Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
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tim.blog
https://bsky.app/profile/ifbookspod.bsky.social
It really is all the same book.
For nerds (like me) who think data and statistics are the way to persuade people, you're doing yourself a disservice by ignoring the truth. Lots of people think sales are icky, but much of life is influenced by your ability to persuade and sell, even yourself, to others.
Dale Carnegie and Steven Covey have both been heavily influenced by Alfred Adler, the Austrian psychotherapist and founder of individual psychology.
It’s almost like the designation of “self help” is so broad as to be totally useless.
I've got some bad news for you about the SaaS industry
I wonder if that is a reason for the decline rather than AI.
> my self help consumption (across all media) has been dropping lately
I share this idea because I see a similar pattern in myself. For the self-help YouTube videos that I do watch, I am/was most interested in (a) exercise/fitness/diet and (b) personal/romantic relationships. After 1000 hours or so of this sort of content, I learned how to improve and "ascended". Now, I don't need to watch as much because my thinking on these topics is more advanced.
Deeper: How will these channels sustain themselves? It does not look obvious to me! If I were running a self-help channel, I might intentionally delete old videos after 6-12 months. Why? So that I can remake the same content again (and again)... to get a revenue boost from new(er) viewers. For anyone who is a full-time self-help content creator, probably 90% of the revenue is made in the first 30 days. (Wild guess, but there will be an extreme cliff of some sort.)
Deep Work by Cal Newport gave me a way to think about my time management: information work is not the same as a factory line where doing the same thing at similar productivity from 9 to 5 makes sense, and it is important to dedicate long stretch of quality time to be productive (vs busy).
There are no silver bullets, but learning what worked for a group of people, testing it for myself, adapting it, and using it as needed has been helpful to me.
Also how you teach somebody a thing matters.
Stories have a profound effect on humans since the earliest of our days.
2. Dispute resolution. There is a three step process that transforms how you fight. A) what did I do to contribute, B) what I’ll do different next time, C) I am sorry and I’ll do X to make amends. When you do this you stop blaming others, which is what causes defensiveness, escalation, and the cascade of in tractable conflict. When you lead with this you’ll be amazed that your counter party feels heard, seen, validated, and connected to you and all of the sudden stops attacking, defending and starts to listen.
3. Characterization. In our lives we often define people based on aspects of their personality that are incomplete. The problem is that stunts their growth and limits the depth of the relationship. So the “ambitious” daughter, “funny” son, “techy” coworker gets defined as only that and can’t break out of it in relation to the person characterizing them. So when the ambitious kid has a failure they turn to the parent for support and get characterized instead treated like a human being that can change. So when an “ambitious” kid says I don’t want to go to university are they suddenly not ambitious? Are they allowed to redefine themselves? There are entire categories of books written by people with a chip on their shoulder because they were characterized.
I did a leadership training that had a session on purpose. They discussed the Harvard study that followed people over their lives and careers and their reported sense of wellbeing. The clear trend of what creates fulfillment at the end of life makes it hard to dwell on a lot of what most people suffer for during different phases of life. I have seen people in college, law school, early careers, doing startups, being parents, even all grinding it out and then looking back with the realization they were and remain miserable.
I could keep going and going and going.
#1 sounds a lot like stoicism.
I was recently surprised by a bookface status change :) might need to reach out to say “hey still alive just not in the original form”.
Is paying 15$ too much to pay? If learning about an obvious but unknown idea for doing the things saves 10 minutes a week, it is.
Do you need to pay 15$ for the result? No. But a result is better than no result.
It made me enjoy life more too, because I have a diaspora of cool and interesting connections who would go to bat for me if needed. I'm friends with the grocery store checkout guy now, he asked me to go antiquing with him two weeks ago. I made friends in my neighborhood, I have a lady I walk with every week who offered to help me garden and even when ordering flooring from Home Depot the dude invited me to come to NASCAR with him and his buddies.
It honestly just changed my perspective to see the good in everyone and through this process boosted my personal, professional and family relationships immensely.
This is the part that gets me to have an almost allergic reaction. It feels like an almost homogenization of people's personalities. In my mind I picture it like this: business man A reads How to Win Friends and Influence People. Businessman B also reads it. Business man A meets B and see that they're doing the psychological tricks of the book and think "wow this guy sure knows how to win friends and influence people like I do" so they get along fantastically.
It's similar to my aversion to books like "The Game" where some men seem to have the idea there's a surefire way to pick up women. Humans are diverse and should have differences in how they treat others and react. "Remember their name, smile, talk about the other person" and all the other tricks often gets me in the mindset of "this person is media trained / inauthentic".
Even though I agree with you, that's not a fact and, if a bunch of people are happy all being exactly the same, that's great for them. You can have any amount of ideas about how things should be but if someone is happy the way they are, that's what's important, that's the end goal.
I think the key difference- at least for the book I mentioned - is that it actually teaches to you take a genuine interest in those around you. It's not a mask or a ploy, it is making you engage positively in a way that yields genuine connections.
Example: if at the start of a conversation a personal anecdote comes to mind but you think 'no that's not what the book said, I should talk about the other person instead' I'd argue you're masking your natural persona. If your natural inclination is to raise an eyebrow but no that's not what I was taught smile instead, that's a mask. You see it often among high earning people and it's pretty transparent. Luckily you often also see people who are not at all like that everywhere and they're the ones I'll prefer having a drink with 10/10 times.
There are similar socialization rituals. When you are in karate you might be taught to bow before entering a dojo or sparring with a partner. Is that an inauthentic mask because you are conforming to the respect rituals? Or how about a military salute? These norms are part of the social lubrication that makes relationships easier to form. And the process of socializing a person is teaching them to incorporate them as authentic parts of themselves.
If you change your entire personality based on a self-help book.. that probably says a lot about your personality.
And anyway twin studies make the hardware seem more impactful than the software in many ways..
And twin studies, while persuasive that biology does have a massive impact are not dispositive compared to similar studies on human development theory that has longer population sizes that show self dialogue can shape behavior over time.
I don't think the word "inauthentic" quite captures why people react negatively to this sort of communication.
At least part of it comes from the fact that this particular style of "kindness-is-cool-coded" (for lack of a better word) communication happens to be the preferred style of insanely passive-aggressive people who take it upon themselves to brutally sabotage anyone who they deem unacceptable. It can also feel like you're being lead on by someone who actively dislikes you but is too polite to say it. Or you just start second-guessing every single thing they say and do.
But honestly, there's a pretty sizable minority of people who are repelled by this type of person and if you're naturally bad at reading the room you're probably better off making friends with other people that say and do dumb things.
I know I went through a "How to Win Friends and Influence People" phase when younger and basically ended up just putting off a whole of people.
Likely stems from a hundred and fifty odd years of the "always British" types swanning it over the "this is where we live and we love it" crowd.
Aside from being about forming sincere relationships, it handles influence with essentially this advice: Stop trying to force people to care about what you want. Understand what they want, treat them with respect, and align your request with their self-interest and self-image. If you come off as false doing those things, it’s because you didn’t actually do them, you pantomimed them.
“You’re such a generous person. I know you love being there for friends. Could you help me move Saturday?”
It's an example that of course sounds ridiculous to anybody that reads it, but it's essentially what the book teaches. Gather information not even about the person but how the person feels about themselves and then use that as a tool to make them feel good when you're talking to them.
I suppose it's also not helped that many of the people I've met who use this and admire this book have psychopathic traits. They're very good at faking caring but actually can't. It's a cold calculation to them and admittedly it's very effective at getting them ahead.
I don’t know how you could read that book in a modern frame and get syrupy insincerity out of it in good faith, but it is true that many people read this type of book looking for shortcuts and hacks, so they are not looking for the good faith reading. If you read the rest of NH’s work, you will find that his philosophy is firmly based on genuine good faith and delivering disproportionally high value to the people you interact with. (As well as some very 19th century metaphysics you can safely ignore)
But yes, many people read that book, ape the ideas, and act like asshats. It’s hardly a failing of the book.
Manipulation seeks to get someone to do what you want against their interests.
Persuasion seeks to align their interests with your interests in a mutually beneficial manner. The act of speaking to their interests by definition takes their well being into consideration.
And the book “the game” isn’t an example of that skill. People that follow those techniques find out quickly that they end up destroying the connections they make really quickly.
Note that The Game isn't a PUA manual, it's investigative journalism into the PUA scene.
I highly recommend the podcast: If Books Could Kill. They have an episode on this book.
It might limit his ability to effect his will in the world, but I see his availability as unchanged.
Have you ever stopped to think about the prices you pay for that behavior?
