STOP Reading Self Help Books, Read These 5 Instead

0:00 What if I told you that most self-help books are just repackaged marketable fluff, easy to digest, but with little real impact on your life? Well, in this video, I'm going to reveal five philosophy books I found over my years as both an academic and entrepreneur that you probably have never even heard of, but which reach far deeper than any self-help book. These are books that will transform you into the type of thinker who sees beyond the surface deep into levels of awareness that most will never achieve. Starting with the first book, Similakra and simulation by the French philosopher Jean Bodriard. I first encountered this book late in my life. In fact, I discovered it soon after I had walked away from my second business. And by that time, I had spent

0:46 a good eight or nine years in business, having read possibly hundreds of self-help business and finance books. But this book, it affected me completely differently than all of those other books. You see, in this book, Bojiard argues that our modern world and our entire life in it is constructed around what he calls similacra. To understand this concept, consider what you see when you scroll on Instagram, Tik Tok, or virtually any social media platform. What do you see on there? Even if the accounts you see are only those of your friends, what you see is not that person. Instead, it's a curated version of that person. a version of reality created just for you to be palatable to you, to be attractive to you, to make you feel a certain way and consume more and more similar content. Consider even that word for a moment, content. Why do

1:32 we no longer talk about art or even use the term art to refer to what online creators produce? Interestingly, the word content seems to have entirely replaced the word art. In fact, the verbs themselves have even changed. When have you last heard of someone consuming art? No, they appreciate art, yet they consume content. The words we use themselves suggest that we are always hungry in a sense for what Bodriard calls hyper reality. The reality in which the curated image of the influencer has become more real than the person with all their flaws. The reality in which the perfectly saturated photo of the countryside has become more real than the experience of walking there with the wind blowing through your hair. And the reality in which the imitative

2:19 voice of a chatbot or the comments in a live stream group chat have become more real than a conversation over coffee. When I read this book, it helped me realize that for the longest time in my business life, I always felt like I had to project this fake person to the world that wasn't truly me. If anyone asked me how my business was going, I always had to tell them, "It's going fantastic." With a smile on my face, always, even when the reality could not have been further from the truth, I always had to wear some fancy suit to project an overblown image of success, even though that persona wasn't really me. And now I couldn't even care less about wearing suits or trying to project some specific curated image of myself. Where are you accepting these similacra in your own life? And how are you projecting them? How could tapping into the reality in

3:07 itself transform your life? Well, these questions speak directly to the relevance of the next book on this list of grammatology by Derida. Now, for all you philosophers out there, I can hear just about half of you scoffing at my recommendation here, but hear me out. And for all of you out there not familiar with philosophy, let me explain this a bit. I'm actually a published academic author in a field called value theory, which examines both the philosophy and the cognitive science behind the concept of value. And I've traditionally approached value theory from what's called the analytic school of thought. I won't go in depth into what this is, but suffice it to say, it's typically seen as very much opposed to thinkers such as Dereda, who is what is called a post structuralist. In short, these schools of thought typically don't like each other very much. And I used to feel the same way

3:53 about Dereda and this book. In fact, there was a point in time when I literally called his work trash. But the thing is, timing is everything. More than 10 years after I read this book, I recently went back to it with new eyes and a new understanding. You see, Dereda, like all postructuralists, doesn't believe that truth and meaning are inherently fixed or objective. Instead, he believes that truth and meaning are situated and always emerging, never final. As Dereda famously states, there is no such thing as outside the text. In other words, truth is bound up in textual interpretation. In that sense, there is no one person who has complete authority over what the truth is. So, it's important to note that I still don't agree with many of his ideas on various

4:38 philosophical grounds. However, ask yourself, do you have to fully agree with someone to learn from them? No. Yet, I've learned a lot from Dereda's work that has helped me understand truth and meaning more fully, and it can do the same for you. You see in the analytic school there are thinkers such as Burch Russell, Alfred Tarsski, Gareth Evans and John Surl who have extensively analyzed truth and meaning yet who haven't in my opinion fully captured what truth and meaning are. So for instance when we look at the concept of probability fundamental to science and to our very understanding of the universe, we don't find one fixed concept but instead we find interpretations. In some real sense, it's still a mystery exactly what even probability is. And the closer we look at even mathematics and logic, we find

