Whenever someone wants to sell you their path to success, you need to ask why.
It’s a huge industry which typically makes outlandish and largely unfounded claims... it’s the homeopathy of literature. Like homeopathy it typically targets the desperate and insecure.
I think this is a really interesting point. I used to be all over self-help books because I wanted to improve myself, but it seems to me as though so many authors just regurgitate the same points over and over again with tired anecdotes mixed in.
Hard Things About Hard Things really helped my career. It could be a placebo.
I don’t think that justifies the industry as a whole, but I believe that for the right person at the right time, these books can be of some use. I suspect that the people, such as yourself, who get something out of them would have found what they were looking for anyway however. The commonalities in people who benefit from occasional self help seem to be committed to change, to improvement, and I think that more than anything else is the active ingredient.