The Problem With Self-Help Books
I used to think reading fiction was a waste of time.
I figured if I’m going to spend this much time reading, I might as well gain something from it.
But self-help books, with a few exceptions that I’ll mention in a second, are absurdly long.
It’s not that they’re long in relative terms, it’s that they’re unnecessarily long.
But the thing is, I understand why they do this.
Imagine a book that promises to change your life.
You pay $30 for it, you get it in the mail, and it’s 20 pages long. How would you feel about it?
99% of people wouldn’t even give it a try. And many of the ones that did, would read it in a day and return it the next.
They *need* to be long. Or at least long enough so that the reader feels like the price was worth it.
But now the reader has to sit through hundreds of pages to get 1 or 2 pages of value from it. And that’s if they’re lucky. Because the majority of self-help books could be summarized in a couple tweets.
And that’s if they’re even worth summarizing.
There are a few exceptions, though, that I found to be worth a full read.
Atomic Habits and The War of Art are two that come to mind, and I’m sure there’s more.
But the truth is that most self-help books are full of filler content to reach an acceptable page count.
Fiction (and many nonfiction books) doesn’t face this problem. You’re reading for entertainment, you don’t need to “get something” out of it. As long as the book is engaging, and you’re sucked into the story, it served its purpose.
There are other reasons why I mostly stopped reading self-help books a while ago, but this is the biggest one.
I’ll still read the odd one, but it needs to have a strong recommendation from someone that I admire and has a solid track record.
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