She gets it!

A pertinent question, courtesy of columnist Ann Marie McQueen, writing in today’s Lifestyle section of The Ottawa Sun: "Why won't Steve Salerno make the millions the subjects of his new book Sham: How the Gurus of the Self-help Movement Make Us Helpless will?" she asks, referencing the Brit version, which was just released last month. She continues, "Will his failure to turn his words to gold have anything to do with the fact that, despite painstaking research and a timely topic, he has failed utterly to come up with a grabby new slogan like He's Just Not That Into You or co-opt an old one like Don't Sweat the Small Stuff?"

Hmmm. Two thoughts here. First of all, drat! Obviously Ms. McQueen got hold of my royalty statements! Also, to be honest, I kinda thought the whole SHAM/Helpless conceit was pretty darn clever in its own right. But her point is well taken. You don’t get rich in America by telling it like it is. A book titled Hey, Maybe You Can Do It—and Maybe You Can’t ain’t gonna sell a ton of copies, after all.

Even though it’s the truth...

Second time's a charm?

Received a nice email from a fellow writer, William Powell Jr.--he does both columns and fiction--who said he read my book twice this past weekend, and...

Twice?

Does that mean SHAM is the kind of book you just can't put down? Or that the writing is so dense and impenetrable that you can't absorb anything on the first run-through? (I've had students tell me that they read a given paragraph of mine three or four times, and I suspect it's not because they just loved my phrasing...)

But applying the rules of positive thought, I shall choose to regard the glass as half full here.... So thank you for the nice compliment, Mr. Powell. And go ahead, live it up--read it a third time if you like...

Running faster...maybe...but where?

Received a couple of interesting emails from former writing student Calvin Tintle of Muhlenberg College (which, improbably, once made me its writer-in-residence), pursuant to my recent posts about Oprah, human potential, and the all-pervading cultural affliction/fiction I've dubbed sportsthink.

Calvin tells me for starters that his philosophies on human motivation stem from his "many years as a competitive track athlete," and that well before that, he'd soaked up much of his go-getter's attitude from his dad, a successful track-and-field/cross-country coach. While at Muhlenberg, Calvin continues, he was exposed to a very intense track coach, "someone that loved to tell us to always push, to always dig deep, and to use his favorite saying, 'to run through the wall because what is on the other side is worth whatever pain you are in right now.' " Thus Calvin would leave team meetings, he writes, "ready to compete and ready to not lose" [emphasis added].

I liked Calvin a lot, and during his semester in my class, I found his perspectives engaging and consistently well-thought-out. And let me add that I would do him an injustice by leaving readers with the impression that Calvin places himself staunchly in Oprah's corner. Not so. During the course of his several emails, he voices a fair degree of skepticism about the hyping of attitude throughout American society, and he too wonders how we go about separating the genuinely uplifting from the insufferably cliched. But confining ourselves solely to the comments I've quoted here, I would ask my former student this (and Calvin, if you're listening, I invite you to respond directly on SHAMblog): How do you know--for a fact--that you were any "readier" to compete because of anything said at those team meetings? In any case, is thinking that you're mentally (or emotionally) prepared to compete the same as being mentally (or emotionally) prepared to compete? Is there any credible evidence one way or the other? Calvin himself hints at the likely answer to such questions when he notes, "Sometimes I would succeed and other times I wouldn't." Point being, if there's no empirical, straight-line relationship between thinking you're a winner and becoming a winner, how do we know that "feeling motivated" is worth a damn?

Reasoning metaphorically from his career in track, Calvin adds that "I think we are always at a starting line of a new adventure, and sometimes we need a push, a reason to actually go at the sound of the gun." I would agree that this is true for many people, perhaps even most people. But can SHAM (or any of its component parts) provide that reason? Can it even play a small, supporting role?

I don't know. And frankly--I would argue--neither does Calvin, Oprah, Tony Robbins, or anyone else.

In truth, a hard-charging, indomitable spirit, in the absence of tactical competency, can be counterproductive if not downright disastrous. As business consultant Jay Kurtz puts it, "You end up running twice as fast in the wrong direction..."

Steve's very own self-help book?

Consider this a short p.s. to my thoughts on Oprah, below.

We can only do what we can do, folks. We may not know--ahead of time--exactly what that is. But there are limits. Human potential is finite. You are only going to grow so tall. You have a fixed number of true aptitudes. And for whatever reasons, whatever inscrutable combinations of nature and nurture, you are only going to go so far in life. Them's the facts. And there may be no single realization that is more central to lasting happiness and peace of mind.

But tell me...who's gonna buy that book?

Click here for something that's worth reading. Don't be put off by the "marxists.org" in the URL. Trust me, I'm no Marxist (as anyone who's read my book, or much of the rest of the stuff listed on my site, is well aware). In any case, what is, is. There's no political component to an honest search for answers.

Food for thought.

If it's true--as Oprah incessantly goads her audiences--that "you can achieve whatever you put your mind to!"--then why is there still only one Oprah?

You mean to tell me that nobody among Winfrey's average weekly audience of some 30 million viewers wants that kind of celebrity? Or even has made a full effort to pursue that kind of celebrity (only to fall flat on her face)?

Come to think of it, why has Oprah herself struggled so much with her weight?

And why am I using so many italics...?

