Every day in every way.

Self-improvement manuals. Would you believe I used to be an avid reader of these DIY tomes – why, you could say almost a junkie – once upon a time? I kid you not. I read Dale Carnegie’s How To Make Friends and Influence People and Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking at the impressionable age of twelve or so. I chanced upon both in a cupboard full of books we used to have. Both, if memory serves, were DB Taraporewala’s trade paperbacks. (I can even ‘see’ the rather unfriendly yellow cover with black printing of the How To book.) Being an introvert by nature, it didn’t take me long to believe that these guys really knew the inside secrets of success and happiness. This belief persisted most of my earlier life. I got hooked on to scouring for, buying and studying many more of their brethren. I remember reading Vernon Howard’s Psycho-Pictography. His ‘teachings’ were couched in an esoteric pseudo-mystical lingo. He used parables (called 'Mental Pictures'), I suppose, of his own making. His USP was that by merely reading those gems, the reader’s sub-conscious would automatically and effortlessly absorb the teaching. The catch was that it would work for you only if you let it. (can you believe 'placebo' remedy?) How this proviso could co-exist with the earlier claim of the mind “automatically and effortlessly” absorbing the teaching I simply couldn’t figure out. Anyway, this ‘lift karadey’ stuff didn’t work for me and somewhere along the way I handed over my entire DIY tome collection to an acquaintance who actually believed it could be done – without mirrors. Read a ‘psycho-pictograph’ at http://www.anewlife.org/html/book_quotes.html#PP if you're so inclined.