Let’s game it out. You don’t know me. I could be Paul Graham for all you know. I could be the person in the world that would unlock the very door you need to open to get what you’re working towards. I could be someone totally vulnerable and insecure and end up cascading into despair based on your comment.
That being said. I thought it was a funny comment.
This is very passive aggressive. You should think about how you communicate to people.
Your second paragraph is playing the victim while you just acted the agrresor in the previous.
Your third paragraph seems to make it sound like you have a point but it essentially boils down to we are all strangers on the internet. And okay?
If you had just written the last sentence, i would have respected your comment much more.
I know i am just a stranger but we are talking about perception and self help here. And from what I've read, i am not leaving with a positive perception of you based on your comments sorry.
I don’t think anyone is a victim or an aggressor. Both people do something to contribute to any conflict and are responsible to acknowledge what they did as the first step (see my previous post).
The point that we are strangers is that 1. he is making assumptions on incomplete information and expressing it with confidence that is unwarranted and 2. For all he knows I could be someone that, in real life, he would regret alienating like that.
As far as your opinion of my comments, your perspective is as valid as mine. I am curious, what do you think my positions are? What do you think my intentions are in this thread?
I am not a failed prompt coder, I personally built am a health care ehr that integrated a wide range of legacy tech well before AI as a coding agent was a glimmer in anyone's eye.
I say that in the hopes that you understand your insults are missing the mark so maybe it's time to update your wetware.
But you’re too smart for all that, right? So smart you spend your time trolling anonymous people online lol
There’s that XKCD about someone learning something new that was just thought to be something everyone knew.
Also you don’t know what you don’t know.
Agree though — coaching and persuasion are a huge part which is why I think a lot of these books seem ‘fluffy’ if all you’re wanting is a collection of facts.
With these types of books(and I read a lot of self help) I generally expect to get like 1-2 good pieces of advice/ideas per 200 pages so I generally just scan through them until I hit areas that seem high value then read those areas more deeply. I've read all of Tim Ferriss' books and haven't really gotten anything I can think of from his stuff to be honest they are a bit too general for me but I've gotten some good advice from his podcast though I only listen to maybe one episode in 10 when it is with someone or about something that sounds very interesting and even then I tend to scrub through it since there is a lot of filler in a 2 hour podcast.
In Zion National Park there's a hike called Angel's Landing. You wind up on this ridge, with a 1000 foot cliff on one side and a 500 foot cliff on the other side. And the ridge is not very wide - only a couple of feet in some places.
Parenting is like that. You think, oh, I see people causing problems by being too strict, so I want to back away from that cliff. But there's a cliff behind you, so don't back too far...
And the problem with parenting books is that, if you're the kind of parent who needs the books warning you about being too strict, then the books that warn against being too lenient are probably the ones that resonate more with you. That is, you're drawn to the ones you don't need, not to the ones that you do need.
All that said, yes, get books and read them. Be sure to get a variety of them.
I can't give specifics off the cuff, as I'm well past that phase now.
I read Nurture Shock before my kids were born. One of its main arguments is to praise effort rather than natural abilities ("you worked hard" rather than "you're smart"). Being one who naturally withholds praise, its message of not over-praising resonated with me.
In retrospect, I should have praised kid #1 more. It took me 10+ years to realize that. The book was not wrong but also not the message I needed.
What did you notice and what were the consequences of the strategy of praise. I’d like to learn from your experience.
tl;dw celebrate don't manipulate.
I have noticed that my daughter responds so much better to compliments like, "I am really impressed how you handled situation X, you stuck up for yourself in a way that doesn't alienate yourself with your friends. I know how hard that is to do well ..." When I give the reason for the praise it doesn't come off, intended or not as "you did good for a kid." I don't do it everytime, but sometimes the praise works to give another reflective or metacognitive pass over the event.
Children the Challenge chapter 3 discusses encouragement.
All this stuff should be done tastefully and without being overbearing. Like the previous poster said, it's a balance.
The How to talk books(there are a few of them for different ages), no drama discipline.
Cal Newports books while not specifically about parenting have helped me with disconnecting more from my tech which has always been a challenge since it's my job and a part of a lot of my hobbies which has definitely led to being a better father.
I’ve even read aloud a few chapters to my kids, because it’s very suitable for communication with parents as well
That’s also why authenticity and honesty matter. If you lie to your children or spouse or colleague they might do what you want one time but over time not trust you. If you are inauthentic they will also learn that you have ulterior motives and become distrustful.
The last thing I’ll say is it’s not always a negotiation. With young kids or direct reports there is elevation in the relationship, meaning one person gets to make the decision and the other gets to follow the instructions. So when a toddler is saying I don’t want to brush my teeth if you treat it like a negotiation you actually make them less secure about their place in the world because they aren’t ready to make every decision for themself. One good technique I learned is to simply present two choices. “You can brush your teeth or let me brush your teeth”. That’s very different than “let’s go brush your teeth” which can be answered yes or no. So it’s not always necessary to engage in persuasion. Sometimes framing is all you need.
When communicating, you don't simply recite every datum you know. You edit, you choose facts to communicate a specific set of points. Those points themselves are not random; they are in service of helping you achieve some goal (to get someone to laugh, or to get someone to do/not do something, or to change someone's opinion of you, to make someone feel comfortable, to get a person to bond with you, or whatever).
> am I serving the other person's actual interests
This is the key.
> would I be fine with them seeing exactly what I'm doing
See my first paragraph. Nobody thinks you are reciting facts at random when you talk to them. QED to the extent anyone thinks about it, they understand that you are trying to advance some agenda (drop the connotation on that word). Because this is how human communication works.
The book teaches how to actually hear people even in the very emotionally charged situations, how to properly ask them questions to understand their point of view and their needs.
If I understand my son’s needs and can give him what he wants in exchange of him giving me what I want, how is that a manipulation? I can yell at him, impose sanctions (eg no minecraft for two days) and we both will be greatly dissatisfied. Or we can both get what we want, which is a win-win.
I don't have a problem with generally understanding someone's needs. You ask what he wants, you say what you want, you both find a common middle ground.
But that's not what I'm worried about. He also teaches you things like give gifts to instill a sense of reciprocity. Use odd numbers so it appears as if you've put in research to arrive at this figure. "Bend reality" by moving around deadlines. Take advantage of cognitive biases like loss aversion.
Actual empathy is one thing, steering someone into thinking that your preferred outcome was their own idea is another. And that steering is precisely the manipulation I can't shake off. I'd be fine with the other person knowing I'm actually empathizing. But all those other techniques rely on the other person not noticing, which falls into my definition of manipulation.
So if I know that these things are as they are, and use them to communicate more successfully, is that manipulation? Then it would also be learning manipulation if kids are sent to school to learn how to write well, or how to do a presentation.
I had a situation with my kid a while ago. They were already tired, but had to take a shower. When I proposed that verbally, they denied. Then I showed them the warm water coming out of the showerhead, and they instantly agreed. So I got what I wanted (the kid getting clean), because I knew how to communicate successfully. But that isn't manipulation: I didn't lie, I didn't have a personal advantage at their cost etc. I just made it easier for them to anticipate what taking a shower would feel like.
So perhaps the distinction should be: If I can honestly and wholeheartedly argue to myself that my intentions are to the best of all participants, then that is communication. If I only care about my outcome, or even want to have adverserial outcome for the others, then that is manipulation.
But we can't use "not noticing" some mode of communication as part of the definition of manipulation simply because we all notice almost nothing consciously, compared to the sensory input we get every second of our lifes.
[1] A pretty approachable book about that, written from a researcher: How emotions are made, from Lisa Feldman Barret
It worked the first time and has reduced my own emotional reaction and create much more peace.
And while I won't suggest it will work for everyone or this is a scientific process with sufficient information (but should be explored) I find resources like this useful.
But that's the other side of these books, understanding "the other side" of people.
I like to believe it all adds up to a big pile of knowledge that finds its place in one's personality / outwards behaviour. But to more observant, introspective, overthinking, possibly neurodiverse people, it just adds to a giant pile of social behaviours that some people seem to have naturally while others have learned / are forcing them.
Doing them costs me energy and makes me feel underhanded / ungenuine. At the same time maybe doing it more often will make them feel natural? I have no idea.
Can’t say anything about other books, but Never Split the Difference is about hearing and understanding other peoples’s wants and opinions. Not this pickup-artist-like bullshit.
[I can be wrong and I usually am ;)] but the book teaches just some way to better re-phrase your best intentions and I have started to think the phrases in my head...
Just be honest with people is what that book taught me. I highly recommend people reading it.
