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In a conference room on the bottom floor of the Fairmont Copley Plaza in Boston, “A Beautiful Day” by U2 blared through massive speakers on either side of a stage. The audience bobbed and rocked their heads to the music. They stomped the ground and shouted. The three-day self-improvement seminar was food for the soul; this conference room, a utopia; these people, their tribe.
Meanwhile, Graham sat in his chair and avoided eye contact with the plump middle-aged woman beside him, but she introduced herself over the music anyway.
“I’m Madeline,” she said. “I’ve been waitressing at a small restaurant for over a decade now, but I’m finally ready to open my own seafood restaurant in Cape Cod. There’s such a buzz in the air here. I feel so alive! Don’t you feel it?”
Graham faked a smile and nodded. He couldn’t judge Madeline for what seemed to be self-delusion because he used to be just like her. A few years ago, Graham would’ve been hopping up and down to the music too. He would’ve collected business cards from fast friends and followed up by email at the end of the three-day escape. He might’ve sent them links to YouTube videos with speeches from movies and triumphant soundtracks playing in the background. The video of the life-affirming speech at the end of Miracle had been a longtime favorite.
For years, Graham had been a perpetual seminar-goer, a self-help junkie. He’d spent most of his twenties—even a small chunk of his thirties—gorging on personal development. Motivational books, inspirational movies, self-help audiobooks, and workshops had been emotional fuel. He’d read all the great motivation gurus: Wayne Dyer, Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, and even old-timers like Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar, and Napoleon Hill. He could quote lines from James Allen’s self-help classic, As a Man Thinketh: “A person is limited only by the thoughts that he chooses.” Or perhaps Hill’s Think and Grow Rich: “When your desires are strong enough, you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.”
Shaking off the memory, Graham searched the stage for movement as the lights dimmed. A slender man in his fifties with white hair, an impish grin, and a dark blue three-piece suit strutted to the center. He raised his arms over his head and shouted, “Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life!” The audience erupted in applause.
This was Max Title, Ph.D, psychoanalyst and author of the international bestseller Why Say No When It Feels So Great to Say Yes? Fifteen years earlier, Dr. Title had closed his clinical practice to write self-help books for the masses. Nobody quite knew how much he was worth, but judging by the houses he owned in Manhattan and Maui and the Aston Martin he drove, it was rumored he did all right for himself.
Dr. Title was born like all motivational speakers were created. He’d spent most of his life binging on self-help material. However, instead of using personal development books and audiobooks to become a better therapist, he’d consumed too many books, become obsessed, and sunk into the genre as if it were quicksand. He reached a critical mass of knowledge and then made the fateful decision to repackage what he’d learned to create his own self-optimization programs. And the anxious, the unhappy, and the lost flocked to Dr. Title to swallow his psychological elixirs at face value.
Once the crowd had stopped cheering, Dr. Title kicked off the first day of his Ultimate Life Design program. He started with the now-legendary story of how he’d fallen into despair in his early thirties, had an existential crisis, suffered a nervous breakdown in the middle of the night, and then—at rock bottom—experienced profound post-traumatic growth. After his “awakening,” the doctor spent a year meandering through public spaces in perfect bliss. A voice told him to take what he’d learned to the people, so he rented out conference halls and rooms in libraries and coffee shops to offer lectures on how others could “get the life they deserve.”
Graham had attended such seminars before, during which Dr. Title told rapt audiences they could attract
