TJL #17: How to write self-help books

Or at least one paragraph...

Dec 09, 2020

Hi friends,

Welcome back to Today Jan Learned (TJL) #17. In this newsletter I try to share something interesting every day. If you haven’t subscribed already, you can do it right here!

Let’s jump right in

Let’s take a look at this paragraph from the book Indistractable:

How is this paragraph structured? The basic structure of this paragraph is claim, then evidence. I colour coded the paragraph so it becomes immediately obvious:

green: main claim of the paragraph
red: evidence 1, quote from study
purple: evidence 2, quote from book
green: evidence 3, quote from study

This leads us to a very convenient two-step formula for self-help content.

How to write self-help content

Writing self-help content is easy:

Step 1. Make a claim
Step 2. Provide some evidence

That’s it really. Have some stuff to say, then back it up with evidence. This evidence doesn’t even have to be scientific. It can also be quotes from other authors, books, articles, etc.

The more interesting question

The more interesting question, to me at least, is how can we read in such a way that we can write the way I described above? How can we build a writing system that enables us to do this? There are two options in my opinion: top-down and bottom-up.

Top-down workflow

What I mean with a top-down workflow is that you start from the top (the claim) and look for evidence that supports that claim while you are reading other material. In this example that would look something like this:

Start with the claim: Hedonic adaption is a reason that satisfaction is temporary.
While reading other material look at whether what you are reading right now supports this claim

This to me seems like a very inefficient way of writing and researching. However, there is another approach.

Bottom-up workflow

A bottom-up workflow means that you start from the bottom (the evidence) and you come up with claims that you can logically deduce from the evidence. For this paragraph that would look something like this:

Start with the evidence. Take each piece of evidence and store it somewhere.
Look at the evidence and see whatever claim it supports

This to me seems like a more efficient way of writing. You just need to keep track of all the pieces of evidence that you have, where you got it from, and what claim it supports.

Recap

Writing self-help content is easy. Just make a claim and back it up with some evidence. What is more interesting is the system generating such content. I believe the bottom-up workflow to be the best contender for this but I still have to play around with it and see whether it actually works.

That’s it! You can find me on my website janmeppe.com and on Twitter at @janmeppe.

Thank you so much for reading. See you next time!

Previous TJLs

Bonus

The full paragraph

Boredom, negativity bias, and rumination can each prompt us to distraction. But a fourth factor may be the cruelest of all. Hedonic adaptation, the tendency to quickly return to a baseline level of satisfaction, no matter what happens to us in life, is Mother Nature’s bait and switch. All sorts of life events we think would make us happier actually don’t, or at least they don’t for long. , such as winning the lottery, have reported that things they had previously enjoyed lost their luster, effectively returning them to their previous levels of satisfaction. As David Myers writes in The Pursuit of Happiness, “—passionate love, a spiritual high, the pleasure of a new possession, the exhilaration of success—is transitory.” Of course, as with the other three factors, there are evolutionary benefits to hedonic adaptation. , one constantly strives to be happy without realizing that in the long run such efforts are futile.”

And its footnotes:

Page 30 “” K. M. Sheldon and S. Lyubomirsky, “The Challenge of Staying Happier: Testing the Hedonic Adaptation Prevention Model,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38 (February 23, 2012): 670, http://sonjalyubomirsky.com/wp-content/themes/sonjalyubomirsky/papers/SL2012.pdf.
Page 30 “” David Myers, The Pursuit of Happiness (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1992), 53.
Page 30 “” Richard E. Lucas et al., “Reexamining Adaptation and the Set Point Model of Happiness: Reactions to Changes in Marital Status,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84, no. 3 (2003): 527–39, www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-843527.pdf.

Example of a bottom-up workflow

What would this look like in practice? For example consider the following piece

You ask advice: ah, what a very human and very dangerous thing to do! For to give advice to a man who asks what to do with his life implies something very close to egomania. To presume to point a man to the right and ultimate goal— to point with a trembling finger in the RIGHT direction is something only a fool would take upon himself.

Hume thinks that giving advice is dangerous and something “very close to egomania”.

I am not a fool, but I respect your sincerity in asking my advice. I ask you though, in listening to what I say, to remember that all advice can only be a product of the man who gives it. What is truth to one may be disaster to another. I do not see life through your eyes, nor you through mine. If I were to attempt to give you specific advice, it would be too much like the blind leading the blind.

Giving specific advice is like “the blind leading the blind”. All advice can only be a product of the man who gives it.

Today Jan Learned