Now I will be honest that reading the book itself isn't gonna give you something. It depends highly on variety of factors. For example, the book also teaches to listen more often and I genuinely try to do it as well but I sometimes fail to do that as I am a bit expressive/talkative
I think it also depends on who you are and how the book reinforces some particular topics. You dont have to completely do everything the book says to have meaningful impact as then it would feel manipulative to other person, yea.
And at the very least, reading this books makes you aware of some logic behind what he's saying (for example. I speak a lot but I should listen more, because people like me are so many and everyone likes to speak and be heard but people who actually listen are rare)
and then I can realize that I am speaking too much and so I think that I am more aware.
More Awareness of a topic doesn't mean complete and utter mastery of it but long term persistence of that awareness helps out meaningfully.
TLDR: Just be yourself and see if something sticks from the books and to implement it slowly and the way you like. There isn't one perfect way (not one even in the books) to living life. At best, its collection of what other successful people are doing. I wouldn't suggest (completely) living off the books because you have your own life and way of living it and you should be honest about it to yourself as well.
The idea that the only goal of communication is to convey facts is (charitably) a pretty autistic view of interpersonal relationships.
There are many situations where conveying facts is not the primary goal, and there's a world of difference just in how facts are conveyed. Facts probably aren't going to stop your toddler screaming for ice cream. Telling your wife that dress makes her look fat likely isn't going to help either one of you. Calling out a coworker when they are wrong isn't going to improve your working relationship. And so on...
Facts won't stop a toddler crying for ice cream. But a clear unmoving boundary conveyed with love stops the intensity of their request and allowing them to have the sadness and anger at being told no and treating them with kindness and love even while they are expressing big feelings of disappointment creates a trusting, safe relationship.
The tactics themselves are morally neutral. They can be used to manipulate or elevate another person whose well being you are deeply committed to, the intention behind the tactics are what determines if it is manipulation or connection/persuasion.
Lacking happiness or charisma or confidence or the ability to quit smoking or any other run-of-the-mill self-help topic isn’t caused by a lack of relevant data: it’s a matter of perspective. Often, the best way to push through the problem is getting the perspective of someone that’s thought about it more. Whether self help books are an effective medium for that is another topic, but if they’re not, lacking hard facts wouldn’t be the problem.
Sometimes you just need someone to tell you common sense in the right way so that you actually listen to it.
I do, however, try to limit who and what I read though because there is a lot of derivative garbage out there.
I also think of reading self-help books (or management books) as giving myself time to engage with the subject. Even if there is no groundbreaking new information, it gives me time to think about the topic. If you couldn't tell yet, I'm a slow reader.
My solution to this problem is to set these books next to one of the two comfy chairs in the house. When I sit in one of these chairs, I consider whether I want to read a chapter, I can only read one chapter, I can only have two of these books going at one time.
And under the system it takes me about three months to finish one of the books up from less than a week. I also find I no longer hate• most of them and I learn a lot more.
• they still have a very high DNF rate.
I'm as skeptical as you are, but teaching you something you didn't know before ain't the only channel they could conceivable help through.
Eg reading their bible can help a devout christian, even though there's nothing in there they didn't already know.
I'm not in a position to verify more than a few of the factual claims made by the author (and a lot of it sounds like mumbo-jumbo), but it was persuasive enough to get me to exercise for health (instead of performance at a specific event) and my life has gotten much easier since I came to that realisation. Maybe I would have done so eventually without the book, but I'm glad the book sped the process up.
Why was this one guy more persuasive than the recommendation of basically every medical organization in the world?
Also, his correspondence with Epstein is quite damning.
Note that I was exercising before, only I didn't do it for health. But I also didn't suffer from any obvious problems. What I got out of every medical organisation in the world then is "You're fine. Don't worry about it."
I was probably fine, but I'm even more fine now; I'm capable of doing more of the things I enjoy.
This is alien to me, because for at least 50 years now, heart disease and diabetes has been at the forefront of basically every developed country’s health problems, for which the only solution proposed by all health authorities has been to eat less and healthier, and to do cardiovascular exercise almost every day. Even from elementary school, I remember being taught in gym or health class that being active and exercising was necessary for long term health.
I've been exercising for most of my life, I'm the guy that has been going to the gym since forever to many of my acquaintances, and so they have often talked to me about how they want to start exercising or how they are doing etc.
Nobody, and I mean nobody has ever said anything like "I'm so happy to decrease my risk of diabetes". My father stopped smoking and started riding a bike, motivated by cardiovascular health, what actually makes him happy though is to be able to go up the stairs without breaking into a sweat.
Ask anyone in a gym why they exercise, they will talk about health, just not in the way doctors do. The stick of "You will die in 20 years rather than 35" pales in comparison of the carrot of "you will feel better basically all the time"
Maybe you were born with all the knowledge necessary to be a good father/husband, but I certainly wasn’t. I imagine most people just have their parents to go off of, and we all know what a can of worms that can be.
I think, for a large number of people, self-help (especially the short form high intensity style content that influencers post is just "content" to "consume" - a form of cheap entertainment that's thrown out almost as soon as it's consumed. There's no enduring change. That takes time and an semi-innate desire to change. Then, all these things become sensible and useful.
I'm not a big fan of Ferris but I'm willing to bet that someone who sits down with one of his books and works through it slowly applying the lessons to his or her own life will see some kind of change as opposed to the typical person who just asks an LLM to summarise the book or a video about it and then decides that they've changed.
By I myself have done a lot of work to understand ways to shift attachment styles similar to yours.
The outdated sense of leader of the willingly lead is a different matter.
I have received multiple emails from alumni thanking me for my leadership, mentorship, and the culture I created. Leading is a skill like any other it can be improved with practice and I have worked hard at it.
My team has no problem disagreeing with me and knows I don’t want sycophantic agreement, they know that even if I ultimately make a decision I will consider all opinions and have seen me change my mind in response to a direct report disagreeing with me in public.
There are known mechanisms to foster a safe and effective environment like that such as separating people from ideas, removing consequences for failure and commitment to experimentation.
I’d suggest you’d read a few books so that you don’t have to reach for your gun but can use your words instead. Though the moment you’d claim any of those books helped you will be a bit of an ironic moment but so be it.
I recommend Non-violent Communication by Rosenberg for you. It got me out of a few pickles (arguments). Also going to a meditation retreat helps.
My wife and I both grew up in physically violent homes. My mom read that book and taught me and my siblings the lessons along with others. And my children have only ever experienced shouting or physical violence when they went to their grandparents house.
I understand you were using that phrase as hyperbole and did really mean it but there is a lot of evidence that the language we use shapes our prefrontal cortex and limbic system responses in every moment. By using that phrase you're subtlety sending your body and brain and anyone that read that into an anxious fight or flight response. That shuts down the ability to listen, persuade or connect. It triggers defensiveness, avoidance etc.
So even though you have a valid point lot of bad leaders exist, and often claim loudly to be good leaders with no self awareness of their actual weaknesses. Its hard to listen when a rhetorical gun has been drawn.
But I don’t understand the problem with this phrase. Maybe it’s an ESL (second lang.) issue, because I have only read one author that I recall that has used this phrase (poverty of stimulus?). But to my mind it isn’t even hyperbole. It’s just an expression saying “I am on my guard now”. Which means that you are skeptical, maybe even cynical. Yes, the immediate interpretation is that someone is reaching for their holster—not to shoot but to anticipate an ambush. But even that is just, you know, colorful in this context. In this context I am intending to express that I am skeptical. Not that someone is trying to fool me. But I am on guard against just taking someone’s experiences at face value; that their lifeworld is such-and-such is not even under debate, that is fine and no one is doubting that. What is under doubt in this context is what the proverbial room looked like when only one out of five people reported on it. Does that make sense?
[1] in sense 1(a) according to Merriam Webster
> But to my mind it isn’t even hyperbole. It’s just an expression saying “I am on my guard now”.
I'm Dutch, so English is a second language. I started at 7.
To me it comes across as hyperbole or something literal. Maybe different for native English speakers. Though I haven't heard my American family in law using it. And they say, to take some inspiration from you, all kinds of colorful things and I'd expect them to say stuff like this.
I don't live in the US with my wife though, so maybe I didn't have enough interactions with them. I will ask her.
I get that an idioms in a second language can be hard. “I reach for my gun” is an idiom but among the more aggressive range. Not quite true fighting words (which a reasonable person would interpret as an indication of imminent threat) but close, especially with the amount of gun violence in the US.
But as I said I heard your valid point. I would be curious about your experience with leaders. What has your experience been so far? What have you identified as effective and ineffective traits?
