Table of Contents
George Carlin once said (roughly): “People who read self-help books should be killed. Life is simple, you wake up, go to work, eat 3 meals, shit, and sleep. You don’t need a book for it. And why is it called Self-Help? You’re reading someone else’s advice. It should be called “Help.””
But really, why should anyone read self-help books? Surely, beyond a certain point, self-help books become redundant, it’s the recycling of the same material that essentially tell you to try harder. Most people already know that they should be more organized, not procrastinate, set deadlines, work smarter, get feedback, and constantly challenge themselves etc… So why not just do these things instead of reading books about it?
I’ll try to answer that question.
I have read a few self-help books in the past. I’ve read the classics like “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, “The 48 Laws of Power”, “Getting Things Done Fast”, “The Power of Habit”, “The 4 Hour Workweek”, “12 Rules for Life”.
After a certain point, reading these books gets boring. There’s more to life than habit formation, and findings smarter ways to work, but that isn’t to say these books aren’t useful. Cultivating good habits is very challenging, since bad habits are much easier and much more fun. The good self-help books (very few) do a good job of giving you clever ways of changing your behavior, and not just stating the obvious.
Here is what a good self-help book should do.
1) Provide a Coherent Philosophy for Why Improving is Important
Do not take it for granted that improving your life is obvious. It may be to you if you’re lucky, but to a lot of people, it isn’t. There are many reasons to be nihilistic, because in the end, things are unlikely to go your way. The odds are stacked against you. You can try as hard as you like, but your destiny is determined by things that are outside your conscious control. You can make a good argument for living a life with less responsibilities, less stress, and less disappointments. The best self-help books are the ones that give you a philosophy against nihilism, they push you towards thinking more positively about your future, not only because things would be better if you tried harder, but because they would be far worse if you didn’t.
2) Explain How your Brain Works
There are many good books about willpower, habit formation, and productivity out there. These books help you understand how your brain works, and how different thought-patterns are reinforced by behavioral routines. Once you understand that your brain is plastic and that new experiences can physically change your neural wiring, you will take your actions a lot more seriously. You will be much more wary of the dangers of your bad habits and will more actively try to fix them.
3) Suggest Different Strategies for you to Implement
There isn’t one way to think about life, there isn’t one way to live life, and there isn’t one way to build good habits and get rid of bad ones. What works for some people may not work for you. Good self-help books help you find strategies that match your personality, goals, and capabilities well.
4) Change the Way You Perceive The World
There’s a book by blogger Mark Manson called “The Art of Not Giving a Fuck.” Another one is by news reporter Dan Harris, it’s called “10 Percent Happier.” These books aren’t trying to give you actionable steps to change your life, but they try to get you to see things differently. Sometimes, caring too much is a bad thing. Making your personal success a priority is generally a good thing, but this isn’t always the case. It’s easy to sacrifice too much for the attainment of a goal.
The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it but in what one pays for it–what it costs us.-Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Some Advice
If you can get at least that out of spending a few hours reading self-help books, it should be worth the investment. There are more frivolous things you can do with your time than reading about how to improve your life. And if you live a chaotic life, and things aren’t going your way, these books will do a lot more for you than for someone else who’s a lot more organized and focused.
To find what works for you, you must experiment. Figure out what smart people are doing by reading these books and try different routines. Some will be more intuitive than others, you will feel they are much easier to sustain. Focus on those habits and ignore the rest.
The best thing I’ve ever learned from reading these books is the 80/20 rule, or the Pareto principle: 80% of your results will come from 20% percent of your efforts. What this means is that most of your work is practically useless. Find out what you can eliminate to get the most out of your time – including self-help books. Don’t read all of them, there is a lot of bad advice, and badly worded advice. Stick to classics, the books that have stood the test of time. If they managed to endure in a highly competitive industry for this long, there must be a good reason. Never read about the same thing. If you want to understand how habits work, don’t pick up 10 books about habit formation, find the best 2.
Finally, never take anyone’s advice too seriously. Most people don’t know what they’re talking about, and a lot of them are just trying to sell their brand. No one knows what you should do better than yourself.
Self-improvement and time-management might be your worst nightmare. There’s no point in making yourself feel guilty if you don’t manage to follow through with the resolutions your promise to make in your life. It just means that you weren’t ready yet, or that you don’t want it badly enough. In either case, self-hatred is not the antidote to your problems.
Not just self-help books, but take all books with a grain of salt. I think the point of reading should be the opposite of indoctrination. Reading should be only one source of information that is going to be balanced by many other sources of information that come from real life. The more you read, the more you will be exposed to different ideas and ways of thinking. This will make you more independent, because it is more difficult for you to take any single idea too seriously.
But I don’t want to say that reading will make you more independent minded. People who are more independent minded are unlikely to be satisfied with a few sources of information. And to be independent minded means to not fall for schemes, charlatans, swindlers and the like. It means your judgement can be trusted, both by yourself, and by others around you. it’s more important to aim for that, than to aim for more knowledge. More knowledge can be misleading, and dangerous, but being discerning and critically minded will allow you to make the most out of the little knowledge you do have.
Remember my favorite rule: 80/20.