How to Read Self-Help
tjcx.me
tjcx.me
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.
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"
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.
- 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
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?
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.
Other traditions (notably the French and German) are far more comfortable with shorter monographs of 100 or fewer pages.
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.
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 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...
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.
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.