Presta Valve Locknuts, aka Valve Rings

Introduction

As you’ll surely agree, this post is long overdue. It stems from my post “10 Fascinating Facts About Inner Tubes” that I wrote over 13 years ago. Fact #4, “Valves can fuel sibling rivalry,” described the war I fought with my brother Geoff over Presta valve locknuts, aka valve rings:

We had an ongoing disagreement about the usefulness of valve rings. I argued that they helped you keep the valve straight, helped you get the pump chuck on there, and enabled you to ride a flat without the tube bunching up around the valve. He argued that … wait a second, this is my blog, I’m not going to bother giving his silly arguments! He can comment on this post if he wants his position articulated.

Geoff was forever stealing the rings from my bike’s valves to deprive me of them. I had to keep spare valve rings on me in case I discovered his treachery too late, like during a ride. In retaliation I was forever putting rings on his bike’s valves. There was a lot of cussing.

(There’s more to that story, which you can find here.)

In response to that post, M—, a guy on my road cycling club, who raced with Greg LeMond back in the day and who has always been our club’s Obi Wan Kenobi, replied, “Valve rings, as you call them, were always the sign of novice nerd-dom, like crank bolt dust caps. Your brother was right.” This really stung, since a) it came from our guru, and b) I never used crank bolt dust caps, because I knew better, but somehow I didn’t know better about these locknuts. (For more on crank bolts, click here.) From that day forward I mended my ways and stopped using valve locknuts. (I did keep one in my toolkit for roadside repairs.)

End of story, right? Well, not so fast. In cycling circles, widespread debate about Presta valve locknuts still bubbles up from time to time and has done so for decades. It’s the perfect hot button issue to tackle on albertnet because it gets people bickering good-naturedly without ruining friendships or landing me on either side of the currently raging culture war. So I decided to poll the members of my bike club on the topic, along with a couple other cycling pals and my brother, and describe in these pages the current Presta valve locknut zeitgeist.

The bike team weighs in

Curiously, more East Bay Velo Club members came out against valve locknuts than in favor, though I suspect more of my teammates use them than not, as I shall get into. I know with certainty that one of the “con” votes was from a guy I ride with all the time who does use them, as he told me himself … but that’s not what he put in writing.

Trigger warning: this is not a short post. If you have attention span issues, I recommend you either a) visit this page instead, b) request a vlog version of this post, or c) print it out and store it on your toilet tank to work through over time.

Okay, here’s what my bike club had to say:

1. I’m a nay on the ring. Need to reduce weight as much as possible. Plus, it just slows you down when having to change tubes—yes, I have still not gone tubeless. And last, if you have them on they loosen up and rattle...

2. Tubeless all day. Pro. [This is a tacit “for” vote … more on this later.]

3. I save them all for making bike bling bracelets, necklaces, etc. Still they continue to pile up. Need any? [He included these photos:]

4. Con. They work their way lose and rattle and it’s annoying.

5. Perhaps  we can add the little cap to the fray. That said, I once had to change a tube with a short stem in a deeper wheel, and it was impossible to insert the pump [chuck] as there was very little length left outside. I have since bought a screw on type, but still put in the nut unless it is a Michelin tube or TPU… [Not clear what “a screw on type” means here but I suspect either a screw-on pump chuck—more on this later—or a valve extender, which is a whole other topic. More to come on TPUs.]

6. I am very much on the pro side of piston rings, which sound like they should be mentioned in the same breath as valve rings, but which of course are entirely unrelated.

7. [From M—] Growing up riding on sew-ups (“tubulars” to youngsters) I never saw a stem nut. I don’t use them on clinchers either but could see how they’d be helpful for some people. The combination of unnecessarily long valve stems and ham-handed pump technique puts a lot of leverage on the stems, which I’ve seen damaged. This probably applies to pumps that attach directly to the stem vs. ones with a short, flexible hose. Both valve caps and stem nuts are largely useless. However, as collectors’ items, the former are vastly superior. [He included this photo of his prized valve cap collection.]

