>"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.