Lesson 3. Stop Buying Self Help Books

My God, can it get any worse than this:

Are You Ready to Be Awakened? Oprah Winfrey’s new book club selection is Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. There are hundreds of blogs about this tripe!

Please, please, please – start enriching your mind people! This nonsense they are selling only serves to line their pockets as they pander to one’s hope for a quick fix :- the effortless “new you.” One does not need to read “The Five People You’ll Meet in Heaven”, “Awakening”, “Who Moved My Cheese”, or that worst one of all: Emotional Intelligence - the Fascinating theory of self-actualization!

I was so worked up about the pap they are selling at my local Dymocks in Soho – I rang up Dr. Randy Bungga for his Top 5 Favorite Books for Self Improvement. Here they are, although I confess I may have had one too many G&T’s to get the order correct:

1. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

2. LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov

3. A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exeley

4. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez’

5. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Misery is almost always the result of thinking too much

Our Guest post today is from Dr. Randy Bungga:

I’m sure who said the above, but it’s a lesson many of us have learned in dealing with the Filipinos. Some would say is a miserable country, fully of poverty, corruption, and misery But ask any Filipina what their secret to happiness is – and the answer, 11 times out of 13 will be – I don’t think so much!

And what dear reader – are you thinking about right now? Why yourself probably! Stop it .. Lose the ego !! it’s not about you! And stop listening to pop music. As Rob Gordon so well put it in High Fidelity: What came first, the music or the misery? So turn off that silly ipod, turn off the TV, and think about the Top 5 things you can do this week to help someone else.

The mind is the master over every kind of fortune… being the cause of its own happiness and misery. Seneca