8. Since I’ve been a tubeless guy for 12 or more years, I can’t really see life without valve rings. That said, I recall also liking [pre-tubeless] to have them on tubes cause they frankly made it easier to get the pump chuck seated on to the valve before pumping the tire. So, for those guys who are against valve rings, tell them to SUCK IT!

9. I was talking about your forthcoming post on valve stem nuts on my ride today and someone pointed out that some of these modern TPU tubes don’t even have threads on the stem. No Nuts! 

My responses

There is so much to explain and respond to here, I feel like a kid in a candy shop, or more accurately an ectomorph with a pet tapeworm at an all-u-can-eat buffet.

First off, the locknuts do make it easier to get an old-school pump chuck on there because the valve doesn’t get shoved down into the tube. Is it the case that a valve that’s pulled out too much can interfere with seating the tire and cause it to blow off the rim? Yeah, that can happen. But it’s also the case that cramming a chuck on lockring-less valve can damage the tube, because the valve can get torqued around and, worse case, the tube rips at the valve. So there’s no free lunch, really, with traditional pump chucks.

That’s where M—’s input comes in, about the modern mini-pumps with the short, flexible hose. Not only do these not torque the valve around, but because the chuck isn’t shoved on there but instead just screws on (using the same valve threads that the locknut uses), there’s no need for the locknut. But the screw-on chucks have a downside, which is that they tend to unscrew an under-tightened valve core, so when you finish unscrewing the chuck and pull it off, the core comes with it and—WHOOSH!—all the air escapes. And unless you have a valve core tool in your kit, you’re pretty much screwed. I see this several times per season when coaching high schoolers. It also happened to me recently on El Toyonal, a road that is closed to cars. I’d have been stranded except I was able to screw the core in far enough with my fingers to make it (sort of) work. I couldn’t believe I managed that. It felt like an 80-yard Hail Mary pass (and as you can imagine I am useless at football).

Any argument about saving weight is a joke (perhaps literally). This is a case, I think, of the person supplying a merely ostensible reason because he doesn’t actually know why he does what he does. (Or she.) I don’t own a scale sensitive enough to weigh a valve locknut. I suppose I could gather up all the ones I own (probably at least twenty, spread out over several boxes, toolboxes, the little nipple holder on my truing stand, and elsewhere) and take the average, but I can’t be bothered. This tiny locknut couldn’t even weigh a gram. If you want to save that much weight, just blow your nose before you ride, or alter your diet. Or better yet, to M—’s point about unnecessarily long valve stems, get the ones that are only just long enough for your aero rims … I see a lot of “stem inflation” (pun intended, sorry) and I don’t like it. The valves look like they’re aroused.

Let’s proceed, then, to the most common criticism of valve locknuts: they come loose and rattle. This is sort of a legitimate complaint. Why only sort of? Because not only is it not always true, many cyclists will tell you that the opposite is true: that part of the purpose of the lockring is to prevent the valve itself from rattling. So which is it? I think this has everything to do with your specific setup. I used valve locknuts on the cheapy Araya rims that came with my Miyata 310; on the Super Champion Gentleman rims I had on my Mercian; on the Wolber 58s I use for my commuting bike; on the Mavic MA-40s I trained on for many years; on the 16-spoke Shimano aero wheels that I had briefly before they disintegrated; and on both pairs of my Mavic Ksyriums. In zero of these cases did the locknut rattle. And I didn’t tighten these locknuts with pliers like an idiot (though a friend of mine did this in junior high and thus couldn’t fix a flat out on the road once and had to call his mommy). Are my fingers possibly stronger than those of the people whose valve locknuts rattle? Possibly, due to all the years I worked in bike shops. (As we always liked to tell people, “Bicycle mechanic bleed on the inside.”)

