[personaldev] The hypocritical self-help guru = The priest who downloads porn

[mattbell]

I had the amusing thought that many self-improvement gurus probably suffer from the same secret hypocrisy as the priests who rail against the sins of the flesh and then go home to download porn onto their computers.  Let's imagine such a self-help guru, who secretly struggles with procrastination and lack of focus even as they publicly preach their techniques for staying on top of things.  Would they be a good person to learn from?  No, because they're not being intellectually honest, so they have no ability to really evaluate their own performance.  Thus, it's worth looking for people who are able to admit their own failures and analyze them in a constructive way.  This blogger: ( http://dirtsimple.org/ )  who I learned about last weekend, appears to do just that.  He's someone who has struggled through a lot of things related to mental orientation and is public about his own continuing challenges even though he heads up some mind hacker's guild and has lots of people following his blog.

It's probably also not necessarily a good idea to try to learn organization from from someone who's always had a natural talent for organization.  One of the many interesting points brought up by the excellent book Refactor your Wetware is that experts are not necessarily the best people to teach a skill to novices.  Experts are so good that most of their skills are automated as intuition and not easily explainable in a verbal way.  Intermediates, on the other hand, are more able to teach novices because their skills are still declarative as opposed to intuitive.  Of course, there are experts who are good teachers, but that's because they have specifically studied the act of teaching and have looked at the skill acquisition paths that will work well for novices.  The book's analysis of these issues is based on the Dreyfus Model of skill acquisition. 

Comments

[il-capitano-z.livejournal.com]

In the same line of reasoning, that is why tech support is very, very difficult sometimes. Explaining how to do something intuitively technical to someone who is completely non-technical, and over the phone even, becomes quite a challenge. Actually come to think of it, I seemed to know a whole lot more than some of the teachers who taught introductory computing classes... maybe they were better teachers because they were intermediates?

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

PJ comments a lot at Less Wrong, I find him very interesting. I hope he someday writes his book b/c I want to learn his techniques!

I hadn't realized "Refactor your wetware" was out, thanks! I saw his Google talk.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

Let's imagine such a self-help guru, who secretly struggles with procrastination and lack of focus even as they publicly preach their techniques for staying on top of things. Would they be a good person to learn from? No, because they're not being intellectually honest, so they have no ability to really evaluate their own performance.

I don't know if this is entirely right. Why should the teacher's ability to evaluate their own performance be relevant? It seems that what you need is either a teacher who has the ability to evaluate your performance (if you're having one-on-one teaching - just think of an olympic figure skating coach who can't do most of the things she trains her client to do) or at least a teacher who has a method that can work for you. If the method doesn't actually work for the teacher, then I can see, that's definitely a strike against the method, but if you see relevant differences between the situation of that person and yourself, then maybe it shouldn't matter.

Intellectual honesty may be helpful, but I don't think it's actually necessary.

I do agree with you about experts vs. intermediates, in many cases. Of course, it's going to depend on what you're learning. For some subject matters, expertise is more important in teaching, because you want to be able to answer complicated questions that come up naturally in thinking about the simple things. If this is a subject matter where the abilities involved remain declarative rather than becoming intuitive, this shifts the balance. (I suspect this is why it makes sense in academia to have the same people doing research and teaching.) But ideally, you want someone who knows how to teach things, in addition to being expert, and retaining the ability to think declaratively rather than intuitively about the skills involved.

[zond7.livejournal.com]

As someone who spent a lot of time hanging around self-help organization gurus and was briefly considered one, all of these observations ring absolutely true.