'Can there really be a system for success?" asks the insurance salesman turned positive-thinking guru W Clement Stone in his 1960s classic, The Success System That Never Fails. (Perspicacious readers may infer his answer to the question from the book's title.) Stone belongs to a bygone era: a pencil-moustached, bow-tied bundle of energy, he made employees of his insurance firm chant "I feel ter-r-rific!" each morning, yet spent vast chunks of his fortune propping up the career of America's least smiley president, Richard Nixon. But one thing that hasn't changed since those days is self-help's obsession with systems. Want to make big money telling people how to change their lives? You've got to have a system.
Anyone can dispense advice. To present your advice as a system, as everyone from Deepak Chopra to Paul McKenna does, is to make grander claims: that it's a comprehensive solution, and that if you master its details - which are unique to the system, of course - success is guaranteed. Good advice is usually simple and timeworn; a lucrative system should be complex and purportedly new. It's a question of branding: relatively few people will pay £10.99, for example, to be told that gratitude makes you happier, though that's a potentially transformative insight. Concoct a Gratitude System (TM) full of intricate routines and jargon, by contrast, and they'll not only pay £10.99: they'll spend another £7.99 for the Gratitude System Thankfulness Workbook, even though it's just a cheap notepad.
The whispered promise of such systems is that they'll render self-improvement automatic, bridging the excruciating gap between knowing how to change and actually changing. Here at last is the sequence of strategies that will let you lose weight without self-discipline, or the time-management method that will spare you from confronting the fact that you're simply overcommitted. But the awkward truth is that it's almost never the details that matter. When diets work, they do so largely because limiting your calorie intake works, not because lemon juice, or cabbage soup, or a specific carbs-to-protein ratio is the previously undiscovered secret to health.
It's not just self-help. For decades, psychotherapists have argued the merits of their different schools (Freudian, Jungian, cognitive, etcetera), while cynics have doubted the efficacy of therapy altogether. Then, in 2001, a study led by the psychologist Bruce Wampold shocked everyone. Therapy was definitely effective, he found - often much more than drugs - but the kind of therapy was almost irrelevant: specific techniques accounted for less than 1% of variance in improvement rates among patients. What mattered wasn't their particular system, but whether they were competent and trusted by clients.
As for Clement Stone, he surely didn't make millions because of a Success System That Never Fails, but because he was relentless, lucky and stubbornly determined to get rich: he tried many things, over and over, and some worked. After all, if success could be reduced to an infallible step-by-step system, couldn't Nixon have employed it, too?
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