So if you, gentle reader, were to install valve locknuts, would they rattle? I’m gonna say probably not. As I look back on all the hundreds, perhaps thousands of cyclists I’ve ridden with, I honestly cannot remember a single instance of valve lockrings rattling. This isn’t because I have a faulty memory; after all, I remember the kid in junior high I just mentioned who’d over-tightened his lockrings, and that was over forty years ago. Meanwhile, I distinctly remember the converse: a valve rattling, which bothered several of us on a ride 16 years ago. It couldn’t possibly have been a locknut because the valve was on a sew-up (tubular) tire. I have photographic proof. Look:

This was during the 2009 Sierra Century (details here). Mark got so frustrated with the rattling he stopped at a rest stop and accepted assistance from the staffer you see above, who was beyond stoked at being able to help, even if that only meant holding Mark’s bike. I’m pretty sure she’d fallen in love.

Okay, you’ve probably stumbled onto the theory that I’m just deaf and/or willing to ignore an annoying noise. I will concede that the latter may be true. I know I mentioned mere moments ago being bothered by Mark’s rattling valve, but to be more specific, it was his complaining of the rattling that actually bothered me. My own bikes have made various noises over the years and yes, I’ve managed to tune them out. Humans are harder to ignore. I was once accosted repeatedly during a ride by my pal T—, who complained incessantly about my pump rattling until I finally did something about it. And I’ve had people complain about my wheels making some kind of noise that I always took as a cry for help (the noise of the wheel, not my friends) but that I figured would take care of itself when the wheel inevitably died. My friend C— often apologizes for the noises his bike makes, and almost invariably I don’t even know what he’s talking about.

(There was one notable exception. One day back in 2007, his bike was making an awful creaking noise that seemed to get progressively worse, and he apologized repeatedly. I have to confess, I  really was getting annoyed, I mean the noise was that bad. Finally I turned off to head up Lomas Cantadas, just to get away from the din, but to my horror the noise persisted. It wasn’t C—’s bike after all, it was mine … my fricking frame was broken! The seat tube had cracked down near the front derailleur, and right about at the turnoff to South Park Drive it sheared completely in two. By the time I got home the noise had grown to the sound of Satan eating a steel garbage can.)

If you’re using a Presta tube in a rim drilled for Schrader, you need more than a locknut—you need a rim grommet, which looks like this:

I’ve used those and they absolutely require a locknut because more often than not, they pucker out like a hemorrhoid which is really gross to look at but is well hidden by the locknut.

Now, if you’ve been paying attention, first off congratulations, and second, you’re probably wondering about my assertion that more of my teammates use valve locknuts than not, despite what a majority of them have indicated in my email survey. This is because I’d guess over half of my teammates are now running tubeless, which setup practically requires lockrings. (It’s not 100%—as I’ll get to—but they certainly help.) So shouldn’t the modern debate be about whether to run tubeless tires or not? Isn’t that where the rubber meets the road? (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) But the tubeless-or-not debate is actually pointless, for the simple reason that this matter is entirely cut-and-dried. There is an obvious right answer, and I have it, and I shall give it to you.

But first, I have just one other tidbit from the reader comments to address, which is piston rings. I found that aside so comical, I read it out loud to my wife. She is a curious sort (and a recovering journalist) and asked, “What are piston rings?” So I started to mansplain them to her, and about a minute in I paused and asked, “Are you actually interested in this?” She replied, “No, I’ve stopped listening. I was only wondering if they were part of a bicycle.” I assured her they weren’t but that they were absolutely integral to the function of a car engine. She asked, “Do all males know what piston rings do?” I said yes, of course. “Why?” she asked. I asserted that all males find such matters intrinsically fascinating. (If you are a male reader and disagree, please set me straight via a comment below.)

So, there is a lively debate, online and IRL, about tubeless vs. tubes, and many of my pals have weighed in during our rides over the last five or more years. Until recently I was a bystander in this because my wheels, though insanely cool, couldn’t accommodate tubeless tires anyway. Well, I finally came into some tubeless-ready wheels, contemplated the matter for about thirty seconds, decided to ignore all the horror stories about how hard road tubeless tires are to mount, pulled the tubes out, stuck the valves in, dumped some goo in the tires, reseated and inflated them, and ditched those inner tubes forever (unless I have a rude awakening ahead of me in which case I’ll blog all about that when the time comes).

