Self Help Books Need Help

Let me tell you why most self-help books piss me off.

A disclaimer before I begin: the intent of this blog is not to undermine the authors’ efforts or demean their work. I am sure they are well-received by most of their intended audience.

Perhaps I am not their target, and that’s why I don’t see the appeal. So no offense intended—these are just my personal views.

Most of these books spend a majority of their time on how this book can help you—and by majority, I mean anywhere around 70–80% of the book. The book spends all this time talking about how it can help me, how it has helped others, and why I should read this book.

I mean, what’s the point of selling this book to me now, when I have already bought it? This is not a one-off phenomenon; a lot of the well-acclaimed books in the market are guilty of doing this. The whole point of the book seems to be to force-feed a positive review of the book into your head.

So when people ask you, “Hey, why don’t you give me a brief summary of this book that you are reading?” all you can talk about is how great and inspiring this book is going to be—because that is literally all that the book is focusing on.

That’s actually a very smart strategy. This way, they are getting me to sell the book to others, a book that I wouldn’t even consciously recommend, let alone sell.

Don’t get me wrong, some of them do have novel insights as well, but after so much useless rambling I somehow can’t take it seriously. Like, if I just spent 92 pages reading about how miraculous this book is going to be, I don’t want a run-of-the-mill suggestion like “focus on things that matter” and “start taking action.”

I mean, what kind of person doesn’t already know these things? Why are you making such a huge deal of telling me these basic universal truths?

I was looking forward to something revolutionary, something no one has been able to crack so far. But because you’ve raised my expectations so high, you can’t just expect me to be blown away by a basic suggestion.

And that’s where most novels in this category fail to uphold themselves. They are very eloquent at building themselves up and pinpointing the pain points of the readers. So much so that it resembles the story arc of a thriller novel, it takes you to the apex of anticipation like a rollercoaster and then, instead of an illustrious free fall, there’s a plateau. I mean, highlighting the readers’ problems and sharing testimonials can’t be the high point of your book.

The thrill is in the help that you offer in your book. Don’t offer generic advice and then spend another 50 pages on those very obvious suggestions and how they are essential to realizing your full potential. Nobody needs a 300-page novel to tell them to prioritize what matters and launch a startup.

No, instead they need the how.

So, in case you don’t have clear steps or proven actions that can be implemented right away, save your content for a TED Talk.

That’s the reason I feel most of these books should just be sold under the “motivational books” category, or better, consumed as 5-minute illustrated summaries on YouTube. They could be very effective as motivational novels. But I picked it up as a self-help book. I needed solutions to my problems, which I thought this book would provide (and what it claimed to do in at least 20 different ways).

So now I’m annoyed, and I can’t be motivated by someone who is annoying me. For me, these books fail to provide motivation either.

The thing that upsets me the most about this is that there is a plethora of amazing books I could have read in the time I spent getting annoyed by this well-intentioned but sly marketing gimmick.

Can someone please write a book on “how to get back the time I spent reading very unhelpful self-help books”?

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Today’s craving – Gluten-free chocolate cake