OK, I grant you, the weight thing is a bit unfair. Maybe. But it does go to the heart of this whole "attitude trumps all" mantra that has held sway in American society ever since SHAM's Empowerment wing began beating its drum in earnest. I am reminded of the episode, described in Chapter 5 of my book, wherein NBC's track announcers were so agog at sprinter Michael Johnson's victory in the 1996 Olympics that they couldn't confine themselves to the evidence at hand (like, say, the fact that Johnson was simply faster than his opponents). No; they had to trot out just about every SHAM-inspired buzz-phrase in order to infuse the sprinter's admittedly impressive victory with all sorts of allegorical overtones. "Michael Johnson made up his mind that he simply wasn't going to be beaten today!" gushed one member of the NBC crew, a line that, for one thing, implies that in the past--especially in races he lost--Johnson didn't particularly care about winning. It also seems to say that his Olympic competitors didn't particularly care about winning on that day. (And how the hell do the announcers know what Johnson was thinking or feeling, anyway? Maybe he was looking ahead to a date, later. Or maybe he woke up with a terrible case of diarrhea and thought, "Man, there's no way I can compete today..." Many athletes, notably Joe Namath and David Wells, have confessed that they were in no shape to play, physically or mentally, on days on which they went out and achieved spectacular heroics.) How far are we prepared to take this "logic"? Do we really want to buy into the notion that in every case where A wins and B loses, it's because B gave a less whole-hearted effort than A?

Does no one see the troubling implications here?

Nonetheless, in every $1000-a-minute-or-better corporate speech he gives, baseball's unofficial ambassador-at-large, Tommy Lasorda, cites Kirk Gibson's pinch-hit homer in game one of the 1988 World Series as ipso facto proof of the primacy of a PMA. (A current Wheaties commercial pays homage to the historic event.) Lasorda, who was Gibson's manager in that Fall Classic, uses almost the same language as the NBC announcers: "Kirk went up to the plate determined not to lose." It's worth noting that the pitcher who surrendered the homerun, Hall-of-Famer Dennis Eckersley, was a fierce competitor in his own right. I wonder what he makes of the tacit allegation that he didn't care all that much whether he cost his team a shot at World Series immortality...

And Shape Up! ships out

Dr. Phil is such easy pickin's that one almost hates to pile on when it comes to his latest widely publicized embarrassment. (Notice I said "almost.") The skinny, as it were: Disgruntlement over McGraw’s Shape Up! diet plan, built around his dubious (and now defunct) line of nutrition bars, may well be building to critical mass--this, after three erstwhile Philophiles went to court in Los Angeles this past Monday, accusing McGraw of making false and misleading claims about the supplements' utility. Observers say the Superior Court suit has the makings of a class action. But there’s a deeper question here that begs exploring: What the hell ever made anyone think Dr. Phil was the guy to lead them to the promised land of fitness and weight loss, anyway? Here again we encounter one of the core deceits of self-help, which I emphasize time and again in my book: By and large, its leading practitioners are nowhere near qualified to preach what they practice.

Granted, McGraw does possess a valid degree in psychotherapy (though by his own admission he’d burned out of clinical practice entirely by the time Oprah found him; see archived entries in this blog). But even if we allow him his original credentials…. How do you get from there to expertise in diet-and-nutrition, a discipline that continues to stymie even those who have given their careers and lives to the painstaking, scholarly study of its mysteries? (Presumably you get there the same way John Gray got from his pair of suspect college degrees, and a long period of personal celibacy, to widespread recognition as America's leading expert on relationships and sex.) Suffice it to say that real experts in the genre, like Yale’s Kelly Brownell, are not amused by the hubris of today's burgeoning flock of Johnny-come-latelies, who seek to parlay celebrity of almost any kind into overnight success by appeasing the public's voracious appetite for weight loss. (What’s next? “The D.C. Sniper Diet Plan”?)

The current suit against McGraw also notes that his nutrition bars are based on questionable science. My question: Why does this kind of stuff still surprise people? When you have leading SHAM figures like Tony Robbins talking openly at seminars about the “energy frequency” of foods (a body of nutritional knowledge that, so far as I’ve been able to determine, is unique to Robbins himself) and popular “empowerment” web sites like Oughten House International promising to help you “change your DNA”… At a certain point you start to wonder, is there nothing we won’t believe, in our eagerness to—well—believe?

'Maintenance Text'?

Well folks, it's been a while since my last post, and life hums (un)merrily along in SHAM-land. Tony Robbins continues to use the email address with which I registered for his discussion site to try to sell me videos and sundry other products. Dr. Phil continues to use Katrina and its grim aftermath as a marketing tool for pitching his fall sked. John Gray is all over the tube these days, explaining why Brad and Jennifer were doomed from the start. (You don't really want to know...do you? But if you just can't help yourself, as it were...) Oh and btw--this is purely coincidental, of course--Gray's got a new, live-streaming Web radio show that debuts soon.

The book itself--that's SHAM, for those with memories as short as Dr. Phil's list of things he wouldn't do to self-promote--has its good days and its bad days. People with expertise in such matters tell me they've seldom seen a book with quite this level of Amazon volatility: top 3000 Monday, back up to 60,000 Tuesday, back down to top 3000 again on Wednesday. All very strange; it's almost as if there's some guy sitting in his electronic cottage somewhere, mouse in hand, incessantly ordering then returning mass quantities of SHAM in a never-ending cycle...

I've (mostly) accepted the fact that a sizzling Today Show face-off with McGraw (or Robbins, or Gray, or Schlessinger, et al) just isn't in the cards. And really, such a showdown wouldn't have made much sense, from the networks' point of view: Katie spends her first hour, in effect, vouching for the latest program that guarantees to remove that ugly cellulite, the latest program that guarantees to help you land and keep a husband, the latest program that guarantees to ensure that excessive amounts of day-care don't turn your kid into the next Dylan Klebold...and then she has me on, to explain why everything she just told you for that first hour is a fragrantly steaming pile of b.s.... Can't you just see it!

Sigh. I still can, dammit. I still can...