SAT Word of the Day:  Astounding – adverb meaning to amaze or bewilder.

There is an astounding amount of self help literature, websites, blogs, services, and seminars.  The self improvement global market is enormous.  Type “self help” into Google and you’ll get almost 38 million hits.  Add the word “program” to the search and Google trims it down to a mere 141,000 results.  I read somewhere that the personal self help industry was a $9 billion market and growing. 

George Carlin said that “There’s no such thing as “self-help.”  If you read a book written by someone else it is not self help.  It’s just “help.”  Self help would be if you improved in some way all by yourself with no outside influence. 

Maybe it should just be called “Personal Improvement.”  Or just “PI.” Or just “π.” 

George Carlin also recommended that anyone caught reading a “π” book should be killed.  He said that life is just not that complicated.  You get up, go to work, eat three meals, have one good bowel movement then go back to bed.  What’s the f***ing mystery? 

But what George didn’t understand was that not everyone has the courage to stand up in front of a group of strangers.  Not everyone has the motivation to practice their stand-up comedy routine.  Not everyone can freely tap into their own creativity and write jokes for their performance. 

There are those of us who need some kind of assistance to harvest as much “life” out of “Life” as possible.  Every one of us is born with everything we need to be an extraordinary person.  William Wordsworth said “… trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.”  But, as we grow older we “perceive it die away, and fade into the light of common day.”  

When we were children we dreamed big, envisioned ourselves in those dreams and used our creativity to make it happen; even if it was only make believe.  And we only lived in the present.  We rarely fretting about the past and we didn’t worry about the future.  We knew we were going to be rock stars, NBA players, pilots, international spies, Olympic heroes, etc… 

But something happened.  Life got busy.  Life got faster.  Time grew shorter.  We “perceived” our dreams “die away and fade.” 

And so many of us struggle with life and find it unsatisfactory.  The dreams, motivation, creativity and courage are somehow missing.  Or, at the very least, we don’t feel them.

So we buy books, and tapes and CDs and DVDs searching for what we lost.   We can’t find what we lost amongst 38 million places.  Those 141,000 programs usually don’t help either.  It is truly astounding.