*(notice I don’t say good and bad because those words often have a value judgement or moral implications and influences people’s cognition. If I say a “bad” boss someone might think corrupt, evil, dishonest etc. someone might think lazy, too friendly, stupid which don’t have the same moral posture).
I ask because I am always interested in learning about how leadership is received in the world so can improve.
One of the most challenging realizations in my life came from band of brothers the hbo show. Everyone thinks they are captain winters but I saw more similarities in myself to the ineffective leaders (especially the guy that disappeared randomly); and had to do a lot of work to improve
I remember I had a bit of a relationship crisis with someone. Just learning the 10 min. TL;DR of a good friend of mine who was well versed in it helped a ton. Later I read it twice.
Sometimes I think I can get away with and flow on intuition. In tense conversations that sometimes go sideways and then I notice I have to use this way of communicating in order to keep things from not spiraling out of control and ultimately resolve things.
And why can't you believe someone's statement about themselves? How is it different to saying they're a good runner?
How to care less about what other people think, but in a healthy way
Same book can be ridiculed and appreciated by different people, sometimes even by the same person when they are in different stages of their life (especially if they have less self-awareness).
"You already know whether you are in love or not, you just need to trust this voice."
Depending on where you are in life and who you are as a person, this statement can simultaneously be called a platitude, or a meaningful statement that someone finds allows them to decide what is important in life at that point.
Which book is it?
Thank you. You made my point.
Oh and the fact they're making money? Yeah everybody has to eat, psychologists don't work for free either, neither does any doctor for that matter. There are people doing good out there and yes they will charge you plenty of money for it.
Many of the authors are selling their narrow experience as if it's divine revelation, often literally because they're religious. The grift usually continues with sponsorships, plugging their other books (or their friends' books), or seminars.
I've read enough about sociology and psychology now that the whole self help industry disgusts me. Receiving such books or recommendations unsolicited strikes me as an insult from folks to naive or lazy to really get to know me first.
But the form of books … Yes, by some reason it collapses. I personally attribute it not to “people realise those guys are salesmen”, but with the fact that none of really good ideas were produced by such books for a while. Now anyone who really has a new angle or new idea to say — they go straight to YT/podcasts, bypassing writing a book altogether. Because of this, me personally, when I check bookshelves, do not see any really new or interesting idea published in the field.
Next, consider the mediums for selling self-help: (1) in-person events, (2) books, (3) YouTube. (1) scales the least, but has the highest branding building effect. (2) scales medium, because it costs money for the customer to buy the book. (3) scales infinitely, because it is nearly free. Further, the most financially successful YouTubers first build a personal brand, then begin sell product placement by sponsorships. Further, they also begin selling "merch" (channel merchandise). That is the real gold mine of YouTube. Even sponsonships for most channels with less than one million subscribers pales in comparison to selling "merch".
About (1) (2) and (3) above, I would say that humans are usually more influenced by [the most] (1) seeing a person live, [next most] (3) seeing a person on video, and [the least] (2) reading their book. Thus, it seems logical that YouTube will replace books for self-help.
Without reading the article, my first instinct (after writing the above) is that self-help books are not being replaced with AI/LLMs. Instead, they are being replaced by self-help YouTube channels.
A lot of those non free services seemed to involve very poorly written and syndicated coaching apps.
Extreme Ownership really helped me be a better leader and take more accountability for my own actions
Atomic Habits really helped me think about goal setting and what the underlying driver was
Coaching Habit improved my 1:1s drastically (I basically stopped talking or advice giving and just listened -- profound, I know, but the book helped smack me in the face with it)
Many more examples, but there is definitely a ton of self-help hack slop out there as well.
maybe you are judging and dismissing something with prejudice?
As an extreme example, pickup artists had a wave of success a few years back and people paid big money for those ridiculous courses. They got replaced with Andrew Tate style "a real man just smokes and fights and hates women" type content and people paid money with the hopes of becoming like them. Trends and life goals change, but people still gobble up self help.
we've seen it with exercise/dieting we've seen it with women/dating this types of things always persist
The former imploded in the aftermath of Neil Strauss' The Game, which made some of the popular techniques well known and/or mocked (e.g. you had Howard on Big Bang Theory who in the beginning "demonstrated" several of the more ridiculous methods) and a lot of the field pivoted towards closer to regular self-help because the weirder stuff would get them called out.
I wonder to what extent that contributed to channeling the people who didn't want to put in the work towards people like Andrew Tate, with the mockery that followed and the less extreme coaches in that field moving away from it leaving a whole bunch of angry young men ripe for the picking, now with one more bone to pick.
Though what helped me most was a mix of being more assertive, meditation and a strong sense of playfulness.
I always went the improv route, so while I read a lot of mainstream pickup stuff back then, I was too lazy to use it. Also, when it was clearly mean then I didn’t do it either (such as negging). It was fun to get some skill in being cocky and funny, but ultimately I fell in love with being playful. Communicating that way is so much fun, and it’s fun to go balls to the wall creative. Yep, I am in love with a communication style and way of looking at the world. So there’s that (I also was in love with learning Italian for a while). But my default mode is looking at the world in an analytical and data-driven/empirical way (while not noticing my irrationality).
The more reasonable dating coaches are still out there. They simply aren’t part of the mainstream advice.
The current mainstream advice about dating sucks. Though, to be fair: the mainstream pickup artists from back in the day also sucked. It’s a lot like mining: you dig through a lot of advice that is plain dirt so you can find the gems of advice that are sparsely scattered around the dirt.
I gave some dating advice to some HN’ers. If anyone wants some, feel free to message me. My email is in my profile.
I am married nowadays (after a few relationships).
What I do find interesting is: I can turn this part of myself off and then no woman sees me. Mostly because I lack initiative and look at the world too seriously. It’s handy because I never get into weird situations like a certain woman liking me at work, for example. It also helped when I didn’t know how to break off contact with someone who I knew wasn’t for me.
I really want to ask: what would their reputation be if they were mainstream, in your opinion?
I find it to be a very interesting spot of culture and society, like at one point you had a bunch of guys who were dealing with the cognitive dissonance between what society asks of men and what society wants from them in a context that wasn't yet politicized.
It is my impression that when it started showing up a little bit in the mainstream, the accusations of misogyny came, and with that most who actually cared about misogyny left the boat, in public terms. So now all we have left is Tate and the likes.
I think effectively those coaches who worried most about reputations to a large extent pivoted from focusing on the dating aspect to more general self-improvement, where dating success might still get mentioned but without so much focus on it, and especially not so much focus on getting sex.
There's lots of mainstream self-help around overcoming shyness and getting better at socialising for example that was/is directly relevant to a lot of people who struggle with dating, and there are lots of ways of framing the non-manipulative, non-creepy parts of a lot of dating coach advice in ways that nobody would consider misoygynist.
But, yeah, I think at least to some extent the attention given to some of this subculture unwittingly ended up driving some of them into the arms of people like Tate. It's not that there weren't plenty of those coaches that deserved negative attention, but the end result might well have been worse.
Agreed
> and there are lots of ways of framing the non-manipulative, non-creepy parts of a lot of dating coach advice in ways that nobody would consider misoygynist.
Yea, agreed
One issue is that pickup artists always framed it as men seducing women. But quite frankly, most ideas would also work the other way around. I remember talking to some dating coaches who strongly disagree with me but they view women too much as women and men too much as men, whereas my view is that we’re humans first and our sex/gender second.
Viewing things in such a gendered way was a factor for misogyny.
Back in the day, I coached a woman to be better at dating. I taught her what I knew and she took her own spin on it and had tons of fun.
Just some examples as to what is interchangeable:
1. Being playful
2. Emotional intelligence
3. Good style
4. Cold approaching
5. Disqualification technique (e.g. what work do you do? I’m a hermit in the woods and sing to birds all day - when you are clearly not)
6. Open body language, and the concept of tonality, body language and non-verbal communication in general
7. Good logistics such as having a place of your own, moving a date to a second or nth location etc. (this just requires planning)
8. Being able to signal intent at the right time (I do it 10 to 60 minutes after when the playful vibe is clearly established)
Women can do these things too, and it works. This is just from the top of my dome. There are many more examples. Such as being optimistic, adventurous and genuinely yourself (I know sounds contradictory, it’s a long topic but yeah works for women who want to seduce men too).
I wouldn’t be surprised if all of this also works for gay/lesbian people but I never thought about that.
The whole status dance was never my thing.
Or more like playful banter? Those vibes are super fun, even though I am not much of a banter guy.
