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Comment by dvh | Hacker News Reader

Now I'm curious, were there any self-help fiction books?

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance comes to mind, I suppose also the business-parable style books like Who Moved My Cheese?.

If you count Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, almost any fiction book with a philosophical angle would fit that description.

Or even books like “The Phoenix(/Unicorn) Project”.

I wouldn't say any fictional book with a philosophical angle fits, but ones that could have been written as non-fiction but for the purposes of getting the point across weren't. Phoenix/Unicorn Project are good examples!

I had trouble finishing Zen and the Art because my recollection is he drones on and on about the philosophy after the initial set up. The story disappeared. I felt kind of being had because I remember being intrigued by the title in a used bookshop as a teenager and buying it (this was before the internet) so my viewpoint is biased by that. My college philosophy textbooks managed to be more interesting and deeper than Zen, even a book about Aurelius was more interesting to me.

Pretty much all of them.

perhaps they made the fiction/non-fiction Freudian slip? Here I was thinking "Are there any non-fiction (actually true) self help books?"

I've never read it but I think Atlas Shrugged might qualify. I don't think I've ever heard anyone praise the plot or talk about it as a novel, instead people who liked it say it changed their life, changed how they view themselves, etc.

I think it appeals to people with toxic "lone wolf" mentality.

The other, of course, involves orcs.

I thought it was pretty well paced as a novel until it got to John Galt's big speech which seemed childishly self-indulgent and then after that it goes to hell. The novel is about 1200 pages and it's pretty amazing that it held my attention for the first 800 because I've rarely been able to enjoy a novel for that long.

as a lite-BDSM wish fulfillment romance novel, it's quite compelling. better plotted and written than much successful romantasy today. the whole plot is about a bunch of hot rich guys fighting over who gets to dom the self-insert female protagonist.

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.

Huh, if this is what we're talking about, I think Starship Troopers may qualify.

“The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho qualifies.

The art of war is probably fictional.

Yes! plenty of them: The Secret, The 4-hour Work Week, Rich Dad Poor Dad, Think and Grow Rich, etc…

I think there are some good things in the 4-hour Work Week but the concept as a whole is problematic: e.g. Tim Ferris himself has more like a 400-hour work week. Rich Dad Poor Dad is a right wing scam. There is a psychotechnology that people call "magic" but The Secret and Think and Grow Rich won't teach you it.

> Rich Dad Poor Dad is a right wing scam.

I think he was actually saying that by calling it fiction, lol.

Yeah, but it's the worst of the four. I remember his advice that you should buy a rental property which is cashflow positive after the mortgage payment on day one. (As opposed to profitable considering that you're building equity)

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.

I liked Ferris explaining that you can validate a market exists by serving ads pretending you already have a product. What a scumbag. Isn't the rest of the book just drop shipping and selling supplements with high margins? I recall snippets of a manual for unethical but mostly legal small business between stories of people making money on such practices.

I like his description of how you could just call up an expert on the phone and often get a quick answer to any question they can answer quickly. I'd learned that one myself.

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.

The Secret is good for encouraging positive thinking. I think we have been fed fear mongering non-stop by the media and governments for at least ten years.

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.

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