>You can save time by learning from the mistakes of others.

Only barely. For important life decisions/paths, people only learn from their own mistakes (and often not even from those).

Heck, Computer Science as a field itself forgets its own collected wisdom every new generation hits the market, and re-invents BS that other eras have tried and buried with another fad name.

What's even worse, those "self-help" books are full of contradictory, snake-oily, and plain wrong information, and can even put people on BS priorities and give them a false sense of what it means to be happy/successful etc. Which is one reason people reading those books keep reading those books and going to those seminars -- they're not meant to get you somewhere, but to keep those believing them hooked forever.

There are exceptions, sure. But not 100.000 exceptions, and there are more than 100.000 such crap works.