You will always find what you are looking for.

A friend of mine tells the story of when he bought his new Alfa Romeo. He took delivery of it and drove out of the car dealer’s property. Now he admits the moment got the better of him and he was going a little faster than the speed limit. Sure enough within about five minutes he was pulled over by a police officer.
Now he admits to being a bit cocky at the time, new Alfa and all, so he tried to talk the officer out of issuing the speeding ticket.
“If you’re not careful,” the officer warned “I’ll defect your vehicle.”
It’s a brand you car, barely five minutes out of the showroom. Give it your best shot,” replied my friend, who by this time was ready to take on the world.
It took the police officer 2 hours and 45 minutes of fastidious inspection, but he managed to find 3 defects in my friends brand new Alfa.
“Moral of the story”, my friend goes on to say, “is you will ALWAYS find what you are looking for”
Steve Salerno in his Shamblog post entitled “More poetic sounding bs from folks who gave you the law of attraction”(sic) today has found exactly what he was looking for; more supposedly damning evidence that shows up the scams perpetrated by the gurus of the “self-help” industry.
Now, I will admit that, just as there are in any other field of endeavor, there are people in the self-help industry who twist and distort things for their own benefit. For example, there are some quite “high flyers” who package together enough material to create a ever increasing number of dependent followers, eager to swallow up the next morsel that is made available to them at a highly inflated price.
That is very clever marketing, which may or may not be to your liking. It does not, however, entitle anyone to pass judgment on the material contained in those various programs. That is another issue entirely.
In response to the popular statement ‘if you keep doing the same thing, you’ll keep getting the same results’ Salerno says
“Hogwash…There can be any number of atmospheric reasons
why something that didn’t work in attempts 1through 30
suddenly clicks on attempt 31.”
All well and good if you are conducting some sort of science experiment but the (almost exclusive) use of this phrase is in the area of human experience where the saying holds true time and time again.

In response to his claim
“the polar beliefs(i.e. nuggets of advice that start with ‘never’ or ‘always’) are false and absurd”
I say two things.
First thing is ‘all generalizations (including this one) are fraught with danger’ . If axioms ( defined as self-evident or universally recognized truths) were always prefixed with “As far as it is possible to ascertain, given the accumulated wisdom of human kind down through the ages, which may or may not be proven to be the case at sometime in the future or which may or may not be the case in all places in the universe, as we know, at all times, as we understand it and acknowledging there may be times when it is not necessarily the case… they would tend to lose their impetus

Secondly, an axiom like “The whole is greater than it’s parts” (with an implied, if not stated, ‘always’) is in fact self evident However, with an axiom like “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” an implied ‘always’ is only appropriate in certain circumstances. If on the one hand you are saying “What can be achieved by all components working together is greater than what can be achieved by the individual components working separately” it may well be true effectively all of the time. However, if you are saying by putting the various components together you have more than before you may well be wrong a large part of the time (especially when its me who is putting something together. I always manage to have bits left over when I’m finished in which case its the whole is always less than the sum of its components)
The final point I wish to make is I agree with Salerno when he says
“there are no easy buttons for deciphering life”
however from that point Salerno starts to lampoon what he refers to as “universally valid bullet points” such as 10 Rules, Seven Keys etc etc.
The reality is, such lists are used as a tool or a set of hooks for people to hang their thoughts on. They help to systematize what is a very complex area of human exploration. Given the point of evolution we have reached, many of the ideas and concepts in the yet to be discovered world of understanding need some explanation, some ordering for our inadequate mental capacity to make sense of it. Despite claims to the contrary, no-one has a monopoly on the truth, but by pulling together the various components we have uncovered so far, we have a far greater understanding than we would if we were only working with the individual pieces. Its a bit like a jigsaw puzzle. When you are able to put a number of pieces together it makes more sense.
In conclusion, with a mischievous twinkle in my eye, I have to ask why, given his obvious cynicism, Salerno was watching the particular program that led to his blog post. Was it that he knew exactly where to find what he was looking for?