Publications
Partners
HAVE you been following the backlash against a 2014 blog by Kallie Provencher (rantchic.com), entitled 24 Things Women Should Stop Wearing After Age 30? (The list includes leopard prints – Marianne Fassler gonna lurve that – hoop earrings, short dresses – damn, Victoria Beckham, gotta let ‘em go! – and crop tops. At just 30? Sriusly?)
Who knows why things like this rattle around online for a while and then suddenly gain traction. I loved the recent response from warningcurvesahead: 24 Things Women Over 30 Should Wear, which is basically, and I almost quote, “Whatever the eff they want”. 24 little dynamite picture-packets of inspiration, right there.
“I dare any child on the internet who’s probably younger than some of the underwear I own to try to tell me I can no longer wear [my Doc Martins],” wrote Phoebe Holmes to loud cheers from all women over forty everywhere.
It got me thinking: who exactly is giving us non-stop advice? And why do we trust them? After all, some 22 years ago, there was little old me, clad in nothing but a BA in English and Psychology, writing sex-advice columns. I quickly – and scarily – discovered that people were taking me seriously (cue a massive learning curve about journalistic ethics and responsibilities, and about doing thorough research; and I learnt a huge amount about sex, into the bargain).
Just the other day, I read an article on Medium by Larry Kim called 7 Things That Will Keep You From Being Successful (these pieces are always numbered, have you noticed?), and I Googled him, thinking, “So what do you know about success?” He looks to be somewhere between 35 and 45, and he founded a company focused on online advertising in 2007, which has, it seems, been successful. Cool.
The 'happiest man alive'
But you know what? I’d rather take my advice from someone who’s been at it a bit longer. Like the man in his nineties, a World War II pilot who has had two marriages (the first one lasted about 26 years, the second 45) and declared himself to be ‘the happiest man alive’. I wish I could find that clip again; it’s fun and inspirational. Like many war vets (my father was one), war taught him that you could be happy with very little, and that only people mattered.
Or the other ‘happiest man alive’, a 60-year-old Sri Lankan who’s happy because he’s redefined the job he got after being retrenched – that of security and car guard outside a bakery – as “making people happy”.
These are ordinary people, with ordinary jobs and lives, who’ve experienced the whole rollercoaster, not just the early thrills. They’ve learnt that the storms of life are often unpredictable and inexplicable– the partner who abandons you with three small kids to rear, the cancer diagnosis that comes hand-in-hand with an economic turndown, the seemingly solid company that crashes unexpectedly, leaving you without even a retrenchment package. Respect to those who come out the other side with smiles on their faces and gratitude for what they’ve salvaged.
How much relevant life experience do famous self-helpers have?
Jack Canfield, author of Chicken Soup for everything kind of Soul, from the Cat Lover’s Soul to the Dental Soul (yes, really). In 2010 I read the autobiography of Canfield’s son, Oran, Freefall: The Strange True Life Growing Up Adventures of Oran Canfield.
Suffice it to say that before he wrote his soothing best-seller, Canfield senior dumped his pregnant wife and one-year-old (destined to spend years in and out of rehab) and moved in with a masseuse. He was a pretty absent father, I gather, but made millions off the Chicken Soup franchise (well, what else would you call it); however, I’m not sure I can relate to his life experiences.
Anthony Robbins, whose Awaken The Giant Within was inflicted on me by a soulless boss in the year it was published, 1991. At that time Robbins was all of 31 and had yet to run foul of plagiarism claims (which cost him $650 000, a not inconsiderable amount in 2000).
Robbins was barely out of his teens when he bust out of promoting seminars and became a ‘self-help coach’ – his breakthrough moment was incorporating firewalking into his coaching in 1983, when he was 23. This gives him real-life experience in… what, exactly?
(BTW, back then he charged Los Angelinos $495 for a firewalking seminar; the giant within awakens, neh?)
Or Cornell Professor Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson, who together wrote The One Minute Manager. Dr Ken Blanchard, the Chief Spiritual Officer of The Ken Blanchard Companies (no, I kid you not) went on to create three zillion One Minute titles, while Spencer Johnson, who has a medical degree, famously wrote a book about some little mice called Sniff and Scurry – nicely in line with his first sorties into writing, a long series of morality tales for kids called the Value Tales (The Value of Elizabeth Fry, for example).
I just don’t know that I feel comfortable taking advice from people with little experience in the sort of ordinary workplace in which most of us labour, people whose advice earned them vast and often early success and therefore have long lived lives most cannot even dream of (Robbins had an epiphany about how great his life was on a heli ride).
I’d rather listen to people who’ve striven and suffered and endured, thanks.
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter.