> The biggest problem with a lot of those techniques is when one side isn't aware - and of course that is often why they were being thought.
Seducing someone on pure technique, while possible, screws with many things. One of them is one’s self worth, as someone like that is now dependent on being a certain way that isn’t them.
> But, yeah, the part you list are all definitely interchangeable.
95% of my whole game is listed there, haha.
Push pull came up naturally through playfulness so I never consciously thought about it. Sometimes it came through spontaneous ballroom dancing. There were a few times where I taught a woman the latin swing. It feels as push pull but as a dance.
> It was also a very good demonstration of how fucked up those techniques can be - she was good at it.
Yea, can relate. I’m still a fan of women that have a similar style to my game. My game is wholesome. Women have mentioned as much. My wife’s style is similar. The first exchange on Tinder was awesome, I immediately yelled “she gets it!” in front of my computer screen :’)
Anyway, "self help" is still one of the largest sections at my local barnes and noble—certainly by far the largest non-fiction section.
> starting to realize
About 15 years ago my friend showed me this video of a "self-help" guy he was impressed with and inspired by.
..it was over 30 minutes of rambling that sounded like it makes senses but meant nothing and lead nowhere.
Looking back it was like listening to how early LLMs were: Just long strings of random words and vague sentences without actually saying anything.
Or how Saruman's power of the tongue was described as.
It's depressing and obvious to see how many people could be misled by this kind of charlatanism.
AI if done right could cut a lot of crap from human society.
I for one used to enjoy such books but have turned more to mind-fuck scifi (i.e. I keep hunting for the Ted Chiang level books, although they are also very rare). I find meaning in those.
- George Carlin
That's hardly unique to the self-help world - doesn't a lot of tech also fall into that category?
"How to Win Friends and Influence People" is still popular today. Dale Carnegie wrote it in 1936.
Back in the '80s and '90s Tony Robbins infuriated millions of North Americans by spamming late television with his obnoxious self-help infomercials: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gUczh_vsRUI
As long as there have been dissatisfied people, there probably has been someone promising to be a deus ex macchina with the secret to turn their lives around.
But also pretty much all of the self-help books I've read can be summarized in a few paragraphs, that is, a blog post. The rest is repetition or examples. Which are important for learning and understanding, I suppose, but when an AI can both tell you the gist of it while applying it directly to your current situation, they can't compete.
This is my biggest issue with the self-help industry. There is a lot of self-help books out there with ideas that are genuinely valuable, or at least worth considering. But as you say, the entirety of the idea can be conveyed perfectly well in a blog post. But you can’t sell a blog post. So it has to be padded out with cruft into a book length publication that can be sold to people.
That’s how AI undermines the industry. It has those general ideas and can convey them in the simplistic, cruftless versions that are most helpful, and can iterate back and forth with someone on applications to their own life.
Sure, you don't need to read an entire book to get the idea to do something, but that's way in which ideas get into your head and consciously or not, guide your steps in certain directions.
Of course, everything in self-help books should be taken with a grain of salt and also applied differently for each individual. It's just a way to get more ideas of what's possible, similar to travelling: it doesn't force you to do things in a certain way, it just shows you what's out there.
There’s literally 100 years of self-help books before, who?
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d49d81d6-7aab-4730-9c3c-4...
Which I’m sharing as a meta point…I think self help books are declining because there’s a better way to get the information without all the filler. But filler makes the books thick enough to sell at the airport
Also - aren’t LLMs the ultimate choose your own adventure version of the information?
The most effective self help books I can recommend are Easy Way to Stop Smoking, which needs all the preamble to get the message to your addicted brain, and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. I'd posit that reading just one of his entries doesn't leave you with a lifetime commitment to stoicism.
Youtube killed them because it is just a faster delivery of knowledge and information. For super-specific questions chatbots are even faster.
There was this recent Tom Scott interview where he recommends people start their video with quesiton A, ask B before A is resolved, then when that happens, already ask C, etc. and solve C and D at the very end to keep the viewer engaged. Most people seem to just ask A over and over and over with filler in between until the viewer's head explodes.
To some extent, his awkward personality didn't help matters either, but he was the only one covering a niche topic I didn't know I cared about. So much of his catalog is unimitable.
After his hiatus and return, I must humbly recognize his genius and real passion.
There I can listen to a 6 hours about the Olmec civilization.
The notion that 'My Octopus Teacher' or 'Boys State' - to name just two award winners of the last decade - could be replaced with some Youtube AI-narrated slop is just disingenuous in the extreme.
Reading an entire book may be more beneficient for habit forming, but most readers probably don't care about this.
But I can tell you that it’s enough to refute the AI fallacy many believe.
To be clear, a summary will never replace reading 300 pages. But it might be 95% good enough for most people and in most cases, and that's often good enough.
Sometimes you just have to read to damn book.
I don’t say AI cannot summarize or there is no value in book summary, but I’d say that by stripping off most of a book, you almost certainly lose something valuable about the book, even if it is a prescriptive nonfiction. This most valuable part (besides the advices) is very often the part that actually convinced you and help the arguments stick. And without that, information will just stay as information.
People tend to spend about a third of their lives working for someone else, a third sleeping and the remaining third split between relaxing and working for themselves. This seems invariant. As people earn more money they just buy more stuff, they have no idea what to do with the extra time from not working as much so just keeping walking the hedonic treadmill.
If you can ingest compressed forms of ten self help books in the time it would have taken you to read one, does that mean you can now evaluate them all together, or include the best bits of all of them? Or are you really just addicted to trying to "get on top" and wasting your precious life away sitting at a computer talking to a fake person?
All IMO:
Syncophancy (and in extreme cases AI psychosis) is a huge problem when you take advice from AI.
It's risky to learn a new field as you often just fall for a superficial, glib explaination and just nod along without learning. AI will do that because humans will train it to - everyone likes a pop science style easy and fake explaination.
OTOH if you just want advice, the AI will need context. Advice is worthless without context. And the AI will use the context to tell you what the dumb human (you) will agree with - that's implicitly what humans want it to do, it's how we will train the AI.
I don't see it getting better either - as long as a human in the loop fine tunes the AI, the smarter the AI the better it is at telling the human what the human wants.
Scary stuff if a major current use of AI is self help.
Draw circle: Set up a highly successful business (prerequisite)
Rest of owl: Delegate stuff (what the book says to do).
It is pretty useless. Not suprised sales have declined especially since startups probably got harder since when it was written.
One of the first which I’ve ever read fully was Getting Things Done after a Lifehacker article eons ago. The book had zero additional information compared to the article. Back then I didn’t know that these books information density was almost zero, and still is.
Last year I bought a book about eating well. I could read only the first half, because it repeated until then basically a single mantra: eat fermented and macronutrient rich food. This was repeated different ways, without adding anything to this summary. Sometimes literally the same sentences. Reasons were not provided, or was on the level “I knew somebody whom this helped”, without even trying to convince me that it was really this what helped them, and not anything else.
The dietary guidelines from the US is a way better read, and that’s free. Even the current, clearly politically distorted one.
Maybe, that’s the main reason. Free information is better or at least good enough. I haven’t learned anything from these kinds of books which was not available freely (and legally… because you can obviously get almost any books illegally).
Self-help is not the canary for other genre. Self-help doesn't comme with significant art. Their consumer gets a better experience through LLM that extracts the substance and contextualizes it.
It doesn't tell what will happen at scale regarding fiction and other content where people tends to expect a genuine human contribution. Sure you can get success with AI-written or AI-assisted writing, but it doesn't mean human written books will no longer catch interest.
Maybe my attention span is truly stuffed, but I really can't stand it when a video essay is the most succinct source on a topic - waiting for someone to express their thoughts in speech, with sometimes slow cadences or their own waffling, combined with sponsor segments (yes I use SponsorBlock, but sometimes or on other devices ads get through), etc.
So I use AI summary for a lot of informational videos now unless I actually am watching it for the entertainment and production value. I don't need 10 minutes on "this will change the way we look at XYZ" that has only 1 minute of real information in it.
> video essays
I am honestly curious why ABC produces such high quality content that is given away for (nearly) free on YouTube. I would hazard a guess that they spend no less than 10K USD to produce each episode (surely more, to be honest -- skilled labour isn't cheap in Australia). Does anyone know if these videos are also aired on Australian broadcast TV? (That would help for advertising revenue.)
[1] YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN7rBX00xjQ&list=PLDTPrMoGHs...
