What’s Wrong with Self-Help Books

I’ve read 40+. Many are vapid: 300 pages, one idea, which is normally wrong.

It’s Your Fault You’re Not Better

Self-help books start with an unjust premise. If you follow their instructions, you’ll make more money, foster greater relationships, and get in shape.

• You simply have not adopted the right reading habits.
• No one taught you taught how to create like Steve Jobs or print money like Warren Buffet.
• If you just try hard enough and work smart enough, you’ll succeed too.

But that’s not fair. Fame and riches in complex systems with billions of independent actors are impossible to game. There are so many structural barriers. Your chance of launching the next unicorn startup is 3 in 5 million.

Self-help books don’t tell you how much of success is dumb luck.

Selecting on the DV

Imagine you’re a self-help author. You’re looking to distill greatness into a few characteristics like “begin with the end in mind” or “lead with questions, not answers.” Who do you look to?

Beyoncé. Michael Phelps. Harrison Ford.

You write mini-biographies and analyze their success according to those values, which your book presents as the patterns to follow. But what about all of the athletes who also woke up 5 AM to swim every day for years and didn’t win gold? Or the actors who weren’t getting noticed for their carpentry?

You selected on the dependent variable. We don’t know if these attributes are instrumental to success because you can find them in anyone who hasn’t hit it big.

Their stories just don’t get told.

Adapting to How the World Works

But we should still strive to be better people. The goal’s to be slightly better than we were yesterday because it increases our appreciation of life. Maybe we can do that without these books.

I said the world’s complex. Let’s study it so that we can understand how to apply ourselves to it efficiently, rather than changing ourselves to match what worked for someone who didn’t grow up like we did.

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