Inspiration
For those of you who want to listen to the full audiobook, here it is unabridged on YouTube. The text below covers how exactly I convinced myself to transcribe the audiobook, and my thoughts on self-help books in general.
Calmness / Positivity
There is a saying that “reading is like medicine for the soul” in how it nurtures our thoughts and feelings. Self-help books are an extension of that acknowledgement, and they could even be thought of as more directed soul therapy – a concentrated helping, if you will.
Over the years, I have come across self-help books in various ways. Sometimes, it comes through hearing of one in popular culture or online, when curiosity gets the better of me, and I find myself searching it up on Libby or at the public library. Other times, the book arrives through an offhand remark by a friend, or perhaps even a personal recommendation. Over the past few years, however, the referrals have come by and large from one source: my parents.
My parents have been on an almost evangelical mission to bring self-help books to their children (my brother and I). Whether through text messages or email links, they send forth a host of recommendations to the two of us. The authors can be varied – a famous businessman, a hall-of-fame basketball coach, a television preacher – to highlight but a few.
In particular, my father has taken the lead on the subject and even decided to transcribe an entire book, entitled How to Stay Calm and Positive in Life, from an audiobook link on Youtube. Now, my father grew up without access to computers, or even typewriters for that matter, and while now he is obviously familiar with such technology, his typing speed is somewhat pedestrian as expected.
His transcription project first came to my attention when I went home during a week off. I saw him sitting in the kitchen, with complete focus, clanking away at this keyboard. In the computer background, the YouTube video of the audiobook was playing at 1x speed. Every ten seconds, as the pace of the voice pulled way ahead of the corresponding transcription, my father would slide his mouse cursor over the video timestamp to backtrack it to where he was. Forwards and back, forwards and back, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. Proudly, he told me he was already at Chapter 7 or 8, that he would type after work, and that it had only taken him the better part of a month thus far. At that pace, within a few months, he would be able to send my brother and me the completed transcription, lest the ~2-hour-long audiobook be too much of a hassle for the two of us to consume.
His dedication to the project did not surprise me, as family and friends know just how persistent and stubborn the men in our family can be. Even still, I was taken aback at the lengths he would go to produce a document that would likely be unread – unless by significant efforts of persuasion. When I spoke with him further, his reasoning for the undertaking of the project was that he could not find the book for sale online and that he didn’t think we would listen to the audiobook, so if he wrote it all down, we would be able to read it at our leisure.
I was so moved by his dedication that I committed to taking the project off his hands; I would transcribe the YouTube audiobook myself, word-for-word, no matter that it could likely be done by AI software, or that the book was readily for sale online, or that likely no one would read the end result, regardless. Did I mention already that the men in our family can be persistent and stubborn?
Of course, my father protested, but when I showed him how his transcription technique yielded mispellings in nigh every sentence, he acquiesced. So began my transcription of How to Stay Calm and Positive in Life. I realized that the audiobook’s default speed, while painfully slow to listen to, was actually painfully fast to transcribe. Rather than listen to a sentence, pause, rewind, catch up in typing, then restart, I decided to drop the speed to 0.5x. This turned out to be right on the cusp of my typing capabilities such that I could leave the audiobook on play. As mentioned earlier, the previous transcription efforts, though made in good faith, were error-prone, and it was easier to retype each and every word rather than attempt to salvage what was already “done.”
With an audiobook run-time of two hours, the transcription project should have taken approximately four hours to complete, but the real going was much slower. I found that, as many self-help books are apt to do, this one liked to use plenty of aphorisms, complete with punctuation and triple examples. I finished typing up three chapters in one sitting before it felt like my eyes would bug out of the back of my skull. So I stopped for the day – after all, the goal is to “stay calm and positive in life,” isn’t it?
I would complete a few more chapters during my week at home, and though I told myself I would spend a half-hour each day over the next few weeks to churn out the audiobook, other commitments and priorities took attention from the task, and it wasn’t until months later when I found a second wind to power through the transcription over a weekend of a carpal-tunnel-inducing typefest.
The resultant work is attached as a PDF, totaling twenty chapters across thirty pages and encompassing more than 16,000 words. Fortunately, only a novelette in the precise definition.
Transcription of this work has made me ruminate more on self-help books as a whole. Loosely speaking, self-help is a vague term that encompasses a wide array of literature. One could say that the genre itself is as old as time itself, from primordial stories that our ancestors told each other to pass time and teach lessons, to the famous parables of the New Testament or the fables of Aesop, to modern-day classics such as How to Win Friends and Influence People or The Alchemist.
While self-help books cover all sorts of topics – finance, religion, relationships, et cetera – I like to categorize self-help books into one of three subcategories: the Personal Story, the Fable, or Generalized Wisdom.
The Personal Story, demonstrated by Dale Carnegie’s well-known work “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” uses a collection of short, personal essays to convey points of wisdom. These books rely on the author’s own learned examples of successes and failures. Some of these have become almost staples of popular reading in the self-help sphere, such as Rejection Proof or The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck.
The Fable relies on incorporating distinct characters that go on a journey, often awe-inspiring and wonder-filled, that eventually lead to a place or understanding. The Fable falls under the umbrella of fiction, of course, and any work worth its salt should have takeaway lessons, but there are certain books such as The Alchemist that fall into this category. I would even consider a novel such as Siddhartha to fit as a self-help fable, though others might put that down as a self-discovery book, whatever that means.
Finally, we have books of Generalized Wisdom, which rely more on short aphorisms of self-help, often listing three short examples in support. This book, How to Stay Calm and Positive in Life, falls under this subcategory. Of the three groups (that I have arbitrarily created), Generalized Wisdom is the one I find least compelling. Perhaps I have been prejudiced by slogans such as Eat/Pray/Love, but short, catchy how-tos usually do not fit my idea of self-help.
While I used to harbor a disdain for self-help books, I have come to the realization that the beauty of self-help books is that there is no one-size-fits-all. A platitude for one person may be a life-changing way of looking at a topic for another person. And that is how it should be!
Reflection
Stay calm and positive, my friends.