When people are presented with the choice of admitting that they are wrong, or trying to prove that they are right, most get started on the proof straight away.
Les Parrott’s 3 Seconds The Power of Thinking Twice is a pretty good collection of self help advice. Like all self help books, he starts from the general assumption that you have a problem or you wouldn’t be seeking self help advice in the first place. The table of contents is one of the best pages in the book, here the the six major ideas of the book are laid out and just reading over them is a kind of aha experience. Here a couple of Les Parrott’s self help tools.
1) It takes 3 seconds to empower yourself
The First Impulse-“There’s nothing I can do about it.”
The Second Impulse-“I can’t do everything, but I can do something.”
2)It takes 3 seconds to embrace a good challenge.
The First Impulse-“It’s too difficult to even attempt.”
The Second Impulse-“I love a challenge.”
The other four items are similar self help advice psycho babble, each one showing a bad first response and a good second response. The book is all about Personal Responsibility, but I don’t think the good Doctor ever actually says as much. He talks about owning problems and going the extra mile and he tells the usual mix of They Did It So Can You stories that fill all self help books. But somehow I lost interest very near the end. It stopped being self help advice and started to be yeah, everybody can do it but you, so stop bitching and moaning and get on with it. Which is really the message from most self help programs.
Maybe this one just hits too close to home, as I tend not to walk the extra mile and have not always loved a challenge. In fact most of the time I tend to love sitting around doing not much of anything. To me the stories of Walt Disney having a vision and some guy climbing mountains in record time were not filled with great self help advice. This self help book is all about the stories. His advice on putting his idea to use to ask a few pointed questions at the end of each chapter to get you thinking about what you should be doing. It’s all about fear and his self help advice is designed to get you over that fear. Or at least to see that you can get over your fear.
The book falls short of it’s contents pages, the ideas expressed there are never fully expressed in any meaningful way.
The book’s introduction pretty much says everything you need to hear. In the rest of 3 Seconds the author gets so wrapped up in ‘sharing’ his countless ‘inspiring’ stories that he has forgotten a cardinal rule of self help- we don’t want to hear about someone else doing incredible things, we want to know how we can do them ourselves. And even in the introduction he can’t help peppering it was personal antidotes about bad service. Still, it is a good idea to move from an attitude of ‘whatever’ to an attitude of ‘whatever it takes.’ I just think maybe a subliminal self-help CD might be a better way to go. I like Kelly Howell.
