My main objection to these types of books is how overly verbose they tend to be. With a few exceptions, this category of book is built around a nucleus of few possibly valuable pearls of wisdom, and then 300 pages of filler is added. Usually lots of anecdotes ("Let me tell you about my friend Alice..."), checklists, and needless exposition.
If this really is wisdom, it does not follow that it takes 300 pages to communicate. But I suppose the propounders have to make a living somehow.
To be honest, I don't object to buying the book if it's really got some good wisdom, but I would be more likely to if they shipped with some sort of executive summary.
Could it be that longer books are almost a natural spaced repetition system for ingesting content?
While I agree many 300-page books can be compressed into 10-20 pages of high density summary, I can't help but wonder if the length of a book almost ensures we spend a minimum length of time playing with/thinking about/considering the idea being presented. And that for certain books, the typical time it would take to read through 10-20 pages wouldn't be enough to really let the ideas sink in.
In other words, when I take a 300-page book (or a 10-hour audiobook) and spread it out over 7 or so days, I'm going to spend a lot more time thinking about it (each reading/listening session + some length of time after each session) compared with if I read a highly-condensed blog post and was done with it. Unless I took the initiative and made flash cards or something to review it later on - which I am not in a habit of doing.
You can repeat a generalization over and over again. It sounds right — but it doesn’t stick. You can’t translate it into your own practice. You learn the words, but not the intuition.
Telling concrete stories helps us learn the intuition, too.
This really reminds me of the concept of elaborative encoding whereas we learn by connecting facts with preexisting knowledge [0]. Abstract things do not stick because we have less touch points to connect them with. The Baker Baker paradox for instance describes the fact that we are much more likely to remember that a person is a baker than the more abstract fact that his name is Baker [1].
>Could it be that longer books are almost a natural spaced repetition system for ingesting content?
I might buy the 'fiber' argument as it were, if it weren't for literature's existing power to convey in compact form already.
Aesop seems miles ahead of the modern self-help crowd here; if anything, there's something about couching information in metaphor that makes it particularly satisfying to digest, which is why we can teach children about boys who cry wolf with more efficacy than simply preaching honesty - which children put to more credible use in examining their teachers' hypocrisy.
I wholeheartedly agree metaphors are a multiplier to information transfer, but I can't say I've seen a deep dive into the psychology of why beyond simple literature class reasons.
My guess is when given a metaphor our brains just don't have to do as much work to frame the concept and understand it, and retention is better as it's condensed.
> If this really is wisdom, it does not follow that it takes 300 pages to communicate. But I suppose the propounders have to make a living somehow.
The article makes the point that the wisdom really does take much longer to communicate - a nugget of wisdom like ‘accept yourself’ seems trite when taken alone, but the examples (presumably filling the other 300 pages) are what makes the advice actually sink in.
More than that it is about how different we all are, the parent poster would like no anecdote, I would like some, you would like some different from mines.
300 pages of filler could very well be the same message told 15 different times in 15 different format hoping that most people would gain that precious wisdom from at least one of them.
I see this as a common fallacy of hyperrational people
And many read it and can't digest it, let alone put it into practice.
A couple of very capable people I know can hear the story of something that happened to someone, and they get glazed eyes and can only say "Huh?" Then I rephrase it as "Imagine you were _______ and then _____ happened and afterward you were _____" and they're like "Well why didn't you just say that?"
Or the exact opposite.
Or like me. Give me an anecdote about something and I'll "Huh, interesting." Tell me about the reason you found it interesting, and I'm way more interested and engaged. Relate it to an event in my own life and now you've got me. But don't ever try to frame it that way for my wife, she'll get bored after the first five words.
It's not the message, it's what the listener gets from it.
I've sen quite a few quotes around that very point, similar to "You'll get the teacher you need when you need them" or
"You'll read it again and understand it on a whole different level" or
"The people in your life are there because you need them now. Don't mourn the loss of an acquaintance, it's because you don't need their lesson anymore"
There are I think two important factors at play here:
1) A lot of the 'filler' isn't filler at all, but the process of communicating ideas in ways that work for many different people (since we don't all process information the same way).