Here is the point: if you’ve made it this far into this post, it’s almost a given you’ve spent thousands of dollars on a bicycle. So you want that bicycle to ride as beautifully as possible, right? Tubeless gets you there. Nothing else matters. So don’t give me any song and dance about maintenance, punctures, mess, ease of installation, whatever. What is your bike for: to ride, or to fix?

Here’s an analogy: suppose you’re a happily married man, with all the children you want (even if—or perhaps especially if—that number is zero), and you’ve just gotten a vasectomy. You’ve had the follow-up semen sample tested, it came back negative, and the doctor has just left you a voicemail saying, “You can have all the unprotected sex you want.” Now, would you continue using condoms? “Well, I’m used to them, and it’s less messy,” no sane husband would ever say. So it is with tubeless: you’ve gotten rid of a pesky bit of rubber that no longer has any place in your life. The road feel is better with tubeless, cornering is better, and rolling resistance is lower. (And to the weight weenies calling for skipping locknuts on your inner tube valves to save weight, get real: I knocked a quarter pound off the weight of my bike by ditching the tubes. I only put an ounce of sealant in each tire; when it dries up I’ll add more, no biggie.)

So what about TPUs? In case you haven’t heard of them (I myself hadn’t until recently), these are tubes made of thermoplastic polyurethane instead of rubber or latex. This brings the weight down by about 20-30 grams vs. traditional tubes, while also offering lower rolling resistance. They’re also easier to mount. All this being said, they’re $20-30 each, and the special patch kit required is $8 or $10—both way pricier than standard, and needless to say pricier than that ounce of sealant. And yet, at the end of the day, the TPU setup is still heavier than tubeless and still doesn’t ride as well. To continue my vasectomy metaphor, they’re like fancy lambskin condoms … better, sure, but more expensive, and still unnecessary. And why don’t TPU tubes accommodate locknuts? Because, as you saw above, the valves aren’t ribbed (i.e., threaded) for anyone’s pleasure!

If you persist in arguing for inner tubes based on less hassle, etc. you need to accept that the tubeless technology is not the problem: you are. If you are serious about riding an excellent bicycle jolly well, mounting tubeless tires is just something you need to get good at, like typing and being organized and knowing how to scramble an egg (or, for the vegans among you, properly prepare tofu). Setting up tubeless is not that hard. Suck it up. I even have step-by-step instructions for you, here.

Okay, fine, there’s one non-trivial argument against tubeless tires, particularly for road bikes, which is the idea—not without anecdotal evidence—that the tire can blow off the rim. So here’s what to do. First, choose the right tire for your rims: if you have hookless rims, you need hookless-type tires. Consult the manufacturer’s compatibility charts to be sure you have the right combo. Then, read the recommended PSI for the tires you’re using, and for the rims you’re using. Go with whatever is lower. Still nervous? Use a fatter tire and go down another 10 PSI or so. Thousands of professional riders use this technology … it’s mature, it’s commonplace, and it’s arguably as safe as any other aspect of road cycling. All this being said, note that I’m just a blogger, not an industry expert, a certified accountant, an Internet influencer, or a medical doctor. Caveat emptor (translation: don’t sue me).

Now: can you run tubeless without valve locknuts? The conventional wisdom is that you cannot, because the locknut holds the valve firmly in place so it can make an airtight seal with the rim. In fact, ENVE claims that if you don’t use their special Pressure Relief Valve Stem Nut (PRVSN), your rim could actually explode. I doubt you need $5 PRSVNs, but I do recommend valve locknuts based on my own experience. (If you’re curious about what happens without them, see Appendix A. If you’re curious about other stuff, see Appendix B.)

This made me wonder: if tubeless basically requires locknuts, why didn’t my tubeless-ready valves come with them? Answer: they did, but the locknuts were just floating around loose in the box of accessories (reflectors, etc.) that my bike came with. Check it out: the locknuts are black to match my wheels. How cool is that?! I’d never seen (non-plastic) black valve locknuts in my life!

