Something's wrong here...

I've read that if I learn to exhibit positive behaviour, I will end up becoming a person with positive-thinking; that if I imitate successful people, I will become successful. I even read somewhere that if you simply improve your vocabulary, you will become intelligent because intelligent people have big vocabularies!! Bah! I've been building my vocabulary consciously over the past many years and yet am nowhere near being a genius than when I started out :-p

The underlying assumption in all these theories is that changing one's external behaviour causes a change in the internals. Nothing can be farther from the truth; while I do appreciate the good intention of these self-help authors (they only intend to do good to their readers), the results are often not very satisfactory. This is because their approach is flawed: if you want to make shiny jewellery, you don't make it out of iron and then give it a gold coating; instead, you make it out of gold and then polish it. Likewise with changing oneself - you can't appear to be a perfect gentleman forever if you really are not one. A rotten egg will always smell bad, no matter how much perfume you smear it with. A good-looking shell on an ugly interior is no match for a beautiful interior, even if unpolished.

The key to becoming a better person is to become a better person. Sorry, I couldn't resist that one <g>. What I wanted to say was that you can't aim at become a better person merely by adopting certain manners of speech and behaviour, without bothering to understand the underlying character traits that give rise to those manners of speech and behaviour in the first place. For example, just acting courteously on a few occasions, or even a lot of occasions, doesn't make me a good person. The pretence will have, of course, convinced many people about my goodness, but that's besides the point. The big question here is "has it made me a good person?" Being a good person is not contingent on being courteous, just as being optimistic is not contingent on cocky talk. Of course, when you become a good person, you'll tend to be courteous; when you are an optimistic person, you'll tend to talk about the positive aspects. But approaching matters the other way round is futile and only ends up getting you frustrated and wondering where you went wrong.

Likewise for every other "attitude" that you're trying to learn: it's better to try and analyse the underlying trait and work on acquiring it rather than stop with adopting those fancy "positive" attitudes. A clarification might be in place here: adopting new attitudes after one understands those traits, in order to consciously develop oneself internally and externally is fine; focussing only on external behaviour is not.

I am not sure if I got my point across. In case you're keen on discussing this further, leave me a comment / an instant message / email and we can take it from there :-)