Photo by Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash

Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Stop Writing About Self-Help

There’s a reason so many cultures use parables.

I was sitting on a washing machine in Amsterdam when my friend planted the idea in my head.

“You get to hear a lot of interesting ideas in your work,” he said. “Why don’t you share it with the world in a blog?”

My work at the time was as an “Open-Space Facilitator” — I used the system developed by Harrison Owen to create small, dynamic, participant-driven weekend conferences. These had no pre-set agendas or speakers — rather, the Open Space system provided people with a place to talk about and explore topics that were important to them at the time.

My friend was right — it meant that I was hearing a lot of very deep and visceral concerns from people, and since none of it was recorded, a lot of the ideas were getting lost along the way.

So for seven years I wrote about Love. Life. Practice. And then I stopped.

The End of History (and Ideas)

Much like many of the critics of personal development writing in the first place, I felt like I was saying the same thing over and over. Sometimes I said it well, sometimes poorly, but very few of my ideas felt like they were original. In fact, I often felt that I…