It's estimated that Americans spend $11 BILLION (That’s a B – Billion) dollars a year on self-help products – everything from self-help books to spiritual DVDs to diet pills. Personally, I think that's a very LOW estimate; especially when you consider all the weight-loss programs, exercise equipment, business books, and everything else you could put in the category of "self-help".
And yes, I know there are a lot of other, fancier terms for this category: personal growth, self improvement, professional development, etc. But for now, let's just agree to call it "self-help". But I actually call most of this information SHELF-HELP – because that's where most of it goes – on the shelf along with all the rest of the stuff you've bought. So let's just say that Americans are "only" spending $11 Billion dollars a year on SHELF-help products. Now, I want you to think about this in even more concrete terms:
How much money have you spent on SHELF-help products in the last year, two years, five years?
If you're like most of my students, the number is probably anywhere from $1,000 to $30,000. (I've had many people come up to me in my seminars, some near tears, and tell me that what I shared with them in 30 minutes saved them over one million dollars.)
So here's the $11 Billion Dollar question:
Why, with all this time, money and energy being spent on "self-help", are so few people actually living the life they really want?
Another way to ask this is:
Why are millions of people who have spent so much time, money and energy trying to improve themselves, still going down the road of life with one foot on the brake?
There actually is an answer to this seemingly unanswerable question. But like most problems, to answer this question, we must first answer a deeper question…
To find the answer to why so many people are holding themselves back from success, the deeper question we need to answer is this:
What actually causes human behavior? I will discuss this topic on my succeeding post.