it's 2700 BC. You're living in ancient Mesopotamia. You've had a great harvest. You've just come home from celebrating some resources with your friends and are contemplating the meaning of life and why the hell you're even here. When something amazing happens. The first book just drops. The Epic of Gilgamesh changes your life. It really explains the importance of making your bed in the morning and creating productive and sustainable habits. And for thousands of years to come, the brightest human rights will can book of the book on the importance of Leverage and Outsourcing and just why you're such a badass. Of course, they don't. While we've already struggled with the same issues self-doubt anxieties depression procrastination. We used to approach these things a lot better. Art poetry theater music used to approach these things in a way that had depth that had passion and eventually was much more effective than the dry self-help books that we have today. Now, despite the title of this video, I do just want to say that

everyone is free to read whatever the hell makes them happy, and I myself very often actually read self-help books. But the reason I'm making this video is because quite often I get told off for almost wasting my time reading fictional books, when actually I really strongly believe that when it comes to self-help or self-improvement or just living a better life, nothing and absolutely nothing tops a good fictional book. A post write every person is capable of transforming a good fictional book into their own personal non-fiction self-help book, which will be a thousand times more effective than any other self-help book out there which is already written as of today. I wanted to break down why I think we should all be doing this and how to do it exactly. Let's get straight into it. We crawl out of the womb surprised to be alone is a beautiful quote by Adrian Mayor Brown, which I think really captures this sense of human existence, which is very often quite alone, disconnected, and craving a connection with someone else. However, she goes on to say that nothing is truly random.

universe has its favorites, and it repeats them again and again. In the same way that our fingerprints are the same shape as galaxies, this repeating nature, this almost fractal nature of existence, doesn't just happen with physical things, but also happens with our experiences. And I think that this is where the self-help genre really comes in. Because on one hand, we have this deep sense of disconnect and loneliness, and on the other hand, we have the realization that other people have been through this too. I am connected, I am part of something, and that other people who have lived in the past have gone through this, and other people perhaps who are living now are going through the same things. I think that this is a journey and a task that we should all do individually, and we are kind of underselling it by outsourcing it to other people who have made these connections and these rules. Self-help books just crassly tell us things and give us information, but literature and art do is give us the elements to come to these conclusions ourselves. And I think that this

realization is just so much more powerful and effective and time enough for Love. At one point, the protagonist says, Of the few things I've learned, is that humans hardly learn from the experience of others. They learn when they do, which isn't often, on their own, the hard way. So it's not only that we learn by experience, is that we only sometimes learn from our own experience, and we might have realized this ourselves. For me, for example, very often I don't do things, or I can't do things, not because I don't have the knowledge, but because I can't apply that knowledge, because it was never mine, it was just given to me from someone else. So I think, where possible, obviously, the best thing to do is to be mindful of things are happening in our own personal lives and learning from them, but the second best thing to do is to gain conclusions ourselves from the things that other people around us are doing. I think that there is just something so much deeper in being able to witness someone's life in full and being able to

observe it, and the lessons that you can get from the things that they are going through are much more effective than a lecture that they can give you. I think that we are hardwired to enjoy storytelling in a way that is much more effective than just like lessons and things being told. For example, if someone was to read a fictional biography of Jordan Peterson, I would get so much more lessons for living my life than listening to his lectures or the books that he's explicitly written telling me to do things. As Jeanette witherson said, I am Telling You stories, trust me. So, I really think that we are hardwired to gain much more and to be able to interpret stories better than we give ourselves credit for. Furthermore, a very important reason I prefer literature is captured by Donald Donahue who says, the poor have been doubly impoverished by the ugliness that surrounds them, and this really captures the fact that living in urban areas, we are surrounded by lack of beauty, lack of Nature, and just ugliness and grayness.

around us. I think that we are very much hardwired to enjoy beautiful things. For example, if we look at a waterfall, or if we look at the Earth from a mountain, or if we hear a beautiful piece of classical music, or if we hear and read something beautiful in literature, we feel something. I'm making everything around us so gray and mass-produced and not unique. I think we have robbed ourselves of so much pleasure from our daily lives, and I feel that self-help books are just a continuation of this damage that is being done. We've gone from mythology, poetry, literature, and arts to just dry productivity advice, and the thing is, these original stories were actually giving the exact same advice. They didn't put just taking so much more care in the experience of the person who is reading them and absorbing them and not being completely explicit with them, but I think we've just stripped that all down and we've just cut down to the chase, which we've done with so many things around us, and I think natural beauty is just so

essential to experiencing a good life. For example, Pascal said, you should always keep something beautiful in mind because it is the power of that which will help us endure what can sometimes be the bleakness of our existence. And this, I feel, is so underrated. And because literature is, I think, a lot closer to this beauty and this nature, it takes inspiration from things that are around us and tries to replicate in a verbal form things that we experience in the world. I think it really captures what is really natural. Jeanette Winterson said, very few people ever manage what nature manages without effort and mostly without fail. We don't know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo sapiens. Who's kidding whom? Taking inspiration from nature and anchoring our self-help and productivity advice to messages which are beautiful within themselves, that care for the form of delivery, make the experience of reading just so much more pleasurable and effective. I think we're naturally curious about the worlds and stories, and we should incorporate these in the

