COULD an instruction manual help people better navigate the many disappointments, miseries and traps that are inherent in human life?

Joe Vitale's "Life's Missing Instruction Manual: The Guidebook You Should Have Been Given at Birth" is packed with his own new-age wizardry and passages from other self-help philosophers past and present.

With aphorisms, maxims and guidelines, Vitale intends to provide insights into a host of vital issues ranging from sex and food, to the purpose of life, even the inevitability of death.

One of Vitale's central tenets is predicated on how to make the most of the possibilities your life has to offer, by directing your thoughts and attitudes to shape the world around you.

Vitale firmly believes that individuals can exercise choice and shape reality.

"You'll find this hard to believe at first, but everything in your life is a projection from the shadow side of your own mind," Vitale observes.

Most cultures have their own collection of proverbs and precepts exhorting people to exert themselves to live a worthy and full life.

And probably at an earlier stage of life, many of us found many of the maxims inspiring and profitable.

To maturer minds many may appear simplistic or sentimental. But for young people on the threshold of life, whose minds are tabula rasa, some good precepts do shine light in a world of temptations and potential pitfalls, giving them discipline, confidence, and direction.

As Vitale believes, one can achieve goals by fully imagining success, gaining serenity by purging bad thoughts and discarding old limits, building self-esteem by focusing on the positive, and directing one's future by conceptualizing it.

As our life evolves (or degenerates) from the state of innocence to that of experience, we become worldly wise, sophisticated, or roguish.

We also tend to take a more cynic view of our modest "achievements."

Some grow disenchanted.

When Mao Zedong met Richard Nixon on February 21, 1972, in Beijing, Nixon observed that "The Chairman's writings moved a nation and have changed the world."

Mao replied that "I haven't been able to change it. I've only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Peking."

And 40 years on today, it is doubtful how many of these few places in the vicinity of Beijing Mao had changed could hope to survive the waves of demolitions that have been sweeping the country in recent decades.

As Vitale observes, "See life for what it is. Realize you have control only over your tiny piece of the overall puzzle. Realize that, when you fit your tiny piece into the overall plan, it is there for the good of all."

Limitations

The tricky part of it is that it is often very hard to know what's really "good" until it is too late.

Towards the end of the meeting with Mao in 1972, Nixon said: "Mr Chairman, the Chairman's life is well-known to all of us. He came from a very poor family to the top of the most populous nation in the world, a great nation. My background is not so well known. I also came from a very poor family, and to the top of a very great nation. History has brought us together."

Two months later the break-in at the Watergate was discovered and investigated. Two years later, Nixon became the first and only president in the US history to resign from office.

Four years later, China was thrown into a state of convulsion with the downfall of the "Gang of Four," which included Mao's widow. The once-enshrined Mao Zedong Thought has been subjected to development and reinterpretation.

Few and far between are the true oracles endowed with clairvoyance to see beyond the limitations of secular efforts.

But here there seems to be a bit of cultural difference.

As the contemporary Western outlook is rooted in science (knowledge), it tends to place more faith in the will power of human beings to effect change.

Henry James's novel "The Portrait of a Lady" (1881) describes the fate of a splendid young American woman Isabel Archer, who is attractive, smart, intelligent, full of life and hope, and a will to live a free and noble life.

She refuses the offer of marriage by an excellent English peer and a bulldog-like New England capitalist, only to fall prey to a "sterile dilettante," Gilbert Osmond, who marries her for her money.

The money was a bequest from her generous cousin, who was determined to liberate her from economic dependency.

The cousin confessed to Isabel as he dies, "I believe I ruined you." His knowledge turns out to be ignorance, and his vision, blindness.

Isabel's innocence and her disdain for money conspire to blind her to the wiles and schemes of people like Osmond.

The real message of the novel lies in the ending, where instead of escaping her loveless marriage, she returns, bravely, to her obligations as a wife.

Real message

We also have numerous real life cases suggesting how windfalls turn out to be the undoing of the lives of the "lucky."

As Vitale observes in his book, many social interactions are the compound result of prior social interactions.

A few of these interactions may be under human control, but many are elusive, or unrecognized.

Henry James' brother William was one of the best known American psychologists and philosophers, but the fate of Isabel, that Jamesian lady, does suggest the difficulty of getting to the human heart and mind, to say nothing of making a science of it.

We have recently heard quite a lot about "tiger moms" or "wolf dads" who have succeeded in making their children appear "successful" after subjecting them to years of rigorous regimen bordering on cruelty.

The question is, how would these children fare in the absence of the tigers and wolves?

Are they capable of enjoying their life, and studying for pleasure?

Experience shows that when the children are forced to expend too much effort on too narrow a subject, they grow fed up, and tend to lack motivation to pursue anything without the prospect of immediate reward.

These externally motivated students never go very far.

Vitale's manuals are informed by the assumption that given will power, man can make a difference.

His views need to be tempered by awareness of the inadequacy of the human intellect, and the fact that there is a greater power in the universe that is beyond the ken of humankind.