5:24 thinkers such as Kurt Good, who showed that the fundamental axioms of mathematics cannot be proved. Truth, it seems, is situated, at least in the sense that the more we grasp for it, the more elusive it becomes. But does this mean that truth and meaning are inherently subjective? I don't think so. It just probably means we aren't advanced enough as a species, at least yet, to find the answers. And what this book has taught me above all is that we have to learn how to feel okay living with uncertainty, with the idea that nothing is fixed and that anything could change at any time. We have to learn how to be comfortable with the discomfort of not knowing all the answers. And this is very similar to the lesson we get from the next book on this list, The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Carl Pauper. Now, Popper comes from the analytic

6:10 school of thought, very much opposed to Derida. Yet, the spirit of his thinking resonates with me in a similar way. You see, recently I went out to walk my dog. And then I came back to the gate of my apartment complex only to find that when I used my key to try to enter through the gate, the lock simply wouldn't turn. It was stuck. Maybe due to humidity, maybe rust. I have no idea. But there was a lady on the opposite side of the gate who could have pushed open the gate for me and let me and my dog in. yet she didn't. But let's circle back to this story in a bit to see how Popper's ideas concretely helped me here. For now, let's understand what his actual ideas are. You see, Popper was what's called a fallibleist. He believed that we never prove something out there in the world to be true by confirming it. In fact, he rejected what is called basian

6:56 reasoning. And I believe he'd probably reject all of basian statistics altogether because this form of reasoning, widely used in the sciences, by the way, measures whether a hypothesis is likely based on confirmation. The more evidence we collect in favor of our belief, the more solid the hypothesis is. But Popper rejected this idea completely though. And although I think there are lots of good reasons to use basian statistics, just reflect a moment on the problems with the following general premise. The more evidence we collect in favor of our belief, the more likely that belief is to be true. So what's the issue with this? Well, as Popper argues, we can pretty much confirm anything we believe. In principle, it's possible to collect evidence for nearly any belief, even the craziest belief. This phenomenon is what is called confirmation bias. And I mean,

7:42 think of all the times we collect what seems like convincing evidence only to construct an echo chamber or bubble for ourselves of a false reality. Going back to that situation I was recently in with me and my dog trying to get through the gate. This lady once again simply stood there as I struggled with the key. Assuming she would just open the gate for me, I said nothing. And then finally, I asked her, "Could you please let me in? I'm having trouble with the lock." At that point, she proceeded without a word to walk away from the gate. Thinking she hadn't heard me, I called her back to the gate to politely ask her to let me in. As she walked away, countless thoughts went through my mind as I collected multiple pieces of evidence. One, she didn't say anything. She's just a weirdo. Two, she had a frown in her face. She must be a miserable person. Three, I clearly had a

8:29 key and she wouldn't let me in. She's a rude person. And so on. A better approach, Popper argues, is falsification. In other words, with respect to any belief you have, don't try to confirm it. Try to prove it wrong. Try to find exceptions. Try to find counterarguments. Try to find alternative explanations. Could this lady have been having a bad day? Might she have thought I could be tricking her and she didn't feel safe? We're constantly making conclusions based on evidence we pick and choose until we've wrapped ourselves up in our own realities, our own worlds. And as we see in our world today, living our whole life like this even becomes dangerous. Which speaks directly to the next book on this list, The Ego and Its Own by Max Sterner. Written in the 1800s, this book was a direct response not only to capitalism, but also to Marxism, to

