Self-help books have loyal fans and critics in equal measure. Some people take it for granted that a self-help book is smoke and mirrors, built on magical thinking and not grounded in scientific evidence. In many cases that’s true, but not all self-help or personal development books can be lumped into the same category.
People sometimes forget that a self-help book may be written by a psychologist, a neurologist or a neuroscientist. The problem lies not so much with the book or the author as with the reader.
The problem with self-help readers
We live in an age of the easy, the quick and, unfortunately, the misleading. Easily digestible content sells better for the simple reason that readers prefer to be lied to. And yes, however harsh it sounds, from a neuroscientific and psychological point of view people prefer to be lied to if it lets them avoid hearing an uncomfortable truth.
This is one of the reasons why books like The Secret or The Power of Now become bestsellers and sell millions of copies. They have a very easy message for the reader and become an anaesthetic for the person’s situation, without offering the reader any real solutions. That’s why people like these books. Unfortunately, the magic of feeling good wears off very quickly, because the person runs headlong into reality.
See also: Andrew Carnegie’s 10 rules of success for getting rich
Modern psychology is also rejecting the message of “taking responsibility for our own lives”, which is usually the main focus of many personal development and self-help books. I am very clear on this point: there is no sensible, coherent way to live unless we take responsibility for our own lives. Given that we are not a stone or a dog, it is up to us to make certain decisions and get into the driver’s seat of our lives.
If someone sees this differently, or gives you a message that lets you off the hook for everything to do with your own life, I’m sorry, but I don’t care who that person is, or what their qualifications or position are. They are simply giving you bad advice that will lead you to disaster. I insist: there is no coherent way to live unless you accept that you are responsible for your life.
And this is very easy to understand. If your life depends on you, on your decisions, actions and choices, then you can change it. If it doesn’t depend on you, then obviously you can do nothing to change it, and the course of your life will depend on other people (external factors). And thinking that way is harmful.
The message of self-help books
Once we start from that premise, we can tell a good self-help book from a bad one. On one side is the personal development book that tells you to think positively, to visualise and wish for something so that the universe will grant it to you (the universe doesn’t grant a damn thing). On the other is the book that tells you you’ll have to work hard, that it won’t be easy and that the result is never guaranteed, but that you can improve your chances of achieving it through effort and hard work aimed in the right direction.
The first message (think positively and the universe will grant it) usually sells more books than the second (effort, sacrifice and sweat), because it’s what readers want to hear. The trouble is that only the second message can really change a reader’s life. Always, I insist, applying Stoic thinking, which starts from the idea that the result won’t always depend on our effort, but how we make that effort and how we accept the result (whatever it is) does depend on us.
Finally, there’s one more problem: it isn’t just about reading. Information and knowledge are useless unless we put them into practice. This is another problem many readers have: they don’t put into practice most of the advice in the good books on these subjects.
See also: The best personal development books
Featured image: Yair Haklai, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