Recently, I had a similar idea when I tried to watch the TV series "SAS: Rogue Heroes". I quit after a few episodes because it was so damn slow. I spent most of each episode skipping pointless dialog and overly long landscape/driving scenes that added little to the story. I am sure the two seasons (10-20 hours) could easily be condensed into a much more exciting 2-4 hour film. I have heard the saying that the hardest type of novel to write is the shortest one. Constraint forces an author to carefully select the words, characters, and storyline that make the most compelling novel. When I was younger, films were rarely more than 90 minutes. These days, so many of them are more than 120 minutes with very little gained... just the same story was watered down over 30+ more minutes.
I set up my claw to be able to do that and it’s infinitely better than searching through hours of content myself.
I set it up as experts on topics I already know and like to reduce noise. So I can say “ask [NAME] what I should do about XYZ” and I get back contextualized info and cited video clips
They got sued out of existence.
Also, I think we have oversold the concept of story-telling. Many news articles start with story telling and take a while before coming to the point.
The interviewer asked something like "who is our competition here?", and the friend of friend listed off other places in the mall to get ice cream, candy, deserts, etc.
Wrong answer. The ice cream and chocolate store was in competition with every other store in the mall. Time or money spent at the GAP can't be time or money spent here.
---
Whether or not people are using LLMs for news specifically, any new, large eater of eyeball-time is going to hurt the business landscape for all other eyeball harvesters.
I would have argued that this is also the wrong answer, as without the GAP to bring people to the mall, nobody would be trafficking their little ice cream store at all. Did a mall vendor really not understand the reason they had opened up shop in a mall?
Was the interviewer a macroeconomics grad student working his way through school at the ice cream shop? Because I can't imagine anyone but a macroeconomics student aggregating all demand into a generic concept of "time and money" without regard for qualitative distinctions between entirely different product categories.
Did he also think the shop was in competition with United Airlines or the local dentist's office, because time and money spent on a trans-Atlantic flight or getting a root canal was time and money that couldn't be spent at the ice cream shop?
> Whether or not people are using LLMs for news specifically, any new, large eater of eyeball-time is going to hurt the business landscape for all other eyeball harvesters.
Which demonstrates that the model of treating the content users are looking for as bait so you can sell their attention to someone else was always an adversarial one in the first place.
Users themselves were never looking for time sinks, they were looking for specific information or experiences that they've had to increasingly endure time sinks to get to due to the perverse incentives in the social media landscape.
AI destroying the viability of "eyeball harvesters" as a business model is an opportunity for people actually creating interesting content, not engagement-maximizing filler, to pivot back to pitching quality directly to their users. That's exactly the point that Tim Ferriss was making in the article: he points out that he already prefers to sell his books to a niche audience of 10,000 readers who actually find value in them than try to engage with 10 million passers-by on social media.
people use Facebook for news?
We are heading for a future where the internet is frozen in time with a cutoff date created when the LLM summaries started.
That's not this quarter's problem. Not even the current owners' problem. That's a problem for whomever is left holding the bag when they exit before the crash.
It all hinges on this statement. But I’m not sure it’s really AI that’s doing it, and not just a contributing factor. There’s higher cost of living, inflation, economic uncertainty, seemingly looming financial crisis, etc. A lot of impactful things happened!
Well this is the difficult part. You can 10x the number of followers and still have less than 50 true fans.
On the actual content, I am actually not surprised at all. These AI systems are surprisingly convincing when giving personal advise - for better or worse.
1. Guy I know who is an exec coach says that a chatbot can do a lot of what he does. 2. I am absolutely seeing lots of people asking ChatGPT a question and treating its answer as the truth.
So I can well believe that, in an age where you can get a quick answer to anything for free, that the market for books is collapsing.
Having said that, I also suspect that many of these self-help books are effectively a blog post stretched out over hundreds of pages, so maybe a decline in their sales is no bad thing.
You suspect right. I usually compare them to a pamphlet, but a blog post works too. They’re mostly one core idea padded with interminable stories to illustrate the point. Instead of wasting your money and time on the book, search YouTube for a talk the author has given about it (the more popular the book, the more of the same talk there will be) and watch that. It’ll hit all of the major points.
So I always wondered how they stayed in business and that they seemed at risk for disruption if anyone cared about their market.
So I guessed that maybe they’re for people who don’t want to spend time finding and reading.
I also was only spending $250/hour so maybe the really good ones cost much more.
-Before the internet, space to publish anything was scarce (and so were methods of finding specific information if it did exist), so newspapers/magazines were valuable and textbooks/guides were great media.
It was difficult to find extremely specific information because a lot of information was so niche it wasn't worth publishing, or because it wasn't worth the effort to find something SO specific.
-The internet made publishing space infinite and search easy, so specific information became super valuable, e.g. "how to do x in 5 steps" blogs. They architected information in ways that wouldn't have been worth publishing in a regional newspaper or small-circulation magazine, but was economically viable at worldwide scale and when publishing was free.
This is the era this article describes.
-Then everything went mainstream and the above production of content was often more frequently done by large companies, with bloggers and other individuals filling even smaller niches
-Now that LLMs have vacuumed all of that up and you can create even more specific content for free, instantly (e.g. you no longer need a generic tutorial on "how to start a business" but summon one that already knows your prior skills etc.)
This has made the previous era of "how-to" content less useful because you can decide whether you want expert/beginner/intermediate level content and what personality etc.)
Now the frontier is first-person narratives and opinions, because even specific information is no longer the constraint.
The criticism of self-help books in my little internet bubble is that if you've read one you've read them all. So why not go for works of fiction that are time-tested and are greatly entertaining and nourishing?
A lot of self-help books fall into this category. But if you go to a publisher and say that you're going to publish a 20-page book, they're going to laugh you out of the room.
I don't think so. That behavior only tells you the modest cost of sending takedown notices/threatening letters is less than the (supposed) lost revenue. Kids I know (I'm a teacher) don't seem at all aware of it when complaining about textbook costs and I kind of vaguely hint they look online for it--nothing like the popularity of napster.
AI is likely correlation not causation. The generation that resonated with the self-help books has aged out. Short form vids on YT, TT, IG taking mind-share is likely the bigger cause.
If this source [0] is true then 65% of audiobooks (in 2022) were non-fiction. Likewise that the audiobook industry has grown by nearly 3x since 2022. So, by my math, it's simply that people prefer to listen to self-help books (which matches my own experience).
> If this source [0] is true then 65% of audiobooks (in 2022) were non-fiction. Likewise that the audiobook industry has grown by nearly 3x since a2022.
Lead to
> by my math, it's simply that people prefer to listen to self-help books (which matches my own experience).
I'm not sure I see the math there, when most nonfiction is not self-help books (and an increase in the broader genre says nothing about a specific niche)
> But what about ebooks and audio? Looking at all formats (print + ebook + audio) for the catalog in 2025, the second half of the year was down ~45% versus the first half.
This compares to 46% on print only
In the first end - short-form content: yt shorts, tiktoks, tweets, ig posts - "authors" have interested to just have more engagement, so we end up with ragebait, fringe ideas, etc - everything for just viewers count go up, the substance doesn't matter at all.
In the other end - "long-form" content: books (usually thick ones), writers for some reason need to fill extra content alongside the substance, some off-topic stuff, I'm not professional writer/editor, but I suppose it's protection from some nitpickers, adding some scientific basis to look more solid (don't know why: author can pick any research that support's book idea, even already debunked), maybe there is requierement from publishers, editors, etc.
The sweet spot here are thin books here, but even that case they cannot help much, because even a therapy sometimes cannot help for someone (heck, there is a real person trying help, not just text with ideas!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZVWIELHQQY
Yes, of course you need to put in work to enact change. The bigger the change, the more work you need to put in.
That desire for a quick and easy solution to hard problems is exactly what lead to the proliferation of scams.
I think with ai, when you get feedback, you are putting in a form of work though. You're practicing recall of previous concepts and having them reinforced while you can get on a narrower and narrower path of what worked and what didn't.
Granted, I have no clue whether this is better than other forms of doing the work like going to a support group or filling out worksheets and journaling, but I do think it is beneficial.
The first self help book that actually helped me was How to make friends and influence people. It was hard for me to overcome my shyness and look people in the eye and smile, but with constant practice I got better at it. Taking an interest in people or being agreeable these are all basic principles that genuinely good communicators use, the book just points you in the right direction you have to apply the hard work and courage.
Good self-help books are rare but they do exist.
My favorite advice (and central message I think) from "how to win friends" is to really have the other person's interests at heart, not to try to scam or game them.
