It's part of the reason the self-help and diet book section is so large; people love the idea that they can get what they want with one weird trick; but the reality is it's not very complicated, it's just hard.
However there are people who have gotten help and made real progress. Think of some of the hardest things one can do: dealing with addiction, overcoming crippling fear, radically changing bad habits etc.
There's people who were weak and gotten strong. Some of them read self help books, some found social support. That's were the focus should be, not on the people who always walked the happy path and just "worked hard". Overcoming hopeless situations, stigma, bias, ego. That's actually hard.
Absolutely. I've also personally benefitted from some self-help books, though I've read many other self-help books that seemed to be useful at the time, but were ultimately forgettable and likely a distraction from issues I would have been better off directly taking of.
A good heuristic I've found is to prefer self-help books written by academics over influencers (anyone with a marketing background or associated with the word "guru"). Good books included those written by BJ Fogg (professor at Stanford) on habits, David Burns on useful versus self-defeating beliefs (psychiatrist and professor also affiliated with Stanford), and to a less extent Cal Newport (computer science professor at Georgetown).
As a side note, Cal Newport's advice was generally good, but — though I may be misremembering — his advice appeared to mostly be useful for people who already have a very clear goal and strong motivation about what to do, and didn't really struggle with self-defeating beliefs, close relationships that were unhealthy in life, or people who had fallen behind in mathematics skill development.
It's a similar thing with dieting, the number of people who have gone to the trouble of actually counting every calorie they eat, restricting themselves to a certain amount to lose weight, and not lost weight is pretty small. But the number who tell themselves that they've done it is much higher.
About 2.8% of the US population has a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. (In a wider study including other countries, the average is 2.4%) I have no reason to doubt this because I have far too many people I knew before my diagnosis who have since told me they have an extended family member who are bipolar. And not the “oh they have a diagnosis” kind, but people who destroy their own lives and those of the people around them. I was shocked how common it is.
And this is just bipolar. There are many other mental and physical problems that affect the ability to have discipline if they just worked on it.
Edit: I should state I definitely believe focus and attention is a skill, but you can’t effectively use a skill when your tools are broken. Good luck racing a car that’s disassembled in the garage.
After awhile I didn't want to be a smoker anymore and found a self help book - "Allen Carr's Easy Way To Stop Smoking." Friends of mine suggested it, and I found a PDF and read it during a dead afternoon at work.
Instead of focusing on the "hard" trope of quitting smoking it presented it as easy - hence the title. It framed the habit for exactly what it was, a drug addiction, but it never talked harshly to you about how you became a nicotine addict or the quitting process. It focused on telling you exactly what to expect if you decide to quit, and then gave you a positive framework to help overcome the effects of quitting. The overall message was always "think of how much you're going to gain by quitting... health, money, etc."
It worked, I am no longer a nicotine addict. I don't think I would have had the capability to quit without some mental reframing which that book 100% helped me accomplish.
> That's were the focus should be, not on the people who always walked the happy path and just "worked hard". Overcoming hopeless situations, stigma, bias, ego. That's actually hard.
Agree.
There's always the "work hard" narrative and I find it's often coupled with a discrediting attitude like OP's comment. The effect of that attitude demotivates more than it helps. As cheesy as it was I found the tools to fix my nicotine addiction in a self-help book ha
Almost all diets work if you stick to them, and almost nobody does. People want behavioral changes to be easy but they're not - they require hard work.
Perhaps more diet books would be successful if they treated it as a food addiction instead of a "eat healthy to look sexy".
I now occasionally a smoke a cigarette (say, once every month or two), something that, according to the vast majority of many ex-smokers, appears to be almost impossible to do.
* Huge procrastination problem in college melted away as soon as I started working 9-5 in an office.
* Couldn't run 5 minutes, until I incidentally started wearing a smart-watch, tried running again, and noticed the heart rate monitor telling me to slow down.
* Doom-scrolling trances easily broken by shutting down the computer or putting the phone out of arm's reach.
I don't think any particular advice in the self-help genre is likely to be true, but these "one weird trick" style solutions do keep on working for me.
If you are interested in the solution, you can signup for my . . .
Seriously though the answer was to just do something else. Don't sit around thinking about the problem; just do something else and the problem will be easier to solve the next time you try to solve it.
But as you've shown, often a good mentor can do just as well, or better.
If you could make that part about 5 minutes longer you'll have a future in YouTube commercials