The Delusional Scam of the Self-Help Book Industry | Hacker News Reader

The Delusional Scam of the Self-Help Book Industry

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44 pointsuniqueid31 comments

>a book that tells you stuff like “remember people’s names” and “make them feel important,” which seems benign, but should only seem surprising to a child, and should not be something you have to unnaturally force your body to do.

there is much good in pointing out the scamminess of the self-help industry, but this is a good example of making exactly the sort of assumptions the author is railing against. Many basic life lessons that 'should be unsurprising' are extremely important for people who grew up in contexts of emotional neglect.

I'm reading this book right now. And this sentence is unfairly dismissive and misrepresents the book. It's not just a book that tells you to "remember names" and "make people feel important". Maybe if you only take a superficial reading. The anecdotes described seemingly tell you obvious things, but for me it underlines some useful and deep truths about basic human psychology and how to leverage it when interacting with fellow human beings. And for almost every rule or anecdote described I can recount situations in my life where those lessons could've been applied to avoid conflicts.

They definitely did not read this book. A few lines down in the sidenote Zitron makes a point of praising a few books in the genre he HAS read, and those ones provide some nuance.

And I completely agree, each chapter had its own stories and players, lively tales to illustrate the chapter's maxim.

It's also useful to remind ourselves to actually apply those lessons; many of us 'know', but fail to 'do' on a regular basis.

> Many basic life lessons that 'should be unsurprising' are extremely important for people who grew up in contexts of emotional neglect.

Or for the neurologically atypical, or absolutely everyone since we all have obvious things that are hard due to our personality and regular reminders are helpful.

The wording can also help to codify it in your mind. Or offer a shift in perspective, like this:

"Treat Yourself Like Someone You Are Responsible for Helping"

This so much!!!

I totally disagree with the premise of this article, unless I don't get the authors definition of "self help book"

> there is an entire book industry that is focused on the premise that you are merely one good idea away from the future

Many famous people started out with one good idea

> The entire business-focused self-help industry is built on the fallacy that successful people read a lot of books

Many famous successful people promote the face that they read a lot of books, such as Bill Gates and Barack Obama. It's not a fallacy.

There's a lot of junk self help books to wade through, but I have found some jewels among the trash and by jewels I mean they were just right for the situation and age I was at.

Edit: I put together a list off the top of my head of self help books I found useful (again, at the age I was at)

I'm OK – You're OK, guide to transactional analysis by Thomas Harris

Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships by Eric Berne

Trances We Live by Stephen Wolinsky

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

Zen and the Art of Leadership by Thomas Cleary

I've avoided "Think and Grow Rich" for a long time due to the title and premise of the book. I picked it up a few weeks ago and really like it.

Heck, I think if I read it 10 years ago I wouldn't even have the emotional maturity to appreciate it. There's a beauty to some of these books --- some of the ideas seem obvious and can easily be written off until you have the emotional wherewithal and maturity to appreciate the difficulty of what they are suggesting.

"Think and Grow Rich" is a good example. What do you mean... I just have to write a vision for myself that I believe I can achieve, and read it twice a day? Sounds stupid.

... and then you realize how difficult it is for people to truly come up with a vision statement for their success that they legitimately believe they can achieve within a specific time frame... And that doing this correctly is the hard part.

Brilliant.

> I read it 10 years ago I wouldn't even have the emotional maturity to appreciate it

That's why I emphasized the right book at the right age. I know successful people who swear by the book. I appreciate it, but I have a small criticism: He basically preaches trampling all over personal boundaries to get what you want. It's an aggressive strategy.

>Many famous people started out with one good idea

Which had nothing or almost nothing to do with their success.

Bezos didn't succeed because he had the idea to "make an online bookstore".

Bezos didn't view Amazon an online bookstore. He deliberately went into books first because they take up a lot of space and have a long tail of interest, which made them ideal for internet distribution vs. physical distribution. It's pretty clear from what Bezos has said and written over the past 20 years that he had a decent idea of what he wanted to accomplish and has been gradually executing on that.

