Self-Help Books: Friend or Folly?
They come in all subjects, themes, and interests; some will tell you how to improve your life through tarot cards, a few tout cleaning and organizing as the key to success, and then there are those ones for people who really, really like cats. With so many, there's bound to be a self-help book that fits your specific emotional niche or crisis. In middle school, just a few years after having read the very helpful novel 'Salem's Lot, I and my fellow students were encourage to read self-help books by our teachers. We were too busy reading Harry Potter and discovering the world of manga to care. This self-help book shilling continued throughout school until I started at Indiana University, where Steve Harvey's "Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man" was required reading for my introductory college prep course. Did I actually read it? I managed about two chapters before putting it down and wondering why I was reading a book about relationships written by Steve Harvey for a college course on freshmen literature. Incidentally, the course finished before anyone was able to finish and the test was over Greek myth instead. I've never read another self-help book since. Why read about improving your life when you can actually work to improve your life? Isn't that simple! However, with so many books at my disposal, I'm left to wonder if, perhaps, have I got it wrong? Can these books really help me in finding success?
The first thing to establish is exactly what a self-help book is. For my purposes, a self-help book is a book written with the purpose of helping readers solve personal problems. This is a fairly vague definition which covers a very wide range of interests, which is probably how you get books on organization, tarot cards, and acting like a cat under one genre. Their readers are people from different backgrounds, their problems are different, and thus they need different solutions, thus, so many books and so many solutions.
But how do you decide if following a self-help book is actually successful in solving readers' personal problems? One simple way to do that is to see if people who are deemed "successful" read such books. After all, those people must be doing something right for them to be successful. In this article by Business Insider, the author of a successful self-help book, Tom Corley, notes that 85% of rich people-someone's level of wealth is an easy qualifier of success-read for self improvement, compared to only 15% of not rich people. The key piece of information to take from this, Corley notes, is that rich people read for education, to find ways they can succeed by copying the habits of those who have already succeeded. In a way, the self-help book acts a substitute mentor for the person reading it. Not everyone knows someone who can spend the time to mentor them, nor can everyone afford professional development courses.
Using a self-help book as a guide can be a cheap, realistic way for someone to have the knowledge of, say, Warren Buffett at their beck and call night and day. Warren Buffett himself is rather famous for his ravenous reading, a trait he encourages for both those just starting out and older individuals who want to stay sharp and at top. Reading during a lunch break has been shown to be yet another habit of successful people. While there is no word about what sort of what sort of book that should be-the article mentions that reading helps someone "focus, offers a mental break from work, and can give some much needed solitude"- it would make sense that to get the optimal amount of success, someone should read self-help books while on your lunch. It sounds simple: take a bit of time during your lunch break to have a quick "meeting" with your mentor, apply their teachings, success!
The recipe for success!
Let's go rewind a bit to the first paragraph: does anyone think that top earning executives and company VPs are reading books on tarot cards and how acting like a cat can improve your mood? Warren Buffett certainly isn't: out of the nine books listed, none are exactly what would would typically throw into the "self-help" pile. Four are books about investment strategy, while others are books about business strategy and the market collapse. You are probably thinking, well, of course, different people, different problems, different solutions, right? We all aren't looking to get rich like Warren Buffett. But remember when I said that I was given that Steven Harvey relationship book to read in college? When I said that that was for a preparation course, I left out that we weren't being told to debate the book, which itself has its fair share of controversies and detractors. We weren't told how or why this applied to our upcoming college careers; this is much the same as in my pre-college school career, where we were not told what self-help books to read or how to read them. Just "read something other than fiction and you will be fine!"
To compound this problem, there really isn't any evidence that reading self-help books actually help their readers. In fact, one study found that self-help books are linked to greater feelings of stress. Why? Part of the problem stems from the fact that the people writing these books are not normally trained professionals in counselling or cognitive therapy. Self-help books are not real substitutes for doctors, counselors, or financial advisers. They are books, often written to be just as entertaining as they are helpful. They may offer perspective on a problem, they may even offer real solutions, but that book does not know your situation, it does not know you.
Self-help books can be grand resources, they can offer perspective and knowledge that one would be hard pressed to find otherwise. But it also requires perspective to understand them for what they are. It is best to narrow your reading to subjects that are not only interesting, but practical to your goals. With this in mind, what self-help books have been the most help for you? The most interesting? The funniest? Or the least useful?