2) More validly, the publishing industry doesn't really have a workable model for a 100 page book. The effort to put this out is not 1/3 of a 300 page book.
Would you buy the 87 page version for, say a 20% discount?
I'd pay full price if the information was valuable. This is what's missing here, having to scour 300 pages for what amounts to a handful of insights.
You could make the argument that a 'top 10' bulleted list misses the scaffolding or structure to adequately argue/justify those points, but at least the ideation of self-help is the 'secret' which is non-intuitive, that we are paying for being distilled to truths and actionables.
> If this really is wisdom, it does not follow that it takes 300 pages to communicate.
There's not a big market for 10 page books.
A lot of business books suffer from the same issue. There's some genuinely interesting or innovative idea, but you could explain it to a bright audience in about 10 pages. So you fluff up everything in order to have a book you can sell.
There was just something on HN about how you have to be a seasoned experienced expert before you're allowed to talk in simple terms to people, otherwise you're socially expected to couch in jargon and terminology ideas.
Dressing up ideas in purple might be a social signal necessity but it's unfortunate.
He is the author of Atomic Habits, which is a reasonably short guide to mastering habit formation. His free newsletter delivers a high amount of wisdom per word, and reading the book is not necessary to get value from it. Normally I can read the newsletter in about 30 seconds, and then can spend as long as I want thinking about the content.
This is true of almost all business books as well. Typically they are a brief paper or even a single drawing ("crossing the chasm" is a single insightful drawing).
Unfortunately a four-page (or one-page!) book wouldn't sell particularly well. So like washing powder they are expanded with inert fillers.
An interesting exercise is to have a sample of readers summarizing a self-help book in 4 pages or less, and see how these pearls of wisdom overlap.
My hypothesis is that people would highlight different things, based on their own present level of wisdom so to speak.
Put it in a different way, the challenge with books as the medium for self-help is that it doesn't adapt to the varying levels of wisdom if its audience.
I suspect it's often just the reality of the market.
If theaters refuse to show films under an hour in length, every film will be at least an hour, even if a shorter film would have been better.
In a world where people go to bookstores to buy self help stuff, people who want to publish something about self help are going to have to write books.
Most self-help books do ship with an executive summary, conventionally written on the inner cover and in online descriptions. "This book contains a great self-help tactic but I won't tell you what it is" doesn't exactly drive sales.
I have a couple of books that are something between self-help and neuroscience/psychology that I can recommend. They are a more scientific and evidence-based lens on many of the same themes as self-help books (resilience, confidence, acceptance, etc), and they contain concrete exercises and summaries. They might appeal to people who are allergic to woo:
- Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, Wisdom
- Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-being
I’m a fan of some self-help books. However, a major aspect that this article misses is that self-help is not a purely mental & cognitive activity. In my experience, the best books are pathways to action - they are like recipe cookbooks, where you actually have to try out the thing in order to experience a change. Neurosurgeons don’t get their wisdom by reading - they practice, watch other people, assist, perform, and train. They learn by training. Self-help is the same.
Evaluating self-help books by what we understood by reading it is like trying to feel full and satiated by reading a cookbook of recipes. The cookbook and self-help book is there to be acted on.
The thing I dislike the most about self-help/self-improvement books (example: Getting things done, by David Allen) is that they spend a lot of the book trying to convince you that their method work.
What I'm saying is: I already bough a copy of the book, you don't have to convince me anymore. I already gave you my money. Just explain me the stuff.
The best “self-help” books I’ve read are the ones that are able to formulate known insights that I already had, but put in much better words than I could have done myself.
I recommend the podcast "By The Book" if you're fascinated by/interested in the self-help book genre. The hosts select a self-help book, try to live it to the letter, and report their findings.
If we're talking about books that contain a lot of wisdom,Imight suggest reading 'letters to a young poet' by Rainer Maria Rilke. It left a lasting impression and I get back to it from time to time.