Based on the limited background information I've read about Bezos, this seems true, but can you explain what you mean in more detail? Just because it's interesting.

That 500 other people with the same idea would have just as well failed (and in fact, tons of people with the same idea did and do fail in most business attemps).

Prerequisites matter (having the money, VC connections), time matter (dot com golden era), place matters (USA vs say Kazakhstan), the overall economic trajectory matters, execution matters - heck, even luck at various different points on setting up the business matters more than the idea.

You must be one of those who think ideas are worthless because everybody has them

>You must be one of those who think ideas are worthless because everybody has them

Yes, one of those so-called realists.

If everybody has them but only 1 of everybody succeeds with the same idea, ideas [1] are obviously worthless.

[1] At the level under discussion, that is: "let's do a business doing X", because otherwise e.g. Relativity Theory is also an idea, and it's certainly not worthless.

I can't speak to the topics addressed in the article itself, but the thing I find most annoying is that _most_ of the people who publish these books (and guides on YouTube, blogs, for-pay video series, etc.) seem to have made their fortunes through the works that are intended to teach people how to build up their own wealth/lifestyle/happiness.

Slightly related are people who serially interview successful people and try to weasel out words of advice or quotables, but never reveal things of greater depth that has more impact on the viewers/listeners/readers (few interviewers do, IMO).

One alternative to this mess is reading good autobiographies by actually successful people in a particular field. Eg I got a huge amount of useful “self help” style guidance from autobiographies of professional mathematicians (eg Paul Halmos) when I was becoming one…

Self-help industry is a joke. My fave https://i.redd.it/uim9p5b9wpaz.png

No doubt there are a lot of "self help" books that are a scam - but that's true for a lot of genres.

A lot of the criticisms seem highly dubious e.g. is this really true?

> The entire business-focused self-help industry is built on the fallacy that successful people read a lot of books.

Altogether seems more like a rant than reasoned criticism.

BTW the list of books cited as an example of the 'scam' includes "Thinking, Fast and Slow" - reasonably sure that reading this is a lot more worthwhile than reading this particular post.

Are books written by Ph.D. researchers who have spent their academic lives studying a topic considered "self help"? If so, not all "self help" books are alike.

My strategy has been to read books like "Stumbling on Happiness" - written by Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard Ph.D. -- rather than by journalists who only tangentially explore a subject to pump out yet another book.

I think like a lot of other similar verticals (exercise etc.) there's quite a bit of cargo-culting, and that def gets scammy.

But for what it's worth, I do enjoy reading self-help stuff -- though for me the practice is what I focus on, not necessarily the results. People are pretty good at knowing WHAT to do, but actually doing it deliberately and doing it well is the hard part, see: exercise etc.

I do think there's a signal-to-noise issue going on with self-help books, and often times the people who need the help are understandably bad at figuring out which things are good vs bad for them.

Much of the industry is a scam. And (similar to business books) seems to exist to support the broader business of the author.

But… There are some nuggets in there. For example, did get value from reading Covey.

Self-help books are a scam because essentially we scam ourselves out of self-improvement. Instead of doing the obvious, like eat less & exercise more, we hope that some idea instead of hard work will actually make us improve. Ideas can be powerful and motivating, but anyone who thinks that they can improve their lives by doing nothing is deluding themselves.

Some of these books are indeed trash, many have advice that's inapplicable to most people, a lot are based on anecdotal evidence, but some of them are alright and I read them and every once in a while I get something valuable out of it.

I think if you set your expectations right (e.g no book will make you happy / rich / whatever) they can be quite useful.

"If you're reading it in a book, folks, it ain't self-help. It's help." -- George Carlin

Similar recent thread:

America’s Obsession with Self-Help - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27741448 - July 2021 (210 comments)

Summary of every self help book by AvE: https://youtu.be/E7RgtMGL7CA

Self-help books are meant to help the author.

Author isn’t wrong per se, but has a thing or two to learn about human nature. The polemic as written is weak.

The main lesson to learn is that people will cling to hope peddlers no matter how BS it is.

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