9:14 nationalism. In fact, it was a response to all isms. Sterner believed that all abstract concepts were fairy tales, illusions, what he called spooks, essentially ghosts. We live our entire lives, Sterner believed, controlled and manipulated by these abstract entities. Interestingly, these entities, entities such as religion, gender, justice, even human rights, aren't even things we can touch or see or feel. Yet, we are entirely obedient to them. and they control our thoughts and our lives. Now, do you have to entirely agree with everything Sterner argues? No. Just as we saw with Dereda and in fact with respect to all thinkers. But can you learn something from each thinker? I believe so. Something I see as extremely pervasive in our world today is an allegiance to exactly what Sterner

10:00 feared. Too many of us hold so strongly to identities we can't even see, touch, or feel to concepts and ideas that are vague and illdefined. The problem, as I see it, isn't the concepts themselves. It's the fact that we are rarely precise in defining them and instead hold them up as a catchall to replace real conversation and depth. For instance, we hear phrases constantly such as he believes in X. And we never want X in our country. Yet, it's barely ironic I've used X here rather than a real belief system since it usually bears just about the same depth of meaning. Out of intellectual laziness, we name some X rather than a real cause. We blame X rather than working to understand the real problem. This is

10:45 how, as Sterner would say, we let X, whatever that happens to be, rule our mind. But you can be a critical thinker. You can practice asking deeper questions. You can practice communicating more clearly with people. In short, the freer you are from isms, the more you become a master of your own mind, and ultimately the more good you can bring to the world. And this dovetales perfectly with our last book on this list. A book that has made a huge contribution to both my intellectual work and my personal life. And that book is natural goodness by Philippa Foot. Back when I was researching for what would become my first academically published text on value theory, I encountered Foot's work on the philosophical justifications for morality. You see, back in the early 1900s, the thinker GE Moore posed a

11:31 challenge to all moral philosophy. And that challenge was called the open question argument. To understand this argument, consider this question. Why is food good? Well, we can come up with some common sense answers such as it's good because it helps us live and survive. But then we can simply come back and ask a similar question. Why is living and surviving good? From here, we might strain a bit and try answering this further. We might respond something like living and surviving helps us have fulfilling experiences. But are you starting to see the problem? We can simply further ask the question, but why is having fulfilling experiences good? And this was exactly Moore's point. The question of why something is good seems to be open, meaning it is infinitely regressive and can go on forever. In

12:16 fact, the more you study philosophy, the more you realize this pattern is not unique to goodness or value. A similar regressive question could be asked of what makes mathematical axioms true, what makes probability valid or what the very definition of meaning and truth are. And although it would be getting a bit too technical here to discuss the solutions various thinkers have come up with, let me simply lay out the broad conclusions foot has made with respect to goodness, value, and ultimately morality. How these have made an impact on my own life and the impact they can ultimately make on yours. The linguist Noom Chsky argues what more and more evidence from the cognitive sciences seems to suggest, namely that we humans are preloaded genetically, so to speak, with certain concepts that shape how we perceive reality. Logic is one of these

13:02 preloaded features, and so are language and grammar. And as I and others have argued, based partially on Foot's work, so is morality. Foot analyzes the natural world and specifically the growth and development of animals and plants and argues at least on my interpretation that there is some necessary grammar embedded in the way we speak about value and in fact that this grammar is a necessary feature of our mind. In short, Moore's question why is living and survival good is self-ansering. Just as 1 plus 1 is foundational to the concept of math, the concept of life is foundational to the concept of value. The implications of this are important. Interestingly, most philosophers in the Western world have historically left discussions about how we should treat nature almost completely out of the scope of inquiry. And if they

13:48 have addressed questions on ethics with respect to how we should treat nature, the answer has always been human centric. In other words, how we should treat nature depends entirely on how it affects us. But Foot seems to have flipped that conversation entirely on its head. It speaks to a larger question entirely from how should we treat other people to how should I behave in the world with the knowledge that my actions not only affect me and other humans but the entire world at large. It seems to me that there are few questions more important than this. But the most important question remains. How will you answer that question for yourself? If you want to keep leveling up your critical thinking to make a massive impact not only on your own life but also on the lives of countless others, then be sure to watch this next