Suppose somebody actually figures out an excellent way to help oneself, e.g. to stop smoking; lose weight; be more productive; etc. And suppose they wrote a book which presented their strategy in a clear coherent way.
One can ask if the book would actually help anyone. Or to put the question another way, would people benefit from reading the book?
I’m pretty confident that the answer is “generally speaking, no.” There seems to be a meta-self-help problem, which is that people are very resistant to that kind of learning.
I would hypothesize that that there are different aspects to one’s personality. Among other things, we all have a “Mr. Fat Slob” who is perfectly happy to smoke cigarettes and stuff his face and procrastinate and doesn’t care about the consequences. We also have a “Mr. Know-It-All” who doesn’t want to do anything which might be an admission that he’s been screwing up or that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Since those aspects of the personality have a big influence over our thoughts and actions, it’s very difficult to benefit from a self-help book. Much of the human brain doesn’t actually want to change since it might interrupt the flow of nachos. And much of the brain doesn’t want to change because that would mean that it had made a mistake.
Of course if you solve the meta-self-help problem, then you arguably don’t need self-help books in the first place.
Here’s a thought experiment:
Suppose somebody actually figures out an excellent way to help oneself, e.g. to stop smoking; lose weight; be more productive; etc. And suppose they wrote a book which presented their strategy in a clear coherent way.
One can ask if the book would actually help anyone. Or to put the question another way, would people benefit from reading the book?
I’m pretty confident that the answer is “generally speaking, no.” There seems to be a meta-self-help problem, which is that people are very resistant to that kind of learning.
I would hypothesize that that there are different aspects to one’s personality. Among other things, we all have a “Mr. Fat Slob” who is perfectly happy to smoke cigarettes and stuff his face and procrastinate and doesn’t care about the consequences. We also have a “Mr. Know-It-All” who doesn’t want to do anything which might be an admission that he’s been screwing up or that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Since those aspects of the personality have a big influence over our thoughts and actions, it’s very difficult to benefit from a self-help book. Much of the human brain doesn’t actually want to change since it might interrupt the flow of nachos. And much of the brain doesn’t want to change because that would mean that it had made a mistake.
Of course if you solve the meta-self-help problem, then you arguably don’t need self-help books in the first place.