can be dangerous. After a certain point, the more you read self-improvement blogs/books on socializing, the more the gains diminish. And self-help reading becomes an escape tunnel from actually socializing, where one thinks they are getting better but only spinning their wheels.

At one point its time to stop reading on the theory of socializing, and actually start practicing. I think I've reached that point well over. So it's time for me to stop reading (at least for now) and focus purely on actual real life socializing with flesh and blood people.

I've spent so much time talking about socializing on WP, not enough time actually socializing.

No one will ever be fully prepared no matter how much they read, but at some point you have to jump in.

Certainly. I know this all too well. One of these things is easier than the other.

Experience is a better teacher than any self-help book can ever be. All a 'guru' can teach you is what worked for them. The very fact that one has a neurological disorder that causes perceptions and thought patterns askew from the norm means that methods devised and recommended by an NT are likely to be utterly and completely ineffective for an Aspergian mind.

The neurotypical way almost never works for me; I'm not one of them, I don't think like them, their techniques are generally 180 degrees different than what I find works for me. Failure is the best teacher. Once you begin to eliminate what doesn't work, you'll automatically move closer to what does.

For 30 years I listened to self-help writing experts who insisted that it was impossible to write a novel without first creating an outline. So I had a file cabinet full of ideas and scenes and characters and a sense of failure and frustration at the idea that I had to have a grand overarching scheme to tie it all together. Then I read an interview with three very famous and successful writers who all said flat out: "Outline? Oh God, no - I can't write an outline to save my life - I just start from page 1 and go forward." That was 4 years ago and I'm just putting finishing touches on my first ever completed full-length novel.

I understand now something I didn't back then - its Aspergian 'Executive Function' issues that make the notion of an outline seem so overwhelming to me. I'm not so intimidated by the idea of creating a scene, so just writing a scene at a time and allowing the story to sort of unfold organically out of the subconscious works much better for me. Bottom line, the self-help gurus were useless to me and in fact prevented me from achieving my potential by convincing me their way was the only correct way.