Seven ways to make self-help actually helpful
When I was younger, I hated the idea of self-help. Despite having spent a fair amount of time in my local bookstore, I don’t recall ever browsing the self-help section. I thought all those authors were charlatans selling the same snake oil in a shiny new package.
Why I wrote this book
This book began with a question I could feel long before I had the words. In 2005, three years before the global financial crisis, I was a senior in high school. Even though many of us were successful in getting into college, there was an undeniable feeling that the world was moving farther away. Away from our ideals. Away from reality.
Stranger in a strange land
I first had the idea of Alien Nation in the summer after high school. I was writing a short story titled The Artifice, inspired by 1984 and The Matrix, and as soon as I finished it, I thought about what I would write next. There was a feeling that had occupied my mind for some time, amplified by the uncertainty I felt after high school. I didn’t know what I wanted to do in life; everything seemed so distant and unreal.