Anyone that wants to get a teaser can watch: https://youtu.be/F5tZ8X-EnAg
Our culture and our algorithms value quantity. It's the same reason why so many YouTube videos are now mostly fluff. We assume a video greater than 20 minutes or a book that's over 100 pages is worth something. But a simple essay or booklet can be worth their weight in gold.
The article says that good self-help that leads to wisdom is obvious but hard to imply.
The natural corollary of that is that you probably already have the necessary wisdom in your head (because it's obvious). And thus, if you're debating between spending two hours reading a self-help book and spending those two hours doing basically anything else, the latter is likely the better choice because there is at least some chance than in those two hours you will apply some wisdom or otherwise enrich your life.
The reason self-help books are bad is not because they contain bad information. It's because reading them burns time that could otherwise be better spent.
Just because something is obvious once shown to you doesn't mean it was immediately present in your mind beforehand, so being made aware of it can still be valuable.
But agree that there's diminishing returns from these insights and focusing more on the specific details of your life is usually more impactful.
Self help that you read and learn is just knowledge; self help that you live and breathe is understanding. Moving from knowledge to understanding is difficult: you can tell a kid that the stove is hot but they just don't get it until they're burnt.
I think sometimes the problem with reading self help is it prescribes too many changes and people become overwhelmed. Learning to understand incredibly simple, trite things like self-acceptance can take a really long time. Simply knowing that you should accept yourself is not enough--ask any depressed person. There is a lot more work to be done before you can fully understand that notion.
In my opinion, the medium is the problem. It's easy to read advice. It's hard to know how to apply general advice to a concrete situation. For that, you need to be in a live conversation with someone wise or knowledgeable.
'Verbose..repetitive..filler content..5/10 pages useful content, rest is fluff...' these were the reasons I wanted to create a no-nonsense encyclopedia of self help, self improvement and career advice.
If this really is wisdom, it does not follow that it takes 300 pages to communicate. But I suppose the propounders have to make a living somehow.
To be honest, I don't object to buying the book if it's really got some good wisdom, but I would be more likely to if they shipped with some sort of executive summary.
While I agree many 300-page books can be compressed into 10-20 pages of high density summary, I can't help but wonder if the length of a book almost ensures we spend a minimum length of time playing with/thinking about/considering the idea being presented. And that for certain books, the typical time it would take to read through 10-20 pages wouldn't be enough to really let the ideas sink in.
In other words, when I take a 300-page book (or a 10-hour audiobook) and spread it out over 7 or so days, I'm going to spend a lot more time thinking about it (each reading/listening session + some length of time after each session) compared with if I read a highly-condensed blog post and was done with it. Unless I took the initiative and made flash cards or something to review it later on - which I am not in a habit of doing.
“The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn't resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates.” [https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/jacqueline_woodson_882873]
You can repeat a generalization over and over again. It sounds right — but it doesn’t stick. You can’t translate it into your own practice. You learn the words, but not the intuition.
Telling concrete stories helps us learn the intuition, too.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaborative_encoding
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mental-mishaps/20100...
I might buy the 'fiber' argument as it were, if it weren't for literature's existing power to convey in compact form already.
Aesop seems miles ahead of the modern self-help crowd here; if anything, there's something about couching information in metaphor that makes it particularly satisfying to digest, which is why we can teach children about boys who cry wolf with more efficacy than simply preaching honesty - which children put to more credible use in examining their teachers' hypocrisy.
I wholeheartedly agree metaphors are a multiplier to information transfer, but I can't say I've seen a deep dive into the psychology of why beyond simple literature class reasons.
My guess is when given a metaphor our brains just don't have to do as much work to frame the concept and understand it, and retention is better as it's condensed.
The article makes the point that the wisdom really does take much longer to communicate - a nugget of wisdom like ‘accept yourself’ seems trite when taken alone, but the examples (presumably filling the other 300 pages) are what makes the advice actually sink in.
