Curio Lists
Some Ideas about Self-Help Books
When I was younger, I read a lot of self-help books. Those books are still around, although a lot of them now refer to life hacks instead of self-improvement. In my 20s, I thought it would be fun to become a personal success coach.
I grew out of that phase.
I have no problem with books that offer practical advice on how to manage your time or your budget. In fact, I read a book called Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport not long ago that took my entire life game up a notch.
But a lot of this stuff is bunk of the highest order. You won't find successful business executives like Nicholas Bredimus or Elon Musk spending a lot of time reading Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins. They're too busy being practical.
That's because there's no guarantee that the self-help book you're about to read is effective in any way.
With the large number of such books available, some of them are bound to offer some good advice. Unfortunately, I think Sturgeon's Law applies:
90% of everything is crap.
I had a young protégé ask me for some advice about what he should read if he wanted to be more successful. I suggested The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. He laughed, but I was serious.
And Ben Franklin didn't really offer "life hacks." His approach to self-help was to build character and become a better person.
Only recently have I started to see a lot of the criticism of self-help books. Some criticize self-help books for giving bad advice. Tony Robbins's books are a good example. One of his exercises is to try to eliminate ALL negative thoughts for 10 days. If you have a negative thought, you have to start over.
That's a recipe for mental illness.
I've also seen Robbins in seminars "cure" people of crippling depression. These people probably need professional help.
Others criticize self-help books for offering placebos. The advice doesn't really help at all.
But you think it does.
And that can be very powerful.
I have a friend who's a telephone psychic, and I'm convinced that the placebo effect has a lot to do with why his customers keep returning.
And, of course, many people realize (rightly) that a lot of the advice in self-help books just doesn't have an effect on someone's life one way or the other. Maybe the advice is just common sense restated. Or maybe it's just meaningless pablum.
Nursing Times has an interesting article about how self-help books can often just be bad for you. Sham, by Steve Salerno, also offers a withering criticism of self-help literature.
But not all self-help books are bad, and not all the advice from the self-help industry is wrong, either.
I'm convinced that many (if not most) self-help authors sincerely hope that their books help their readers. Why and how does that go wrong?
Sometimes it's because the reader doesn't act on the advice in the self-help book. For some people, just reading the advice makes them feel better temporarily about their lives. Other readers practice the principles espoused in such books, but they only do so temporarily.
It doesn't matter how good your coach or therapist is. If you don't act on their suggestions, you won't see any kind of results.
One way to put more of this self-help advice into action is to study a legit book about forming habits. Atomic Habits by James Clear is excellent for this, but The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg is also good.
Another approach to this kind of literature that might be helpful is the Catholic form of meditation called "lectio divina." This translates to "divine reading." It's also the same approach to meditation outlined in the seemingly-ubiquitous twelve step programs for defeating addiction.
Here's how it works:
Instead of reading quickly, you read SLOWLY. You let each sentence be a unit of its own and think about it carefully. You might also do this with a paragraph. When you find a sentence or paragraph that resonates with you, you might re-read it multiple times.'
When you do this, your mind relates this new knowledge or insight to your existing knowledge. This is part of the hermeneutic spiral.
You can use this technique with any book, self-help or not, as long as it's a GOOD book. I can see how reading Walden in this way could be life-changing.
And you'd be hard-pressed to find a better self-help book than Walden.