Some of my other favorite self help-ish books - a guide to the good life - thank you for arguing - algorithms to live by
From a new language to public speaking to media training.Some books need more than structure by AI, that is professional knowledge and real-life experience. AI has a vast information ocean, yet a travel book helped me prepare my underwater kit because WiFi does not work underwater, saving me a lot of money I could have wasted on wireless kit.
Take AI apps for teaching languages,Langua is a good example, I think the most successful ones combine human instructors for insights and guidance with AI for drills prescribed and calibrated by the tutor. AI drills are not the same.
I’ve always found that most books within or similar to Ferris’ genre hold a nice message but are 90 fluff.
He picks on summarization as the sort circuit and claims the lived experience imbued within his books is the real draw. Not disagreeing here. LLMs unpack the intentional content stretching rigmarole authors go through as a function of publishers requirements to produce something that is minimally viable to publish.
Some seemingly important questions that come to my mind in a future where LLMs, ad-based revenue, and attention-as-currency prevail:
how do you create a knowledge-based product valuable/compelling enough to make people want to pay for it? And what is the best value-prop way to monetize it? (For BOTH producer and consumer)
Is length a necessary requirement for substantiveness?
If so, where on the spectrum of long-content_vs_short-content should it live?
Unfortunately, I im not confident the internet can fundamentally diverge from an ad-based or subscription monetization model in its current form. IMO, Michael I Jordan has a lot of refreshing ideas on how to build better marketplaces that sustainably benefit producers and consumers (as opposed to mostly just platform-maintaining-rent-seekers).
AI can never touch the human interest angle of authors, the best it can do is hope to trick people temporarily, and that doesn't last long.
Ask yourself, how many "self-help" books are published by Anonymous?
At some time, the market has been satisfied.
Self-help books are absolutely worthless if you don't internalise their insights, practice applying it into your life on a daily basis until it becomes muscle memory, and actually spend time on it. The insight is never actually the bottleneck.
AI can surface insights better and faster than any book. But speed is the problem, not the solution. Books are on the contrary slower, and slowness is the point. Without discpline, AI might be a worse choice.
For deeper topics, I don't think books are going away anytime soon.
Maybe if someone put together a list of fiction books that correlate strongly with self-help categories, it would be immensely useful.
A great fiction book helps you vicariously experience a character's life while self-help is an instruction manual which sadly does not provide the same form of connection.
[1]: https://bloomsburyliterarystudiesblog.com/2022/02/i-always-s...
I read fewer blog posts, fewer newsletters, fewer “10 lessons from…” articles, and fewer productivity videos than I did three years ago.
But I still buy books.
The first casualties seem to be the intermediaries, not necessarily the original sources.
Makes me wonder what’s going to happen to AI’s results if all these content streams dry up.
I say non-technical because the ones about specific subjects like "What to expect in the first year" etc. can be pretty good, but the more general "improve your life" ones are usually awful.
Why make a 24-minute Youtube video instead of an article with proper navigation?
This is slightly off-topic, but this is a pet-peeve of mine. I believe that for most practical purposes hypertext beats video:
- you can Ctrl-F through text (well, now you sort of can search through a video, but it is much less efficient)
- you can quickly skim through text to find what you need
- text can have proper navigation (chapters etc)
- texts can be linked to each other. Link could lead to a specific part of the text (proper navigation)
- text is much quicker and cheaper to produce
Yet a lot of people make and watch serious educational and informational videos. Why? I don't get it.
Because increasingly many people wont even stoop to reading an article, but will put on some bs video - even for tutorials
I've commented about this before [1] but a lot of my simple searches lead to monstrous walls of text with tangential information about the query. The answer is buried well past a simple ctrl-F on the page. It definitely varies for domain though.
- ad revenue - youtube algorithm placement - sponsored content - street cred
With an article, if you're lucky google will base their AI overview on it, and the creator gets bupkis.
Of course I'd prefer a blog post with many looping, silent 5-15 second gifs and no extraneous like-and-subscribe and life-story-delivery. But c'est la vie.
This feels like something you could vibe code up (creating the blog posts from YouTube videos). Fascinating times.
Wouldn't be surprised if this is viable by next year though.
Between the bloat and bad UI in both modern OSes and modern websites, I'm seriously considering if my next OS will be a command line pointing to an LLM where most web browsing is rendered out in plain text (perhaps LCARS, just for fun?), and any apps that actually need a UI are just-in-time generated as each feature is needed.
After all, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VibeOS already exists.
But last weekend I had to remove a trim panel under the hood of my car to extract a dead rodent, and I was wondering how to get those round clips off without breaking them. This video helped: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K_rsVDj5s1o&ra=m
The AI summary of the same video explains the exact steps but doesn’t show them actually being done.
When you're trying to repair a Playstation motherboard, you gonna need some photos and text.
a picture is worth a thousand words. Of course your text article can have pictures, but how can you sure you include all the "useful" pictures. Then there is animation which is impossible to do with static picture.
Because articles make no money?
But as understandable as it may be, a clown whose job is to keep people entertained until the ad break can talk about a lot of things, but cannot be something else. This clown talks about math, the other one just rubs the microphone over materials and then says "smash that like button", but they all have the same purpose and can only differentiate themselves by how much engagement they create. The platform is the payload, the content is whatever.
Which one is more likely to result in more ad revenue for you?
Not only that, they're creating content for each other. People who can barely compose an email run TikTok accounts and YouTube channels and podcasts with audiences in the millions.
I don't even know if I think this is a bad thing. Sure, their education system failed them, but they need to know how to do things, and they often have information worth sharing. Providing video tutorials almost becomes a question of accessibility (in the a11y sense) in some contexts.
I agree that a huge percent of 10+ minute YouTube videos would be better off as a few sentences and a bulleted list.
The success of YouTube and TikTok has shown that video is by far the easiest way for the average person to share whatever they know and have a chance of getting it seen. Where would the average person even post a article?
Some of this probably isn't just "AI" but the quantified/journaled lifestyle trends. Do Oura rings and Apple watches impact self help as much as basic health questions on Google and routine doctor visits?
It feels more like a broader information abundance and a more educated consumer base that started over at least a decade ago. AI's impact is hard to measure since it's just the hot feature resting atop existing tech. It certainly did none of the heavy lifting to nudge people this direction.
It’s not an electronic problem but an human first IRL interface problem. A shining example to the contrary is meditation practice like Vipassana. Saying you can kill that with AI is like saying “Gandalf is here and he explained to you the meaning of life and said now you don’t have to live or learn lessons anymore because you know I can always ask him”. Of course living the actual life is the whole point! It’s also why IRL experiences like classes and communities tend to work better when structured as lived experiences.
If this industry of self help books dies I won’t shed too many tears.
However, that doesn't mean AI is useless for this type of thing. Its very, very good at acting as an "expert" to answer questions you may have after reading the book.
I'm also in an actual informal bookclub with a few friends. It started in the AI era, all nonfiction books and is still going strong.
Depending on the model and size of the book, its also possible to load the entire book into the context window and ask questions.
It does disappear. There is already much less expert knowledge shared after the breakdown of those platforms that used to be so good at encouraging it. Both what the clankers can regurgitate and what humans can find themselves on the internet is increasingly stale and thinned. My GPU can generate fairly good content now.. 2023 content.
AI is better at personalized information, short-form content offers a snappier and more "real" point-of-view.
What I find most interesting is the appeal to authority aspect. Self-help always has had its gurus. If self-help is getting hit harder than other genres, I wonder what that says about brand trust.
EDIT: could also be that these books are kinda fads. I would expect them to have a shelf-life.
Humans have know blocks for their own well being. Most struggle with probabilities or long term planning. But they are teachable skills.
I just skip the motivational fluff and dig out the useful bits. Makes them very fast reads when you can skip majority of it.
What you needed was a survey.
I suspect that's not always true. There's so many self help books out there from totally unqualified people that I suspect an AI commingling data from multiple reputable sources may beat some of the most inappropriate books
Now most are just a 300 page self pitch for some subscription or another product.
Most self help books are too general to be useful to anyone. You're writing your own guidebook for an audience of one.
The whole spiel about "I just want to help others in the same situation" died with the Internet, because for the past 30 years it has been entirely feasible to publish your advice and guidance for for free. The books are just for money and fame.
If you really like to do the things, you will spend many hours on it.
Only mental health and longevity remain outstanding.
https://theconversation.com/a-weird-phrase-is-plaguing-scien...
Obviously this is mean but I do think "self-help" has been incredibly inflated by these people who think there are some sort of magic answers out there to solve everything about their life. And those people are now moving to short form redpill content and / or llms that gas them up.
> Let that sink in for a minute.
