Is it worth your time to read a lot of self help and how to books?

Maybe reading self-help primes you to think about how you can do whatever you're doing in a better way, and having the habit of frequently and enthusiastically asking yourself "how can I do this better" and taking action on your answers is very general and valuable.

Here is my very obsolete "self help guru ratings" page, and an (old) incomplete list of self-help books I've read or skim-read.

Maybe I'm exceptionally good at picking self-help material to read, but I've received a lot of benefit from the following books:

• "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. This helped me think more about how my communication was being received, with dual effects of tailoring my communication to better get the results I want, and better be understood by others.

• "Difficult Conversations" by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen. This is a good book on nonviolent communication which made a big difference in my interpersonal skills.

• The Greyskull LP book by Johnny Pain is cringe-inducing in it's bro-ness, but the information about weight training within is excellent.

• "Becoming a Supple Leopard" by Kelly Starrett is an excellent resource on physical flexibility, mobility, and movement efficiency. This helped me a lot in gaining the mobility to perform a deep squat snatch.

These are the most recent examples I can remember. I've frequently used How To books in the past to get started with certain skills (playing piano and guitar, learning C), though I've found that books don't do too well to take me past the beginner stages.

When I decide I want to learn a new skill, like Powershell, my first instinct is to pick up a book on the subject and work through it. It works pretty well for me, but that may just be my individual learning style.

Hobbes: Whatcha doin?

Calvin: Getting rich.

Hobbes: Really?

Calvin: Yep. I'm writing a self-help book! There's a huge market for this stuff. First, you convince people there's something wrong with them. That's easy, because advertising has already conditioned people to feel insecure about their weight, looks, social status, sex appeal, and so on. Next, you convince them that the problem is not their fault and that they're victims of larger forces. That's easy, because it's what people believe anyway. Nobody wants to be responsible for his own situation. Finally, you convince them that with your advice and encouragement, they can conquer their problem and be happy!

Hobbes: Ingenious. What problem will you help people solve?

Calvin: Their addiction to self-help books! My book is called, "Shut Up and Stop Whining: How to Do Something with Your Life besides Think About Yourself."

Hobbes: You should probably wait for the advance before you buy anything.

Calvin: The trouble is, if my program works, I won't be able to write a sequel.

The question "what books do I have to read in order to become you?" is one I have been considering lately. I'm not entirely sure why, but it feels like quite a rude question to ask.

If luke is naturally good at putting stuff he's read into practical use, and particularly if he knows it (at least subconsciously), then he would be likely to want to read a lot of self-help books. So the causality in your argument makes more sense to me the other way around. Not sure if I'm helping at all here though.

Out of my ~14 shelves of books, somewhere between one and two are primarily self-help. I'm counting here both pure self-help books like 59 Seconds and specific skill books like Getting to Yes and The Handbook of Style.

I suspect this is part of virtuous spiral involving the growth mindset, and I'm not sure going on a self-help kick is useful compared to a habit of buying and reading any potentially interesting self-help books you come across. In particular, I don't have all that much respect for self-help books as raw motivation; if I can't tell from looking at a book at least one skill it purports to teach, I don't buy it without a recommendation, and looking back those books tend to have been less useful for me.

I have found biographies useful as raw motivation, though- the one I read most recently, and which I think I got the most motivation out of, was Lives of the Engineers by Samuel Smiles. (I've linked to the free ebook, or you can get a paperback for $30, but my version is the Folio Society hardcover.)

''Enabling patients to read self-help CBT guides has been shown to be effective by some studies.[72][73][74] However one study found a negative effect in patients who tended to ruminate,[75] and another meta-analysis found that the benefit was only significant when the self-help was guided (e.g. by a medical professional).[76]'' -Wikipedia

When I was younger I read a lot of self-help books and did not accomplish much. I attribute this to the following:

1. It's easier to get the feeling of having learned something useful than it is to get the feeling of having accomplished something. So there is a tendency to read through the book but not actually accomplish anything.

2. The above is exacerbated by the fact that self-help authors are aware of it. So self-help books tend to be like potato chips -- stimulating but not very nutritious.

3. My brain seems to have an inner fuck-up who ends up making a lot of the day to day decisions in life. My inner fuck-up is too much of a fuck-up to benefit from self-help books. So what would end up happening is that I would read the self-help book, learn something which seemed to make sense, think to myself "yes, now I've got it," and feel really motivated and confident. Until my inner fuck-up takes over and whatever I've learned fades away, kinda like things faded for the main character in [i]Memento[/i].

I always thought that there are bits of useful insight scattered among all the nonsense of self-help books and that reading lots of them and then letting your mind sort through it could lead to those bits being assembled into a useful whole. But I was never able to get myself to actually do it (is there a self-help book on reading self-help books?)

The problem is that I can't really tolerate the idea that I'm doing something mostly useless in the hope that some benefits will nevertheless accrue, invisibly, in my subconscious. I feel the need to judge whatever I'm reading and either seriously engage with it or discard it. And self-help books are not only full of crap, but are also designed to push all your enthusiasm buttons. For me, it's hard to read through bazillions of 'simple insights that will change my life' without slipping into excessive enthusiasm or outright contempt.

So, I think, do it, if you can tolerate the tedium.

Just because someone read a lot of self-help books and managed to improve themselves in some way doesn't mean the self-help books should be recommended to everyone.

Most scientific self help books in my experience piece together a bunch of studies of dubious quality and hang a narrative on it. When you investigate the studies a lot of them don't hold up well methodologically. And that's before you even get into the quality of the narrative.

So basically I'm agreeing with your point. Engaging with lots of self help material is doing some non-explicit stuff to the way you model the world that winds up helping. You remain stronger even if much of the underlying material winds up falsified. I've definitely noticed an improvement in my day to day epistemology as I've done more personal research and learned to quickly identify patterns that indicate something is likely bogus. I think this might just be that humans have consistent ways of dissembling when they know their point isn't solid.