Self-Help Books Are Good, Actually
I'm writing thirty posts in thirty days, again. This is number fifteen.
About 25% of the books I read are in the self-help category. I think that this number is a little too low. I say this having earned myself a fancy literature degree, which involved tasks like spending an entire semester tackling Ulysses. Classic literature is great. Beautiful, good for the spirit, good for reminding you of the richness of life. But if I had to pick one of the two, for the rest of my life, I’d probably pick self-help. And I think among smart people I know, self-help books are consistently underrated.
Almost Any Self-Help Book Works
Almost any diet is an improvement on the standard American diet, so if you do some diet, even if it’s totally wrong-headed, some vigilance about what you’re consuming will generally improve your health. The same is true of self-help books.
If you’re reading self-help, unless you’re taking every suggestion as literal gospel and implementing it immediately, what you’re doing is encountering a set of propositions about the good life, and at least reflecting on whether they might be useful. For most people, this is an improvement on not thinking about the course of your life at all and just drifting the way you might otherwise.
One thing religious people get right and secular people get wrong: it’s good to examine your principles on a regular basis. It’s good to regularly spend some time thinking about what you want in this life, and how you’re going to go after it. If nothing else, self-help books provide a prompt for this kind of inner dialogue—an invitation to start figuring out what’s going on around you.
Obvious Advice Is Good
You probably will have heard lots of the advice in self-help books before, in one form or another. But that’s fine.
Sometimes you need to be reminded of amazingly obvious things. One weird thing about the human mind is that we’re capable of knowing a tremendous amount, just not right now. We can forget shit like, ‘exercise is really good,’ or de-emphasize it temporarily in favor of other pieces of knowledge, like, ‘people are making millions selling pictures of penguins on the internet.’ Shuffling some useful knowledge to the top of the pile can get a lot done.
And also… you might not have heard some really obvious advice? Consider a book called I Hear You, a short book I read two years ago, which tells you to use validation when you communicate with other people. You know, saying stuff like, “wow, that sounds really painful” when someone tells you about a shitty experience. Obvious, right? Not to me. And not to many people I interact with. Reading this book and implementing it instantly made me much easier to talk to.
There is no manual for life. You have to assemble your own. Chunks are scattered across the landscape. They are available on Amazon.
Often, Book Summaries Are Not Enough
The naive view of non-fiction books is that they’re storehouses of information, and that to get the full effect, all you need to do is get the salient tidbits. In this view, it makes sense to just read a Blinkist summary of a self-help book. But that’s not how non-fiction works at all. Books are hypnosis. You sink into a vibe, a voice, an aesthetic, and an implied way of being. That creates an interface through which you can consider what’s being dispensed. Books are also talismans. Buying an object or a Kindle file is a ceremonial act that has real effects.
Somehow, Allen Carr’s book The Easyway to Quit Smoking has gotten millions of people to end a destructive drug addiction. Reading a summary of the book on the internet doesn’t do the same thing. Therefore, delete your Blinkist account.
The Stoics Are Just Self-Help, You Snob
Self-help used to be a valid branch of philosophy. Greeks wandered the streets discoursing about how to live the good life. Then, academic philosophy became about wandering up our own asses, and self-help became culturally low-class. Now, The Meditations is considered a towering classic, and Difficult Conversations, despite being a more mature and useful work, isn’t given the same status. This is just cultural baggage.