Self-Help Books, Top-down vs Bottom-up
I pit two self-help books against each other, and level-up from both. The books are Ray Dalio's Principles and David Allen's Getting Things Done. Both are NYT bestselling, authoritative, and on the 640-650 bookshelf at the library. David Allen's book is "hailed as the definitive business-self-help book of the decade (Time)" according to the blurb on the back. And Ray Dalio's book is, well, written by Ray Dalio.
Principles takes a top-down approach to self-help. This book reads like a list of someone's categorical imperatives, listing out principles that enables what Dalio defines as success, asking the reader to synthesize the material by challenging its contents. Dalio gives his reasons like a didactic father figure, though this book is clearer and more secular than alternatives to books in this category like Peterson's 12 Rules for Life. By being able to program unchanging principles into the human, we become the machine that lives the life to reach our goals.
As the title Getting Things Done suggests, it's about mentally enabling oneself to get things done. The bottoms-up approach to managing action is key argues the book; life is a constant planning around the action itself. If something is going to take less than 2 minutes, just do it. When something scheduled comes up, do it. Make references and mental maps, and always make lists of possible future do-ables, and at the end of the week, host weekly reviews to empty your head and update future do-ables. From cognitive science to capturing action, the book dissects the ecosystem of action from an opinionated point of view.
We're back at the philosophical conjunction of doing vs being for self-helps and life in general. As a general side-note, neither of these books are succinct, GTD reads like an opinionated instruction manual at times while Principles sometimes sounds like a parent that makes his kids wear ties. Though I had a much better time reading Principles, both have been very helpful in providing clarity.
Links to books below.