Personal Request for Draft Reviewers: "Why You Do Stupid Sh*t: Self-Sabotage, Real Sabotage, And How To Live A Better Life."

If you are interested, I've just completed the final review draft of my book, Why You Do Stupid Sh*t: Self-Sabotage, Real Sabotage, and How to Live a Better Life. 

You can request a (free) review copy here: www.selfsabotage.com/request. While you are not (of course) required to give feedback or to endorse the book, the purpose of providing this review copy is the hope that you will do so. If you don't have any interest in giving feedback, please wait until the final copy of the book is ready, since it will undoubtedly be better, and I will make a copy freely available at that time to anyone who wants one.

Book Description:

Most people think their biggest problem is self-sabotage.

They can't stop scrolling, can't stop spending, can't stop reacting in ways they know aren't serving them, and they conclude the problem is somewhere inside, a deficit of willpower or discipline or whatever it is that other people seem to have figured out.

This book asks a different question. What if most of what we call self-sabotage isn't self-sabotage at all?

Why are you not the hero of your own life story? Why have you accepted a story that you are broken, or not good enough? These aren't exaggerations. They are the reality of the running self-dialog in most people's heads, the quiet narrator that never quite shuts up, the one we bury under entertainment and busyness and the next thing on the screen because sitting with it is unbearable.

The degree to which we will distract ourselves to avoid thinking deeply about our own lives is itself evidence of how much is down there.

And why is it so easy for us to blame ourselves? Why, when things go wrong, is the default conclusion that it must be our fault? There is a reason for this. It is not a mystery, and it is not a character flaw. It is a mechanism that has been identified.

This is not another positive thinking book. It is not just affirmations or manifestation or any version of telling yourself a prettier story (although it covers all of those). It is understanding how you actually operate so clearly that you come to a realization most people can never arrive at: that much of what you have been taught about how you work, and how the world works, is not true. Not slightly off. Structurally wrong. And once you see what is really going on, it will change you permanently.

Steve Hargadon spent years talking to people about their education, and he noticed a pattern. When the conversation moved past the performative response, past the surface story, people would often start to cry. What they told him, again and again, was the same quiet verdict. I wasn't one of the smart ones. Always those exact words. A conclusion installed so early and so thoroughly that it felt like bedrock truth rather than something that had been done to them.

That discovery is the starting point for this book. But it doesn't stop at education. The food industry employs scientists to engineer the "bliss point," the precise combination of sugar, salt, and fat calibrated to override your body's natural ability to stop eating, and when you can't stop, you blame yourself. That same pattern, deliberate exploitation followed by self-blame, turns out to be operating across nearly every domain of modern life: finance, social media, healthcare, politics. The machinery gets more sophisticated. The blame stays personal.

Why You Do Stupid Sh*t builds a framework for seeing the machinery clearly and for discovering opportunities to escape its effects. Drawing on evolutionary psychology, institutional critique, and decades of personal investigation, Hargadon makes the case that every human being is running ancient psychological firmware in a world it was never built for, and that the systems around us have learned to exploit that mismatch with scientific precision, sometimes intentionally, mostly opportunistically, while ensuring the resulting harm gets narrated back to you as your own failure.

If you doubt that you can be calmly and confidently secure about who you are, where you're headed, and why, then this book is for you.

 

Cheers,

Steve
Steve Hargadon
www.stevehargadon.com