Synthesis

So what’s my ultimate verdict on valve locknuts? As follows:

• If you have a commuter bike with Presta valves, use the locknuts or not, at your whim
• If you have a backup “rain bike” that you mainly ride on the indoor trainer, you better be using noise-canceling headphones, in which case you can use locknuts or not, because who cares if they (or your valves) rattle?
• For your flagship road or mountain bike, run tubeless with locknuts, and if anybody makes fun of you, send them this blog post.

One more thing: do I ever hear valve locknuts rattling on wheels with tubeless tires? I’ll give you a hint: no. Still stumped? Here’s another hint: I don’t.

Appendix A

Tubeless-ready wheels came with my new bike, but the tires were mounted with tubes since it’s impossible to know how long a bike might sit around in a warehouse, its tires going flat (which could break the seal and cause sealant to ooze everywhere). So I dug through the bag of accessories (reflectors, a bell, owner’s manuals, etc.) and found the valves that came with the wheels. They didn’t have locknuts in the little bag, so I assumed locknuts weren’t necessary. (Obviously I could have installed some from my stash, but M—’s admonition about “novice nerd-dom” was still ringing in my ears, 13 years later.) Despite all the mythology I’d heard about setting up tubeless tires, I not only managed to get the tires to seal without lockrings, but did it with ease. My assumption, that the pressure inside the tire would hold the valves in place, seemed to pan out.

The problem is, not all seals are created equal, and tubeless-style valves (at least mine) do not have a round base. The rubber part that butts up against the rim is rectangular, as it’s designed to sit in the rim in a specific way, and if it gets twisted the seal is slightly compromised. I learned this on my fifth or sixth tubeless ride: before heading out, I topped up the air pressure, and when I removed the screw-on pump chuck from the valve, it put up a fight (as it often does) and must have twisted the valve. About 90 minutes into my ride the tire pressure had dropped to about 40 PSI, maybe less. I thought I could pump it up and get home, but as I mentioned before, halfway up El Toyonal the tire was again almost flat, and that’s when I had my mishap with the valve core.

So yeah, use locknuts with tubeless, to make sure the valve stays straight. The locknut also helps when you tighten down that valve core good and snug. (If you use a screw-on chuck and don’t have a valve core wrench, buy one immediately.)

Appendix B

I’m still working on Appendix B. Check back next week. For information about giraffes, click here.

UPDATE: I have now posted Appendix B here. Enjoy please enjoy.

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Self-Help & the 8th Habit

Introduction

Don’t you hate it when this happens?

It’s always so tempting to mock the word “paradigm,” and other concepts from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  (I mentioned this book to my brother and he said, “Let me guess … these habits include yachting, fine dining, and fox hunting.”)  And if more people knew the subtitle of the 7 Habits book, Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, they’d probably make fun of that, too.  In general, the entire self-help industry has been a giant target for all kinds of sarcastic vitriol.

For example, George Carlin is very funny on this topic.  He asks, “Why do so many people need help?  Life is not that complicated….  I really don’t understand:  if you’re lookin’ for self-help, why would you read a book written by somebody else?  That’s not self-help … that’s help!  There’s no such thing as self-help!  You did it yourself … you didn’t need help!”

As much as I enjoyed that riff, I can’t embrace his distaste for self-help.  I myself have no use for glib aphorisms, much traditional advice (like the importance of goals), and frankly most of the books in the self-help section.  However, I’m a big believer in self-help as an endeavor, and actually respect The 7 Habits.  In fact, in this post I’m going to give you an 8th habit—an all-important one that I think Stephen R. Covey missed.

The self-help paradox

Some of the abuse that The 7 Habits gets is based on clichés like “paradigm” and “win-win.”  The comic strip “Dilbert” has been mining that stuff for so long, “Dilbert” itself can get repetitive.  (In Covey’s defense, “paradigm” and “win-win” weren’t hackneyed when he first trotted them out, and it’s only due to the massive success of his book that they’ve been overused ad nauseam.)  But I think there’s something else people are bothered by; after all, many other self-help books, such as Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, avoid the problem of trite language.  I think a lot of people instinctively recoil from the very idea of self-help.  (I know I did, when I was younger and cockier.)