messages that we are trying to give John and Donahue. Also, said it's strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone. So now, let's go to specifically how I transform literature books into self-help books. And the very first thing that I will do is focus on the characters within themselves. And this can be a main character, a protagonist, or a side character. And I'm really seeing them not as someone who's just doing things. So, not as someone who is taking actions to drive the story forward, but more someone to whom things are done. Someone who is kind of being changed and being affected by things that people say around them, by things that happen to them, by things that they are thinking themselves. And therefore, I'm trying to find cause and effect where I can see it and try to interpret and come up for rules for what I see. So, to get very specific example into the lighthouse, Virginia Woolf describes the interaction between a mother and a guest, male guest in her house, where she says, But afterwards, they got on perfectly.

made herself out even more ignorant than she was, because he liked telling her that she was a fool. Now, this is a very powerful paragraph, and especially in contacts, you can really see many layers of human interaction here. And of course, the most obvious one seems to be around the gender roles. So, a woman making herself feel foolish so that a man can feel comfortable and like her more. So, we can analyze this on this level. Also, we can go in deeper and strip it off the gender roles themselves and kind of see this human interaction and this power play and what can make someone who values power feel better about you or feel better about themselves and what this interaction is. So, in the sentence alone, even ignoring the rest of the story, there is so much analysis that we are free to do and insert ourselves on how human nature works and how interactions work. There's no need to read a whole book on like making friends and influencing people and all that kind of stuff that gives these kind of raw lines. Just with this line, we can go back.

and see how she's been interacting so far. How the relationships have happened and we can analyze a lot better and come up with a lot more rules for better understanding friendship and love and human interaction Dynamics. The second way that I love to analyze fictional books is to see how the characters just are. And what I mean by this is that very often I tend to think of what I should be, what I should do, what decisions I should make, and very rarely do I actually think of how to be. How do I exist? What is my daily emotion throughout the day? And what is my experience of this life? This I do not pay a lot of attention to, so I probably should, but I've tried to do this in books themselves. And I kind of try to see this how layer and observing the characters in the book and seeing how are they existing. How do they view life? And what is their primary emotional state? And how are they maintaining this or going away from this to go back to the lighthouse at one point about the

mother, it said she had done the usual trick, been nice. She would never know him, he would never know her. And this is a specific rule and experience for how to live your life. And it kind of shows that balance of how much you open up to someone and what sort of connection you can have at different levels. And this can be seen as a way of living and how much to open up about yourself with the people who are around you and what level of interaction you can achieve with this. And this also becomes an anchor. So every time that there is a rule, it kind of stays in my mind and then I go retrospectively and see what the character has done so far and how this has informed her decision making and also take this role in the future for the book and kind of see all the other decisions that she makes in light of this. And thirdly, for this video, literature books are turned into self-help books by looking at the change and the progression of the characters. Very often, I will pick up a theme for a

character and then I will see what sorts of things they can inform in this direction. For example, Time Enough for Love, there's a character who can teach us how to live a comfortable life with minimal effort. And I came up with, I think, seven or eight points of how to do this thing. Like, for example, there were things like, Have your managers at work observe you when you're doing hard work, and things like this. A very kind of funny, self-helpy tips that could be taken from the book in this way. And on the other hand, I found that one of the main themes in To the Lighthouse was how to deal with depression and how to overcome with depression in your family. And there were a few rules. Again, I don't have to agree with all of them. There are things like, Have a baby or witness pure joy around you, or Have someone who is toxically positive be surrounded by them that can lessen your anxiety. So there are a lot of tips, I think, that the authors were subtly given within the story. So every time

that I have this theme in mind. I will try to approach the book with it. And on the back of the book, so on the back cover, or on the last few pages that don't have any writing on them, I will kind of write these rules one by one. And depending on the book, sometimes there'll be three rules, or ten rules, or 20, or 30, depending on what I want to gain from it. So in this way, by the end of the fictional little story, I've had a really fun experience of kind of seeing Beauty, seeing a storyline, seeing what happens to the characters, feeling connected to people in the world, but also some really strong messages that I can take forward into my life. So as I said earlier, I do still read quite a lot of non-fiction books and self-help books, and I do summarize them up on my website, which you are free to see if you want to kind of see my interpretations or how I approach them, but also most importantly, this also highlights the value of having a personal website, even if you're not in

the stage of your life where you want to build something like this kind of investing in it and having the domain for the future. I find can be super helpful so I'm very grateful to Hoover who are very kindly sponsoring this video. It cost me under 10 pounds to get one that I needed, and most importantly, even if you don't want to do this for yourself, I find that they make a brilliant gift to give someone that you care for. Just buy them a website for a project or a name of something that you know that they like, and gifting it to them to kind of inspire them along the journey of getting started with this thing. I feel is such a wholesome, easy, and thoughtful gift. So there will be a link in my description for a discount on Hoover if you want to fancy doing something like that right now. If not, no worries. Thank you so much for spending this time with me. I hope you have a wonderful rest every day because yourself on others and don't believe.

Forget self-help books, learn how to read fiction properly

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