We often want someone else to fix our personal problems or to tell us what to do to avoid having them.

Help can come right into your hand. Go to a bookstore and you’ll find several shelves of expert advice about any affliction or condition that is known to mankind.

Pick up a random self-help book. Find the author’s name. You probably never saw the name before, so what proves he or she has credibility about the subject of the book? Look what’s printed after the author’s name. Most likely, you’ll find letters like MD, PHD, CSW, DDS, ESQ, so on and so forth, a virtual alphabet soup of abbreviations that confirms the authors have earned degrees and certifications and are now educated experts in their fields.

Improve health, manage money, have happier marriages, recover from addictions, raise wonderful children, fall in love, control anger, open successful businesses and raise self-esteem. Whatever your issue is, somebody has written a book about it.

Let’s pretend I’m going to put together a Convention of Wisdom and invite an educated expert from each of the topics listed above. These experts would set up appointments for people to ask questions about what they need to know to fix what’s wrong in their lives.

On second thought, let’s leave the advisers from academia on the bookshelves.

For my Convention of Wisdom, let me bring in older people who have been proven failures, down and outers, bottoms of the barrels, quitters and abusers. They will tell their stories and give you reasons why they failed.

If you’re concerned about your health, make an appointment with 60-year-old “Donny” in booth number one. He eats pizza, cake and drinks a case of soda every week. He leaves the couch to go to the bathroom. He’s diabetic with an enlarged heart and high blood pressure. He takes five prescription pills a day and his doctor tells him he’s a time bomb ready to explode at any minute. Talk to “Donny.” He blames his mother for raising him with unhealthy food and now he can’t stop the habit.

Are you worried about managing money? Let me direct you to booth number two. You’ll meet “Louise.” Over a span of 30 years, she’s accrued $20,000 in credit card debt and has twice filed for bankruptcy. Her house went up for sheriff’s sale last month. Her car was repossessed for nonpayments. “Louise” will tell you what she did and didn’t do that eventually put her on the streets — homeless and penniless.

“It’s not my fault,” she’ll tell you. “I had lousy jobs and lousy pay. I couldn’t pay my bills.”

Talk to “Kevin and Jennifer” in booth number three about marriage. Now in their late 60s, they have been divorced three times, but only once with each other. They have been masters at winning arguments champions of cheating on their spouses. They are always right, never wrong, stubborn and degrading and they now live alone. “Kevin” had to drive the turnpike every weekend for six years to see his various kids born from four different women, one who was never his wife.

They both offer the same reason for their marital woes. “We married awful people who didn’t understand how to make us happy.”

“Bob” and “Beth” share booth four. He’s a 70-year-old alcoholic. She’s spent her entire adult life as a drug addict. “Bob” lost his job, his driver’s license, and his family. His self-respect lies at the bottom of the empty beer bottles lined up in marching soldier formation on his kitchen counter. “My parents were drunks,” he says. “I got this disease from them.”

“Beth” has always been unemployable. She had no time to work. She spent her days on the streets looking for her next fix. She’s stolen money and sold her body just to get high. She flunked three attempts at rehab. “Beth” says nobody ever cared about her and drugs help her cope with life’s miseries.

Someone once said, “Listen to your elders for advice, not because they are always right, but because they have more experience at being wrong.”

Some figure it out and some don’t, and we can learn from both.

Talk to the fallen who have risen from their depths of despair and they will tell you recovery begins by asking yourself one important question.

When you choose whom to blame, do you point the finger or the thumb?

Note: I would like to publicly express my gratitude to Mike Tedesco for suggesting I write a column about this subject.

Rich Strack can be reached at katehep11@gmail.com.