Why should this be?  Well, many forms of self-help are aimed at people with drug, alcohol, or other addictions … not exactly the kind of person we hold up as a role model.  Beyond that, I think there’s a tendency to equate self-help with weakness, and whiny-ness, and perhaps with excessive humility.  Maybe showcasing the awareness of your own frailty can come across as emo.  If you meet a stranger at a cocktail party who within 30 seconds is mentioning his or her therapist, you might start looking for an excuse to disengage.

But if you look at self-help as commitment to improving yourself (and one that can be as private as you wish), and if you acknowledge that there’s a distinction to be made between good, sound advice in book form and all the chaff that any industry will naturally accumulate, I don’t think there’s any reason to automatically eschew the entire notion of trying to be a better person.  The alternative, when you think about it, is to think of yourself, “I’m just fine the way I am.” 

To me, that’s a pathetic way to be, and actually strikes me as more conducive to being emo.  When I witness emo behavior, I see it as an overblown, melodramatic indulgence and I want to shout, “Aw, just shut up!  I know you’re feeling all sad and vulnerable, but don’t wallow in it—work on it!  You could start by growing a pair!”  (Am I sexist?  Perhaps not—after all, I didn’t say “when I witness emo behavior in a male.”  I think “grow a pair” has, like “guy,” become almost a gender-neutral term.)

Frankly, I think the biggest problem with The 7 Habits is simply that not enough people actually read the book.  More broadly speaking, I think too many people—for reasons of pride, or insecurity, or laziness, or some combination of these—are unwilling to challenge their personal status quo.

So here’s my 8th habit:  get help.  Or to be more specific, don’t get too comfortable.  Concede that you’re not perfect, and work on yourself—and don’t pretend that your natural instincts about this process are any match for the careful, thorough thinking that very good minds have already done.  After all, if you knew how to be the perfect you, you’d be perfect.  And you’re not.  (Nobody is, except perhaps Atul Gawande.)

An example

I’m a cheap bastard.  When my daughter’s Stumpjumper (a great bike, but ~15 years old) wasn’t shifting right, I was determined to fix the shifter instead of replacing it.

I tried the easy route recommended by my mechanic pals (hosing the shifter’s innards down with WD-40), but that didn’t work.  This thing was completely gummed up.  So I took it apart.  Damn, that thing’s complicated.  There are all these washers and bushings and pawls, and it’s got 3 springs, one of which you have to wind up and hold tension on while you bolt the shifter back together.  I took photos as I went, but I wasn’t methodical enough, and missed important information, and wasted vast amounts of time in vain.  Throughout the ordeal there was this voice in my head:  “You’re an idiot!” and “Your brothers are right, you’re not mechanically minded!” and “You suck!” and “You call yourself a bike mechanic?” and “Like an idiot, you bought your kid an ancient bike you can’t get parts for and now you’re screwed!” and so forth.

I took a break from the shifter repair to closely examine these strong feelings I was having, and question whether there’s something wrong with me that I can’t take little failures like this in stride.  In the big scheme of things, a new shifter wouldn’t actually be that expensive.  Any third party would probably having trouble understanding why this meant so much to me—and maybe for good reason!  What if I’m being totally unreasonable, I wondered, and some deep fracture in my ego is starting to show itself?  These are all worthy ideas to investigate, and it’s a worthy thing to have the bravery to confront yourself and entertain such doubts.

So did I look online for a good therapist who could sort out my feelings of self-loathing?  No, in the final analysis I determined that that wasn’t the kind of self-help I needed.  I just needed a good website with some better photos of the shifter.  And man, I found an awesome site!  Click here:  this guy not only posted 17 great photos of the left shifter alone, he annotated them and provided complete instructions!