300 pages of filler could very well be the same message told 15 different times in 15 different format hoping that most people would gain that precious wisdom from at least one of them.
I see this as a common fallacy of hyperrational people
A couple of very capable people I know can hear the story of something that happened to someone, and they get glazed eyes and can only say "Huh?" Then I rephrase it as "Imagine you were _______ and then _____ happened and afterward you were _____" and they're like "Well why didn't you just say that?"
Or the exact opposite.
Or like me. Give me an anecdote about something and I'll "Huh, interesting." Tell me about the reason you found it interesting, and I'm way more interested and engaged. Relate it to an event in my own life and now you've got me. But don't ever try to frame it that way for my wife, she'll get bored after the first five words.
It's not the message, it's what the listener gets from it.
I begin to think that if you don't understand the advice, you simply don't need it _yet_.
"You'll read it again and understand it on a whole different level" or
"The people in your life are there because you need them now. Don't mourn the loss of an acquaintance, it's because you don't need their lesson anymore"
1) A lot of the 'filler' isn't filler at all, but the process of communicating ideas in ways that work for many different people (since we don't all process information the same way).
2) More validly, the publishing industry doesn't really have a workable model for a 100 page book. The effort to put this out is not 1/3 of a 300 page book.
Would you buy the 87 page version for, say a 20% discount?
Other traditions (notably the French and German) are far more comfortable with shorter monographs of 100 or fewer pages.
You could make the argument that a 'top 10' bulleted list misses the scaffolding or structure to adequately argue/justify those points, but at least the ideation of self-help is the 'secret' which is non-intuitive, that we are paying for being distilled to truths and actionables.
There's not a big market for 10 page books.
A lot of business books suffer from the same issue. There's some genuinely interesting or innovative idea, but you could explain it to a bright audience in about 10 pages. So you fluff up everything in order to have a book you can sell.
Dressing up ideas in purple might be a social signal necessity but it's unfortunate.
He is the author of Atomic Habits, which is a reasonably short guide to mastering habit formation. His free newsletter delivers a high amount of wisdom per word, and reading the book is not necessary to get value from it. Normally I can read the newsletter in about 30 seconds, and then can spend as long as I want thinking about the content.
Unfortunately a four-page (or one-page!) book wouldn't sell particularly well. So like washing powder they are expanded with inert fillers.
Funny, I recently read that book and have about four A4 pages of notes.
My hypothesis is that people would highlight different things, based on their own present level of wisdom so to speak.
Put it in a different way, the challenge with books as the medium for self-help is that it doesn't adapt to the varying levels of wisdom if its audience.
If theaters refuse to show films under an hour in length, every film will be at least an hour, even if a shorter film would have been better.
In a world where people go to bookstores to buy self help stuff, people who want to publish something about self help are going to have to write books.
- Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, Wisdom
- Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-being
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Evaluating self-help books by what we understood by reading it is like trying to feel full and satiated by reading a cookbook of recipes. The cookbook and self-help book is there to be acted on.
What I'm saying is: I already bough a copy of the book, you don't have to convince me anymore. I already gave you my money. Just explain me the stuff.
The same can be said of Gladwell's books.
There's a bit of strawman stuff going on in the article.
The natural corollary of that is that you probably already have the necessary wisdom in your head (because it's obvious). And thus, if you're debating between spending two hours reading a self-help book and spending those two hours doing basically anything else, the latter is likely the better choice because there is at least some chance than in those two hours you will apply some wisdom or otherwise enrich your life.
The reason self-help books are bad is not because they contain bad information. It's because reading them burns time that could otherwise be better spent.
But agree that there's diminishing returns from these insights and focusing more on the specific details of your life is usually more impactful.
I think sometimes the problem with reading self help is it prescribes too many changes and people become overwhelmed. Learning to understand incredibly simple, trite things like self-acceptance can take a really long time. Simply knowing that you should accept yourself is not enough--ask any depressed person. There is a lot more work to be done before you can fully understand that notion.
Tiny Skills https://www.thesuccessmanual.in/tiny-skills.php