Jesus Christ. Here is how AI relates to me—ooh, with suspense-driving one-sentence paragraphs and reflective commandments. Come on, in Q2 2026 this is still a thing?
The self-involved industry is in shambles.
> What’s actually going on?
Need the meander headlines. I told you what is going on. Now. Let me interpret what I just wrote for you.
It would be just boring if self-help books were down because people believe less in astrology and affirmations or something. Couldn’t write about the Zeitgeist that way.
---
I’m not just a cynic. I lived a former life as well. And self-help is something ranging from entertainment to fantasy to small chance of personal transformation. And for books, it’s a cheap hobby compared to one-on-one pscyhology. So would it make sense to replace that with a language soup? Not really. The idiosyncracy is the whole point, jesus.
People might get taken in by it. That doesn’t mean that it will work in the long run.
I can think of many subjects which are not well served. Scottish history certainly isn't. The only suggestions it tends to give are Scotland History Tours (who is quite good but surface level) and commentators like BBC (who are often way off the mark and have their own agendas)
To be fair, some people probably do benefit from, or at least enjoy, the history, examples and stories used to pad out the length. But in my career I've had to constantly learn new domains to varying depths at high velocity. A good LLM, properly prompted, can be an amazing self-learning tool. Before LLMs I'd often hire an expert, usually a post-doc or professor to spend 2-3 hours one-on-one answering my questions - and those sessions would move at very high-speed, making the investment worth it. For those who are experienced self-learners, an LLM can deliver 60-70% of that value. And, frankly, extracting the relevant knowledge out of the average self-help book is a vastly easier task than that.
Let's say I'm living in the past and think Star Trek TNG and the X-Files was peak TV. If I could just hit enter and generate an in-all-ways-believably-authentic episode, maybe I just wouldn't watch anything else. Would it matter to my brain that real people didn't make the episode if it was indistinguishable from the real thing?
Somehow, this is one of the episodes I never actually watched, but it is interesting to me how often the Trek scripts cover essentially identical ideas to current discussions about AI: Moriarty insisting to Barclay that he was conscious even when his program wasn't running, Pulaski saying Data was just remixing and not actually intelligent, various examples of deep fakes, cyber addiction, AI going weird sometimes while following orders and sometimes just as an emergent bug.
Fiction, on the other hand… Much of fiction's value isn't just the content itself, is that they create a shared language medium. A book might actually be meh (came up with some examples, but then decided to drop it so as not to offend anyone), but the fact that people you talk with have read the same book and understand same references makes reading it valuable. So, it's unlikely to happen, until we delegate all of our communication to AIs, which isn't likely to happen any time soon.
"…You're absolutely right!"
However, the loss of reading self-help books surely will hurt no-one. It is an ill wind, etc ...
Looking at the author's books, they're full of healthy living and optimistic narratives. In my view, maybe the problem isn't the old approach itself, but that we need to answer new questions. Like, 'How do I survive in an era where AI takes away jobs?'
And I think the most critical point in this post is this passage:
'What happens when 99% of the rigorously fact checked media is behind a paywall? The short answer: people skip it and ask the AI.'
We use AI for things we don't consider important. If that's the case, I think the key is to convince the public that what I do is something AI cannot replace.
If Famous Athlete/Entrepreneur writes a self-help type book, people will buy it, because the fame lends legitimacy. Even if the book itself is obviously written by AI.
With an additional caveat: the person needs to have some real, demonstrable authority. Tim Ferris doesn’t really have authority in the sense of “I am a professional athlete” or “I am billionaire startup founder” does. He does have authority as a podcaster and digital products / books creator, but that isn’t what the 4HWW is about.
The vast majority of self-help books out there are ghost-written upsales trash.
> Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no
Afaik Tim Feriss hasn't done anything notable in the past decade. No surprise that his one best seller is finally dropping off the cliff.
Without some incredible developments in AI, and as long as competition and desire for a better life still exist, I see no future where self-help books go away.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Remember, Tim Ferris scammed his audience with NFTs lmfao.
Self help being generally part of a larger grift pipeline for authors (for selling overpriced courses, seminars, retreats, infoproducts etc.), this is an actual positive silver lining for AI in society.
but how is everyone missing the enormous amount of self published slop released since 2022?
that stuff actually is selling, diluting the interest in the rest
its the law of diminishing returns
this may coincide with people also realizing they bought slop, as well as all the other distractions and ways of consuming that people identified
but just like software is experiencing this year, the same has been occurring in writing for 4 years
Printing books wouldnt make sense anymore except for "Traditionalist who love feeling a crisp page between their fingers"
I think he was actually saying that by calling it fiction, lol.
These were just not on the market except for one that had 8 section 8 apartments and would have driven me crazy trying to manage as a bleeding heart who cares about people.
Like it or not a lot of successful businesses have some bodies buried somewhere, particularly those that have been successful in two-sided markets such as online communities. There have been legendary successes in marketing enterprise software that didn't quite exist but I can say it didn't work when I tried it.
If you are in a good frame of mind, you will handle bad situations better, turning them into good situations which means you will have more of them. A better way of thinking about it than just saying you will attract positivity into your life.
Or even books like “The Phoenix(/Unicorn) Project”.
there's another fantasy aspect, which is discovering your sense of alienation from family and society is really because you're part of a special but oppressed group and won't admit it to yourself, and once you embrace your identity you can find fulfillment, love, and community.
now, in this case, the repressed identity is "capitalist", which is a peculiar way of looking at the world. but if you ignore this, the emotional beats of the story (finding yourself, coming out, found family) also work for the LGBT experience, even perhaps neurodivergence. I think this is why so many confused teenagers find themselves very moved by the book and are later embarrassed to admit it.
on the whole, it's not high literature but competently executed, the only really stupid thing about it is Objectivism.
Perhaps there is a business opportunity for a "rigorously fact-checked" chatbot? You can test chatbot to see if it gives "correct" (according to the author's opinion) answers on a topic of your choice and fix errors through prompt engineering, RAG (or other "memory" techniques), fine-tuning the base model if previous two approaches didn't work.
You can also probably teach it to use your own voice instead of dreaded LLM-isms, to make it sound less like typical AI-slop. This potentially can attract people, who are annoyed by the typical AI voice.
Perhaps, people who wrote self-help books should craft bespoke, custom-made chatbots instead?
Literary slop being replaced with AI
Self-help as a domain is absolutely stuffed with this sort of behaviour, where 300 pages just repeat and spin variations on an extremely simple premise, again and again. The reader tags along, sure there's going to be a twist or next level, but in reality it's just trying to justify this being sold as a "book", when at most it could be a single blog entry.
And yes, every single one of Tim Ferriss' books follows this principal. Entire books can be condensed into one page summaries and absolutely nothing will be lost. Nothing. In many cases one paragraph. Sometimes a single sentence.
This problem afflicts all media. There's a "Glucose Goddess" woman who has made an endless series of videos after she had a book do numbers about reducing glucose spikes. She's spinning four bullet points into endless content and it's just a perfect example. Nothing new or revelatory is being shared, but someone made a whole grifting career on this, all to pitch overpriced vitamins and protein powders.
It's actually interesting that someone mentioned YouTube replacing documentaries because people don't have time for that, so to speak, but YouTube is an absolute scourge of time wasting bullshit. I remember years ago one Apple-sphere guy posting a 10 minute video to answer the question "Should you get 8GB or 16GB in your Macbook". Ten minutes of yapping -- apparently ten minutes was the baseline for getting some monetization metric -- and the answer was an unqualified, worthless "get 16GB", because feels or something.
YouTube recently added an "Ask" AI button, and it includes generating extremely good summaries of videos. So many videos propose some clickbait headline with a clickbait graphic proposing some novel revelation, and in the first few seconds I've seen the summary, see that they have added absolutely nothing new or of value, and click back.
Will these people also post complaints about the drop in viewership about worthless, time inconsiderate content dragging not hitting like it once did? Probably. "Back in my day you could make a career by posting shocked-face thumbnail, a Betteridge's law of headlines question that you promise to answer, and then meander for twenty minutes. Kids these days just don't have the attention span anymore!"
That said, a lot of it is really filler.
Before we dive into my dirty laundry,
dude, why would i want to dive into your dirty laundry man?
There's no life lessons you'll learn reading self help-books that you won't get by just reading the classics.
The same phrases and patterns repeated over and over again, blech.
I am not reading most things post-ChatGPT era (books, articles, and even Jira tickets), by habit I am looking at the dates (hopefully they are correct) and then adjusting my effort level accordingly, anything post-ChatGPT depending on the blog author I send to summarization, if I really trust and know the author then I read their article.