Ask HN: What's your opinion on motivatinal and self-help books?

8 points by bor100003 5 years ago | 3 comments

I've read my fair share of motivational and self-help books. They have useful tips and make you fill good. On the other hand they all follow very similar templates like:

- High ratings(4+) on goodreads. I guess that's strong marketing?

- Always "best-sellers". Like all books are best-sellers?

- A lot of praises here and there.

I enjoyed most of the books but honestly I started questioning this repetitive, common sense, praising CEOs and famous people 300 pages blog posts.

ny2ko 5 years ago |

Intially when I started reading the books, I found some useful stuff. After a while as you said, you realize the vast majority are all basically following the same template and aren't all that useful. While there's some gems in the noise, the vast majority I find are the noise

samrmay 5 years ago |

I find that most are exactly as you mentioned. Definitely depends why you’re reading self help books, but generally speaking, I think that general philosophy and “mental model” books are more useful for evolving your world view.

The other general reason to read self help seems to be to gain practical benefit from concrete knowledge (as opposed to a world view change). In that case I would just suggest psychology or business books (at least the ones that tend to shy away from the self-help genre).

gls2ro 5 years ago |

I think it really depends on "why" or "what" do you try to gain/understand/fix with these books. If you are looking for things to inspire action in a direction you already decided you want to go then maybe self-help books can be a fuel to inspire action.

More concrete I think most of self-help books should not exists or should only be (maybe) a long form blog post. They recycle the same ideas. Very few of them have really original, breakthrough ideas that could really be helpful or illuminating in a sense. Of course I did not read all of them and as this category of books is very large, I might be very very wrong.

I started reading these kind of books when they began (or at least when I discovered them) like 15 years ago. And the 10 years ago I stopped. The reason for stopping is that I discovered that a lot of them contains very old ideas, ideas that can be found in mythology, religion and in the works of philosophers.

Here are some examples of what I find inspiring:

I reading Norse and Greek mythology and try to think about them as people trying to talk in a symbolic way about human nature. Can be seen that these gods were divine but also human. And for example the main idea I take from this is that it is normal to not be perfect, to have inspiring days and bad days.

I am reading Stoics and finding there inspiration about how to look at hard things when they come, what is an actionable point of view (making a difference between what is in my control and what not), about how to manage emotions and what does this mean. I recommend for example reading Seneca 'Letter from a Stoic'. I covers a wide range of life matters.

I am planning to read these days Arthur Schopenhauer "Wisdom of Life" and maybe start reading Decartes Meditations to start digging into what can be known or not.

This is what inspires me and it might not speak the same to you. Also reading some of them multiple times in different periods of time brings me different meanings and inspiration. I trust more these works which stood the test of time written by people who were thinking about such matters for long time, than a book written in 2 months.

I am not saying that these self-help books are bad. But rather that they are too many to have time to distinguish between them.