Word: self-help
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...most entrepreneurs, however, there is an enlightened self-interest at work in their philanthropy. A healthy society creates a healthy market for everything from software to cell phones. Without high levels of education and public health, there would be no one to buy--or build--information-age appliances. "If you want to keep making a profit," says Powell, "then you've got to keep growing the society, so that you have people out there who are workers and consumers." It is a version of the message sold hard in self-help groups, therapy sessions and 12-step meetings: You gotta...
...fall 1998 aid increase--made after a wave of similar increases in aid at Princeton, Yale, Stanford and MIT--allowed students to apply an extra $2,000 in Harvard grants toward reducing their annual "self-help" contribution--meaning loans and job income, which make up a substantial portion of aid. Students could choose whether to apply these grants to loans, job requirements or both...
...characters in Pastoralia try desperately to clamber up out of their ruts. In Winky, Neil Yaniky goes to a local Hyatt to hear a self-help guru named Tom Rodgers tell the paying guests how to get other people to stop "crapping in your oatmeal." Yaniky adopts the speaker's recommended mantra--"Now is the time for me to win"-- but can't muster the appalling selfishness to act on those words and kick his deranged sister out of his house...
...back to the future! I constantly remind my middle-aged seminar participants that George Babbitt and Dilbert are not the quintessential Americans. Who are? Ben Franklin (the father of self-help literature). Ralph Waldo Emerson (self-reliance was his shtick, recall). Walt Whitman. And yes, motivational guru Tony Robbins. And yes, Donald Trump. And... Bentonville, Arkansas' Sam Walton... and Bill Gates...
What if Abby from "Dear Abby" married Cliff from Cliff's Notes? What if somebody spiked Chicken Soup for the Soul with Harvard's Core Curriculum? What if a hapless humanities major condensed his four-year, $120,000 liberal arts education into a 100-page, $9.95 self-help manual...