Frankly, I was plenty daunted by the website, because it gave me even less excuse to chuck the shifter and buy a replacement.  But more than that, this guy’s success, and his generosity in putting up the instructions and photos, inspired me.  He obviously has great patience, and a more methodological approach, and I thought, “Why can’t I be more like him?”  So I gave it another crack, and it really did end up being a self-help project (i.e., requiring my own effort and insight) because I couldn’t just follow the guy’s directions … I needed to conceptualize the pieces in 3-D, and try out various ways of putting them together (since I’d buggered the thing up to the point that some were installed wrong).  In case you’re interested, here’s my own set of photos:

(That last photo is a still from a movie I made, which was instrumental because even when I had the shifter assembled correctly, I still had to reach through a gap in the housing with a screwdriver and click the internal pieces back and forth, to work in the oil, before the lever finally started working—which it totally does now, like a champ!).

My point is this:  at the core of self-help is a refusal to let yourself off the hook too easily.  Sure, there is good advice out there about being compassionate with yourself, and the self-loathing voices that countless people have in their heads are not often very constructive.  But for every person who pushes himself too hard and needs to lighten up, I’d say there are 10 who are just too complacent to push their comfort zone, or too reluctant to get help on something they can’t handle on their own.

Giving up too easily can lead to serious consequences; standing down and accepting defeat is no good for the soul.  When I got that shifter working again, I just sat there for a spell, clicking away, putting it through its paces, as delighted as Eeyore savoring his birthday presents:  putting his (popped) balloon from Piglet into the (empty) honey pot Pooh gave him and taking it back out again.

Without getting help (and inspiration) from this complete stranger on the Internet, I’d have failed to fix the shifter, and that self-annihilating voice might well have taken to reasserting itself every time I looked at the mismatched replacement shifter on my kid’s bike.  Instead, the repaired shifter is now an emblem of my perseverance.  (Is it okay that I berated myself so much during the process?  Yeah, probably.  I’m a loud person from a loud family  so my internal voice is bound to be loud as well.  I think my self-esteem is fine.  Sometimes my stubbornness plays a little rough, that’s all.)

One more point to be made here is that not all self-help resources are touchy-feely.  A how-to guide, or the shifter repair instructions on a website, are still self-help.  Why are so many people perfectly casual about instruction manuals and how-to guides but suddenly get nervous when the book is about fixing yourself instead of some object?  A self-help book is either good or it isn’t … there’s no shame in giving it a go, even if (or perhaps especially if) the process might subject you to uncomfortable self-examination.

The cynical justification for the 8th habit

Okay, maybe you’ve been gagging on my whole essay here because you’re just too cynical to go in for this idealistic self-help business and my saccharine success story.  That’s fine—but you should still embrace my 8th habit—get help—for one purely pragmatic reason:  chances are very good your boss will appreciate it.

Who is it, after all, in the “Dilbert” strip who’s always spouting stuff about “win-win” and “paradigms”?  It’s the bosses!  Who are the people, in the real world, who have used these terms so much, and for so long, that they’ve become clichés?  The executives! 

Now, there are various ways to account for this.  One way is to say that executives just have a weakness for this stuff and those who spout banal platitudes and ideological sound-bites are bound to flock together.  But another possible explanation is that a willingness to embrace the self-help ethos is what actually helped propel these people to power.  I don’t think it matters which of these you believe, because the bottom line is, management does respect the self-help impulse.  (Over a dozen C-level executives are quoted in the “Praise for…” section of The 7 Habits.)

When you think about this, it makes perfect sense.  Any healthy corporation needs to foster a culture of earnestness, while rooting out cynicism (which can hugely erode employee morale).  I don’t think you can ever go wrong, career-wise, by erring on the side of humility.

So am I saying you should leave The 7 Habits on your desk for your boss to see, and/or gush to him or her about this or that self-help book?  Not at all.  This essay being the exception, I’m generally pretty quiet about my own self-improvement projects.  Moreover, there’s no telling what your particular boss might think of this or that self-help resource.  But if you suppress your cynicism, and acknowledge the reality that earnestness isn’t the 8th deadly sin, and at the very minimum resist the temptation to pooh-pooh the various professional development programs and rah-rah sales kickoff meetings or whatever, your attitude is bound to evolve, and this will be noticed.  Humility is a habit that very few people, I think, would hold against you.

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