Walls at the Southern Highlands - Every self-help book ever, boiled down to 11 simple rules

 In philosophy a single naïve question is sometimes enough to make an entire system come tumbling down

— Don Colacho

Is it time for royal commission into the entire consulting industry and how they captured government? 

PwC accused of ‘walking both sides of the street’ on inflated medical device prices

Amazing wall of camellias against the bluest of winter Souther highlands sky

Bowral Borialis  

The Southern Highlands may be just a 90-minute drive southwest of Sydney, but its string of villages, idyllic landscape and impressive producers will have you forgetting all about city life. Here, you can stay in a 19th-century estate, taste locally produced wine and whisky, peruse a whole heap of art and feast at a hatted restaurant — all in just one weekend.

Czech out Ngununggula, meaning “belonging” in the traditional language of the Gundungurra people, the buildings have been transformed into a gallery, café and pavilion comprised of an entrance, reception area, amenities and staff offices. 

Bowral Travellers 🧳

‘Differential enforcement’: Elon Musk weighs in on Donald Trump charges

The Twitter owner has given his view of Donald Trump’s latest legal woes suggesting the former president is being treated unfairly.

"We are now approaching the state of Orwell's perfect dictum, that he who controls the present controls the past, he who controls the internet servers controls the intellectual record of mankind...." - Julian Assange

From Beethoven's 5th Symphony to Britney Spears' ... Baby One More Time, there are some songs that we just can't seem to shake from our memories.

 

Labour of love 💕 

Every self-help book ever, boiled down to 11 simple rules

The first self-described self-help book was published in 1859. The author’s name, improbably, was Samuel Smiles; the title, even more improbably, was Self-Help

(opens in a new tab). A distillation of lessons from the lives of famous people who had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, it sold millions of copies and was a mainstay in Victorian households. Every generation since had its runaway bestseller, such as How to Live on 24 Hours a Day(opens in a new tab) (1908), Think and Grow Rich(opens in a new tab)(1937), or Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff(opens in a new tab) (opens in a new tab)(1997). By now, the $11 billion self-help industry(opens in a new tab) is most definitely not small stuff. Yet when you strip it down, there’s very little new information. After all, we were consuming self-help for centuries before Smiles, just under different names. Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius gave tweet-sized advice in Meditations(opens in a new tab); so did Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanack(opens in a new tab). Even self-help parody isn’t new. Shakespeare did it with Polonius’ “to thine own self be true” speech in Hamlet: basically a bullet-point list from a blowhard. The 21st century has seen a measure of self-awareness about our self-help addiction. There’s the wave of sweary self-help bestsellers I wrote about, such as The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck(opens in a new tab). They hover somewhere between parody and dressing up the same advice as their forebears in earthier language. More recently, there’s a trend you might call meta-self-help: books in which people write about their experiences following self-help books, such as Help Me!(opens in a new tab) (2018) and How to Be Fine(opens in a new tab)(2020), based on the similar self-help podcast By the Book(opens in a new tab). But hey, if it’s all pretty much the same stuff — and it is — why stop at distilling it into a single book? Why not condense the repeated lessons of an entire genre into one article? That’s what I’ve attempted here, after reading dozens of history’s biggest bestsellers so you don’t have to. Here is the essence of the advice I’ve seen delivered again and again…”

More Sunday Trivia:

Average age people in various nations lose their virginity.  “Iceland [Malaysia] fact of the day.”

Crocodile found to have made herself pregnant