Thinking your life better, by yourself - a strange concept?

There are many courses -and books also -  that purport to help you improve your life, make it better, make you better, make you better able to handle what fate throws at you; some are super professional, smooth and clever, others are lovey-dovey amateur affairs. All ostensibly have the same goal, and that is to make you a better, more complete, human being, in control over whatever comes your way. The big question is this: do you need this stuff and can it really help you?

Please ignore my old man's quibbles, as I do not believe in any course/book/whatever that tells you how to live, how to run your life. My credo - applied to myself only - is to live one's life creating one's own philosophy along the way, learning, absorbing, adjusting. Read - and read a lot, please - but do not be in search of 'how-to' manuals but of inspiration, sparks, wisdom in any and every form. Read, absorb, evaluate and dismiss whatever you feel is not useful to your purpose; if you discover things that you are not ready for but feel may be interesting further along the line, put them to one side and remember them for perusal at a future date.

Coaching I have only found useful in specific situations, to learn  skills and tactics for a sport or a specific activity. I do not believe in 'Life Coaches' or gurus, nor do I believe in people with all the answers, especially not now in my late middle age - I have never seen an all-wise, all-knowing creature anywhere, ever. On the contrary I have come across individuals who CLAIM to be all-knowing, ones who know little but profess to know a lot (shysters, really...), useless and dangerous individuals seeking to take advantage of the susceptible and the gullible; they are vermin and should be avoided like the plague. But I have  met people who possess little bits of wisdom, are happy to share them and have the self-knowledge to accept that what they know is limited; their biggest strength is that they believe in the search for knowledge and wisdom, not the possession and exploitation thereof.

But we are funny old things, we human beings, always looking for shortcuts to our goals. We love believing that someone, somewhere has the answers, that he/she knows what there is to know, secretly controlling things and preventing us from finding the answers. And we persist in this delusion, stubbornly refusing to understand the value of the journey to knowledge and understanding, which contains few, if any, shortcuts.

Boys and girls, you cannot cheat your way to wisdom of any kind; you can learn from others, however, through observation and evaluation, but you need to be open, receptive and brutally honest with yourself. Try it, you may even like it...