Beyond the Quick Fix: How I Found Depth After Self-Help
“We read [the great works] to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find. ”
The Hunger for More
I devoured books the way some people binge on sweets—self-help manuals, spiritual guides, popular psychology, even esoteric teachings promising enlightenment.
If a new author or guru claimed to reveal the secret, I was there, notebook open, underlining sentences as if they contained the formula to life itself.
But instead of clarity, I found confusion. The business I had built slipped out of focus as I experimented with various projects that never quite took hold—foundations, seminars, coaching. Each new effort felt like a spark that should have turned into fire, but instead fizzled into smoke.
And yet, I continued to feed myself with books, podcasts, and retreats, convinced that just one more piece of knowledge might unlock the door.
The paradox of self-help is that it begins with the premise that we are broken and thrives on keeping us in a state of perpetual seeking.
If the promise of self-help were true, why did I never stop at the one illuminating book or seminar? Why did I, like so many others, become addicted to the next insight, the following technique?
The industry thrives on that very hunger. I waited for the single satori moment that would transform my life—but the more I searched, the more restless I became.
Lessons Along the Way
Not everything I read was wasted.
Buddha’s Four Noble Truths taught me responsibility for my own peace. Hemingway reminded me that truth must be lived before it can be written. Hesse’s Siddhartha mirrored my own wandering search.
These voices planted seeds, even if I lacked the patience to let them grow roots.
Still, I often felt like a man drowning in a sea of knowledge, mistaking variety for depth.
I understood concepts intellectually, but rarely stayed with them long enough for them to shape me.
I jumped from the Law of Attraction to the subconscious mind, from Reiki to chakras, from leadership seminars to Rumi’s poetry.
Each promised a doorway, but I left before truly entering.
It took years—and one piece of advice from my MFA tutor—to realise what I was missing.
My MFA Tutor’s Lesson
When I was writing my memoir during my MFA, my tutor paused after reading a few of my chapters and said, almost gently:
“Stay narrow and go deep until you hit something true.”
Those words landed like a quiet revelation.
I had been writing the way I’d been living: chasing breadth instead of depth. I wanted to include every experience, every insight, as if completeness would somehow equal meaning.
But meaning doesn’t come from collecting—it comes from carving.
From staying long enough in one place to see what’s really there.
That advice changed not only my writing, but also how I approached my entire life.
From Dazzle to Depth
For years, self-help had dazzled me with quick fixes and slogans.
It was fast food for the soul—tasty, addictive, and ultimately unsatisfying.
Proper nourishment required something slower, denser, and harder to chew.
Depth, I began to understand, isn’t about sophistication or intellect.
It’s about patience, discernment, and the courage to stay with what resists you.
It’s what happens when you stop chasing novelty and start cultivating understanding.
Self-help was my entry point, but philosophy and literature became my deeper current.
Socrates dared me to ask more.
Montaigne showed me that my journal and personal essays are explorations, not answers.
Nietzsche turned my life upside down.
These thinkers/writers didn’t promise transformation—they somehow manifested it in me.
Their works challenged me, but also, they enlarged me.
“Had I stayed only with what was easy or familiar, I would have remained circling endlessly around what was comforting.”
Staying With the Difficult
Depth is born not from following what’s popular, but from staying long enough with what challenges us.
It means being willing to be defeated by a book—to reevaluate, to wrestle, to sit in discomfort until something gives.
It means recognising that Tolstoy offers something more enduring than any pop-psychology bestseller—not because he is fashionable, but because he widens our vision of what it means to live and to love.
My years of wandering through self-help were not wasted. They were the beginning of depth.
They taught me to listen to myself—but also revealed the danger of listening only to myself.
To move forward, I had to aspire to more: to struggle through texts that felt impenetrable, to ask not “What do I like?” but “What can I grow to understand if I let it shape me?”
What I Now Know
Today, I no longer treat any single book, teacher, or practice as the answer.
I see them as companions—sparks that light the next step.
The responsibility is mine: to linger, to reflect, to return.
To keep digging until something inside me shifts.
My so-called failures were not failures at all, but necessary detours in cultivating depth—and shaping a life that feels truly my own.
“Depth, like purpose, is not given. It is earned through patience, persistence, and the willingness to be transformed.”